Linda said directly, “I met Miss Lowrie, father's sister, at a concert last week, and this morning I had a letter asking me to stay with them in Philadelphia.”

Mrs. Feldt's face suddenly had no need for the color she held poised on a cloth. Her voice, sharp at the beginning, rose to a shrill unrestrained wrath.

“I wonder at the brass of her speaking to you at all let alone writing here. Just you give me the letter and I'll shut her up. The idea! I hope you were cool to her, the way they treated us. Stay with them—I guess not!”

“But I thought of going,” Linda replied. “It's only natural. After all, you must see that he was my father.”

“A pretty father he was, too good for the girl he married. It's my fault I didn't tell you long ago, but I just couldn't abide the mention of him. He deserted me, no, us, cold, without a word—walked out of the door one noon, taking his hat as quiet as natural, and never came back. I never saw him again nor heard except through lawyers. That was the kind of heart he had, and his sisters are worse. I hadn't a decent speech of any kind out of them. The Lowries,” she managed to inject a surprising amount of contempt into her pronouncement of that name. “What it was all about you nor any sensible person would never believe:

“The house smelled a little of boiled cabbage. That's why he left me, and you expected in a matter of a few months. He said in his dam' frigid way that it had become quite impossible and took down his hat.”

“There must have been more,” Linda protested, suppressing a mad desire to laugh.

“Not an inch,” her mother asserted. “Nothing, after a little, suited him. He'd sit up like a poker, just as I've seen you, with his lips tight together in the Lowrie manner. It didn't please him no matter what you'd do. He wouldn't blow out at you like a Christian and I never knew where I was at. I'd come down in a matinÉe, the prettiest I could buy, and then see he didn't like it. He would expect you to be dressed in the morning like it was afternoon and you going out. And as for loosening your corsets for a little comfort about the house, you might as well have slapped him direct.

“That wasn't the worst, though; but his going away without as much as a flicker of his hand; and with me like I was. Nobody on earth but would blame him for that. I only got what was allowed me after we had changed back to my old name, me and you. He never asked one single question about you nor tried to see or serve you a scrap. For all he knew, at a place called Santa Margharita in Italy, you might have been born dead.”

She was unable, Linda recognized, to defend him in any way; he had acted frightfully. She acknowledged this logically with her power of reason, but somehow it didn't touch her as it had her mother, and as, evidently, the latter expected. She was absorbed in the vision of her father sitting, in the Lowrie manner, rigid as a poker; she saw him quietly take up his hat and go away forever. Linda understood his process completely; she was capable of doing precisely the same thing. Whatever was the matter with her—in the heartlessness so often laid to her account—had been equally true of her father.

“You ought to know what to say to them,” Mrs. Moses Feldt cried, “or I'll do it for you! If only I had seen her she would have heard a thing or two not easy forgotten.”

Linda's determination to go to Philadelphia had not been shaken, and she made a vain effort to explain her attitude. “Of course, it was horrid for you,” she said. “I can understand how you'd never never forgive him. But I am different, and, I expect, not at all nice. It's very possible, since he was my father, that we are alike. I wish you had told me this before—it explains so much and would have made things easier for me. I am afraid I must see them.”

She was aware of the bitterness and enmity that stiffened her mother into an unaccustomed adequate scorn:

“I might have expected nothing better of you, and me watching it coming all these years. You can go or stay. I had my life in spite of the both of you, as gay as I pleased and a good husband just the same. I don't care if I never see you again, and if it wasn't for the fuss it would make I'd take care I didn't. You'll have your father's money now I'm married; I wonder you stay around here at all with your airs of being better than the rest. God's truth is you ain't near as good, even if I did bring you into the world.”

“I am willing to agree with you,” Linda answered. “No one could be sweeter than the Feldts. I sha'n't do nearly as well. But that isn't it, really. People don't choose themselves; I'm certain father didn't at that lonely Italian place. If you weren't happy laced in the morning it wasn't your fault. You see, I am trying to excuse myself, and that isn't any good, either.”

“Unnatural,” Mrs. Moses Feldt pronounced. And Linda, weary and depressed, allowed her the last word.