'I cannot understand a word you say,' said Mrs. Porter, 'but I fancy we
mean the same thing. Here comes Mr. Winfield at last. I will speak to
him at once.'
'Spiel away, ma'am,' said Steve. 'The floor's yours.'
Kirk entered the studio.
Old John Bannister returned that night. Learning from Bailey's
trembling lips the tremendous events that had been taking place in his
absence, he was first irritated, then coldly amused. His coolness
dampened, while it comforted, Bailey.
A bearer of sensational tidings likes to spread a certain amount of
dismay and terror; but, on the other hand, it was a relief to him to
find that his father appeared to consider trivial a crisis which, to
Bailey, had seemed a disaster without parallel in the annals of
American social life.
'She said she was going to marry him!'
Old Bannister opened the nut-cracker mouth that always had the
appearance of crushing something. His pale eyes glowed for an instant.
'Did she?' he said.
'She seemed very...ah...determined.'
'Did she!'
Silence falling like a cloud at this point, Bailey rightly conjectured
that the audience was at an end and left the room. His father bit the
end off a cigar and began to smoke.
Smoking, he reviewed the situation, and his fighting spirit rose to
grapple with it. He was not sorry that this had happened. His was a
patriarchal mind, and he welcomed opportunities of exercising his
authority over his children. It had always been his policy to rule them
masterfully, and he had often resented the fact that his daughter, by
the nature of things, was to a great extent outside his immediate rule.
During office hours business took him away from her. The sun never set
on his empire over Bailey, but it needed a definite crisis like the
present one to enable him to jerk at the reins which guided Ruth, and
he was glad of the chance to make his power felt.
The fact that this affair brought him into immediate contact with Mrs.
Porter added to his enjoyment. Of all the people, men or women, with
whom his business or social life had brought him into conflict, she
alone had fought him squarely and retired with the honours of war. When
his patriarchal mind had led him to bully his late wife, it was Mrs.
Porter who had fought her cause. It was Mrs. Porter who openly
expressed her contempt for his money and certain methods of making it.
She was the only person in his immediate sphere over whom he had no
financial hold.
He was a man who liked to be surrounded by dependents, and Mrs. Porter
stoutly declined to be a dependent. She moved about the world, blunt
and self-sufficing, and he hated her as he hated no one else. The
thought that she had now come to grips with him and that he could best
her in open fight was pleasant to him. All his life, except in his
