"Well then, you're a bigger fool than I should have ventured to suppose
you."
"Why so? You live. You flourish. You bloom."
"Ah, how you've all always hated me!" he murmured with a pensive gaze
again at the window.
"No one could be less of a mere cherished memory," she declared as if
she had not heard him. "You're an actual person, if there ever was one.
We agreed just now that you're beautiful. You strike me, you know,
as--in your own way--much more firm on your feet than I am. Don't put
it to me therefore as monstrous that the fact that we are, after all,
parent and child should at present in some manner count for us. My idea
has been that it should have some effect for each of us. I don't at
all, as I told you just now," she pursued, "make out your life; but
whatever it is I hereby offer you to accept it. And, on my side, I'll
do everything I can for you."
"I see," said Lionel Croy. Then, with the sound of extreme relevance,
"And what _can_ you?" She only, at this, hesitated, and he took up her
silence. "You can describe yourself--_to_ yourself--as, in a fine
flight, giving up your aunt for me; but what good, I should like to
know, would your fine flight do me?" As she still said nothing he
developed a little. "We're not possessed of so much, at this charming
pass, please to remember, as that we can afford not to take hold of any
perch held out to us. I like the way you talk, my dear, about 'giving
up!' One doesn't give up the use of a spoon because one's reduced to
living on broth. And your spoon, that is your aunt, please consider, is
partly mine as well." She rose now, as if in sight of the term of her
effort, in sight of the futility and the weariness of many things, and
moved back to the poor little glass with which she had communed before.
She retouched here again the poise of her hat, and this brought to her
father's lips another remark in which impatience, however, had already
been replaced by a funny flare of appreciation. "Oh, you're all right!
Don't muddle yourself up with _me!"_
His daughter turned round to him. "The condition Aunt Maud makes is
that I shall have absolutely nothing to do with you; never see you, nor
speak, nor write to you, never go near you nor make you a sign, nor
hold any sort of communication with you. What she requires is that you
shall simply cease to exist for me."
He had always seemed--it was one of the marks of what they called the
"unspeakable" in him--to walk a little more on his toes, as if for
jauntiness, in the presence of offence. Nothing, however, was more
wonderful than what he sometimes would take for offence, unless it
might be what he sometimes wouldn't. He walked at any rate on his toes
now. "A very proper requirement of your Aunt Maud, my dear--I don't
hesitate to say it!" Yet as this, much as she had seen, left her silent
at first from what might have been a sense of sickness, he had time to
go on: "That's her condition then. But what are her promises? Just what
does she engage to do? You must work it, you know."
"You mean make her feel," Kate asked after a moment, "how much I'm
attached to you?"
"Well, what a cruel, invidious treaty it is for you to sign. I'm a poor
old dad to make a stand about giving up--I quite agree. But I'm not,
after all, quite the old dad not to get something _for_ giving up."
"Oh, I think her idea," said Kate almost gaily now, "is that I shall
get a great deal."
He met her with his inimitable amenity. "But does she give you the
items?"
The girl went through the show. "More or less, I think. But many of
them are things I dare say I may take for granted--things women can do
for each other and that you wouldn't understand."
"There's nothing I understand so well, always, as the things I needn't!
But what I want to do, you see," he went on, "is to put it to your
conscience that you've an admirable opportunity; and that it's moreover
one for which, after all, damn you, you've really to thank _me."_
"I confess I don't see," Kate observed, "what my 'conscience' has to do
with it."
"Then, my dear girl, you ought simply to be ashamed of yourself. Do you
know what you're a proof of, all you hard, hollow people together?" He
put the question with a charming air of sudden spiritual heat. "Of the
deplorably superficial morality of the age. The family sentiment, in
our vulgarised, brutalised life, has gone utterly to pot. There was a
day when a man like me--by which I mean a parent like me--would have
been for a daughter like you a quite distinct value; what's called in
the business world, I believe, an 'asset.'" He continued sociably to
make it out. "I'm not talking only of what you might, with the right
feeling do _for_ me, but of what you might--it's what I call your
opportunity--do _with_ me. Unless indeed," he the next moment
imperturbably threw off, "they come a good deal to the same thing. Your
duty as well as your chance, if you're capable of seeing it, is to use
me. Show family feeling by seeing what I'm good for. If you had it as
_I_ have it you'd see I'm still good--well, for a lot of things.
There's in fact, my dear," Mr. Croy wound up, "a coach-and-four to be
got out of me." His drop, or rather his climax, failed a little of
effect, indeed, through an undue precipitation of memory. Something his
daughter had said came back to him. "You've settled to give away half
your little inheritance?"