When Belle Lorimer, the wealthy, merry, or at any rate not lachrymose, widow of Vincent Lorimer (of Lorimer and Lorimer, the stockbrokers), agreed to the Colonel's suggestion that together they should tie a second knot, the Colonel was probably assuming that Ben's capable control and intimate acquaintance with his needs and moods would still be available. Never an imaginative man, he had probably given no thought whatever to his daughter's temperament and character; enough that she was his daughter and he her father, that she was solicitous, remembering, and, above all, cheerful, and that she rarely provoked even the semblance of a scene. There had been scenes with her mother too often: the result less of mismanagement on Mrs. Staveley's part than on the Colonel's tendency to indulge an exacting nature to the full coupled with the advantage that the position of husband too often confers. For husbands are not merely husbands: they are also contemporaries; and as the predominant partners they have the great pull of beginning right. Daughters are of another generation, with fewer obligations, and the power actually to rebel, or, if it comes to the worst, bolt. Wives have stood at the altar and made promises; wives have brought money with them, and marriage settlements often very adroitly drawn up in the widower's interest; wives are too old to be influenced by detrimental new ideas. But daughters are different: daughters have made no promises, possess no financial resources, and are painfully susceptible to revolutionary notions. They are capable even of asking such upheaving questions as, "Why do I owe any duty to a father I didn't choose?"

The Colonel may have lacked imagination, but some self-protective instinct had worked in him to give Ben an easier time than her mother, poor woman, had ever had. But sweet as was Ben's nature, she was modernly conscious of certain duties and loyalties to one's own individuality, and, even before she came to talk to me about it, had quite determined that now was her opportunity to strike out a line for herself. And luckily she could to some extent afford it, for in addition to a little nest-egg consisting of the accumulation of interest in her minority, she now had, in common with her sisters and brothers, an income of two hundred a year from her maternal grandmother, the terms of that shrewd old lady's last will and testament being the culmination of a long series of indignities which, in the Colonel's opinion, she had put upon him. Surely a daughter (named Mrs. Staveley), he had said, should come before grandchildren? But the dead hand distributed more wisely.