self with rage that he had come up at all to impose the outside world upon their peace. She had heard the voices directly she reached the front steps, and she stole silently into the study. They were not fighting, she was relieved to find, but the things her father was saying boiled the blood already over-heated in her veins.
And Dane saw, as he tried to calm her after her father’s apology, that he was wasting his time.
“Dane, I’ll say what I want to say and nothing else. My father came here and said what he wanted to say, and now he can listen to me.”
He turned away very hurt for here they were quarrelling for the first time. He began to pace back and forth on the verandah, growing more resentful every moment at the scene that followed, though he could not but admit the grim justice of much that Valerie said to her father, and admire the passionate eloquence with which she said it.
She stood against the hammock opposite her father, making at first an effort at control as she wiped her hot face, but after she got started she was like an over-wound spring that had been suddenly released.
“I never heard you talk such rubbish before, and I didn’t think anyone could talk such stuff to-day. You mentioned my ruin. Why, Dane couldn’t ruin me if he tried. You can’t ruin a person who isn’t ruinable, who refuses to be ruined. Do you think I’m the Second Mrs. Tanqueray that you come out with that tosh? What about all the women you’ve been living with? Are they ruined? And me? Am I going to sit round in the dark with the blinds drawn waiting for people to call? Can you see me doing it? How can you be so ridiculous? Nothing can ruin me but my own attitude of mind. Do you hear that? And what do you think I live for? Invitations to
