id not refer to her, but to the fight.
He did not . . . he was cowardly."

"But as you say, it is _said_. He told me about it, not long
afterwards, and I do not think he would have dared had there been
anything--"

"But I do not make it as a charge," Jacob Welse hastily broke in.
"Merely hearsay, and the prejudice of the men would be sufficient to
account for the tale. And it has no bearing, anyway. I should not
have brought it up, for I have known good men funk in my time--buck
fever, as it were. And now let us dismiss it all from our minds. I
merely wished to suggest, and I suppose I have bungled. But understand
this, Frona," turning her face up to his, "understand above all things
and in spite of them, first, last, and always, that you are my
daughter, and that I believe your life is sacredly yours, not mine,
yours to deal with and to make or mar. Your life is yours to live, and
in so far that I influence it you will not have lived your life, nor
would your life have been yours. Nor would you have been a Welse, for
there was never a Welse yet who suffered dictation. They died first,
or went away to pioneer on the edge of things.

"Why, if you thought the dance house the proper or natural medium for
self-expression, I might be sad, but to-morrow I would sanction your
going down to the Opera House. It would be unwise to stop you, and,
further, it is not our way. The Welses have ever stood by, in many a
lost cause and forlorn hope, knee to knee and shoulder to shoulder.
Conventions are worthless for such as we. They are for the swine who
without them would wallow deeper. The weak must obey or be crushed;
not so with the strong. The mass is nothing; the individual
everything; and it is the individual, always, that rules the mass and
gives the law. A fig for what the world says! If the Welse should
procreate a bastard line this day, it would be the way of the Welse,
and you would be a daughter of the Welse, and in the face of hell and
heaven, of God himself, we would stand together, we of the one blood,
Frona, you and I."

"You are larger than I," she whispered, kissing his forehead, and the
caress of her lips seemed to him the soft impact of a leaf falling
through the still autumn air.

And as the heat of the room ebbed away, he told of her foremother and
of his, and of the sturdy Welse who fought the great lone fight, and
died, fighting, at Treasure City.

CHAPTER XVIII

The "Doll's Hous