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 sam