"Oh, dear mother, you are mistaken! The day will never come when your daughter Isabel will not stand shoulder to shoulder with you." "I am sure of that. I wish Christina had not asked such an obtrusive question. I had to answer it as I did, in order to show that woman that we--in our own home here--would call her just what we preferred to call her, without let or hindrance; yet I wish that Christina had kept her foolish question for a little longer. I was hardly ready for active opposition. It is premature. Christina always interferes at the wrong moment." So Christina, snubbed and blamed for her malapropos question, subsided into sullen indifference externally, while inwardly passing on the blame for her correction to Theodora, who, she decided, was going to be unlucky to her. In the meantime Robert had walked with his wife to the parlor door of their own apartments, but he did not enter with her. "I am going to leave you half-an-hour, Dora," he said. "I wish to smoke a cigar in the library." "I should like to go with you, Robert, as I have always done. I enjoy good tobacco." "Walking on some lovely balcony, overlooking the Mediterranean, it was pleasant; but here it is not the thing. If you went with me, I might have the whole family, as the library, like the dining-room, is common ground. Circumstances alter cases, Dora. You know that, my dear! I will return in half-an-hour." She had a slight struggle with herself to answer pleasantly, but that free and loving thing, the human soul, was in Theodora's case under kind but positive control, so she replied with a smile: "As you wish, dear Robert--yet I shall miss you." She was alone in her splendid rooms, and her heart fell. The day had been a hard one. From the moment they left Kendal, Robert had been disagreeably silent. He knew that he was going home to a struggle with his family, and he dreaded the experience. Had it been a struggle with business difficulties he would have risen bravely to its demands. A dispute with women irritated him. In his thoughts he called it "trivial." But had he known all that such a dispute generally involves, he would have sought out for it the most portentous and distracting word in all the languages of earth.