e was wasting herself, and
began going to lectures with a lot of faddish women, became saturated
with these nonsensical ideas about her sex that are doing so much harm
nowadays. I suppose I was wrong in my treatment from the first. I never
knew how to handle her, but we grew like flint and steel. I'll say this
for her, she kept quiet enough, but she used to sit opposite me at the
table, and I knew all the time what she was thinking of, and then I'd
break out. Of course she'd defend herself, but she had her temper under
better control than I. She wanted to go away for a year or two and study
landscape gardening, and then come back and establish herself in an
office here. I wouldn't listen to it. And one morning, when she was
late to breakfast, I delivered an ultimatum. I gave her a lecture on a
woman's place and a woman's duty, and told her that if she didn't marry
she'd have to stay here and live quietly with me, or I'd disinherit her."

Hodder had become absorbed in this portrait of Alison Parr, drawn by her
father with such unconscious vividness.

"And then?" he asked.

In spite of the tone of bitterness in which he had spoken, Eldon Parr
smiled. It was a reluctant tribute to his daughter.

"I got an ultimatum in return," he said. "Alison should have been a
man." His anger mounted quickly as he recalled the scene. "She said she
had thought it all out: that our relationship had become impossible; that
she had no doubt it was largely her fault, but that was the way she was
made, and she couldn't change. She had, naturally, an affection for me
as her father, but it was very plain we couldn't get along together: she
was convinced that she had a right to individual freedom,--as she spoke
of it,--to develop herself. She knew, if she continued to live with me
on the terms I demanded, that her character would deteriorate. Certain
kinds of sacrifice she was capable of, she thought, but what I asked
would be a useless one. Perhaps I didn't realize it, but it was slavery.
Slavery!" he repeated, "the kind of slavery her mother had lived . . . ."

He took a turn around the room.

"So far as money was concerned, she was indifferent to it. She had
enough from her mother to last until she began to make more. She
wouldn't take any from me in any case. I laughed, yet I have never been
so angry in my life. Nor was it wholly anger, Hodder, but a queer tangle
of feelings I can't describe. There was affection mixed up in it--I
realiz