Emily lifted her head from the back of the chair on which she had been resting it, fastened a lock of her hair, smiled and said:
"You let that young John E., or whatever his name is, wear you out," her father insisted, taking his glasses from his nose and marking his place in his book after his old custom.
"Poor child!" the mother said. "He's not well. I dread the summer so."
"He seems fretful," said the father, with a shade of his original resentment lingering in his tone.
"Oh, it's not that, father," Emily replied. "He's so active and full of energy. Mother Garwood says Jerome was just so when he was a baby."
"Yes, I ran over to-day to ask her some things about baby. She knows all about them."
"Well, you ought to have a nurse," he said.
"We can't afford it," the mother replied.
"I know it, but it's so expensive living, as Jerome must, at a hotel in Washington. And he's in debt, with another campaign coming on. That'll cost, you know."
"It seems to me," he said, "that with five thousand a year, he might--"
The daughter also raised herself in her chair and her dull eyes caught back some of their old brightness.
"You know, father, that Jerome does the best he can--"
She stopped; and so did he. They had sounded that note several times of late. The truth was, that the presence of Garwood in the house was already beginning to have its effect on his father-in-law. When Garwood was in Washington Harkness felt a pride in him, but after he had been at home for awhile, his various characteristics one after another got on the old man's nerves, until he could scarcely treat him civilly. He detested Garwood's lazy habits, his lying abed in the mornings, his afternoon naps, though Harkness took naps himself, and he distrusted his long absences at night. More than all he inwardly raged at Garwood's extravagance, though he dared not complain of it, for Emily had been firm in her insistence that they pay for their board, knowing, as she did, her father's punctiliousness in matters of money, a disposition likely to be cultivated by those who have money enough to gratify it. Harkness would doubtless have preferred that the Garwoods keep house, as Jerome was always threatening to do, but he could not bear the thought of the loneliness Emily's absence would add to his idleness. Restrained therefore from complaining of Garwood, his discontent expressed itself in complaints of himself, and he shuffled about the house with a martyr's patient suffering written in his face, lowering himself carefully into his chair whenever he sat down, with a prolonged, senile "Ah-h-h-h" that heralded, as he meant it to do, the encroachments of age.