“You see,” I went on, “there’s only Ada helping. The other girls are too young to work yet, though Nora is leaving home next week.”
“Nora! That kid! What on earth is she going to do?”
“Oh, Nora’s not so young. She’s nearly seventeen. You forget we’ve been engaged some time now, and all the children are growing up.”
I said this sulkily. Secretly I resented Reggie’s constantly putting off our marriage day.
“Oh, she’s going out to the West Indies. She’s got a position on some paper out there.”
“Whee!” Reggie drew a long whistle. “West Indies! I’ll be jiggered if your parents aren’t the easiest ever. Your mother is the last woman in the world to bring up a family of daughters, and I’m blessed if I ever came across any father like yours. Why, do you know when I asked him for his consent to our engagement, he never asked me a single question about myself, but began to talk about his school days in France, and how he walked when he was a boy from Boulogne to Calais. When I pushed him for an answer, he said absently, ‘Yes, yes, I suppose it’s all right, if she wants you,’ and the next moment asked me if I had read Darwin.”
Reggie laughed heartily at the memory, and then he said:
“Yet I’m fond of your governor, Marion. He is a gentleman.”
“Dear papa,” I said, “wouldn’t hurt a fly, but anybody could cheat him, and that is why I hate to deceive him.”
“Well, don’t lie to him then if you feel that way. Just say you are going to take a studio up town and I bet you anything he’ll never bother his head where you go or how you pay the rent. As for your mother, if you told her the studio was free, she would think that just the usual thing and that you were doing the landlord an honor in using it.”
Again Reggie burst out laughing, but I would not laugh with him, so he stopped and said:
“Your mother’s awfully proud of you, darling, and I don’t blame her. She told me one day that you were the most beautiful baby in England, where she said you were born. She said she used to take you out to show you off, as you were her show child. Your mother is a joke, there’s no mistake about that. And to think you are afraid to leave them to go up town! Come, come darling, don’t be a little goose. Think how cozy it will be for us both!”