Nothing in my whole life has so surprised me as the capacity of this single adventure for involving us in successive coils of turpitude and disaster; though it was not until we followed my father into the best room the next morning after he had seen Mr. Allingham, still rather sick, for the turnips had not agreed with us, that we realized the worst, rounding on us through a stream of dreadful, biting things that, as my father uttered them, seemed to float us clear beyond the pale of sympathy and hope. I remember my father walking up and down with his hands under his coat behind, a short man in my recollection, with a kind of swing in his walk which curiously nobody but myself seems to have noticed, and a sort of electrical flash in his manner which might have come, as in this instance, from our never being brought up before him except when we had done something thoroughly exasperating: I am not sure that I did not tell Ellen McGee, in an attempt to render the magnitude of our going over, that he rated us in full uniform, waving his sword, which at that moment hung with his regimentals over the mantelpiece. "Good heavens," he said, "you might have been arrested for it--my children--_mine_--and I thought I could have trusted you. Good heavens!" Suddenly he reached out as it were over my brother's shoulder, to whom in his capacity as the eldest son most of this tirade was addressed, with a word for me that was to go tearing its way sorely to the seat of memory and consciousness, and, lodging there, become the one point of attachment to support the memory of him beyond his death. "As for you, Olivia," I started at this, for I had been staying my misery for the moment on a red and black table cover which my mother valued, and I was amazed to find myself still able to hate--"as for you, Olivia May"--he would never allow my name to be shortened in the least--"I _am_ surprised at you." He had expected better of me then; he had reached beyond my surfaces and divined what I was inarticulately sure of, that I was different--no, not better--but somehow intrinsically different. He was surprised at me; he did not say so much of Forester, and he _did_ say that it was exactly what he had expected of the McGees, but he had had a better opinion of me. I recall a throb of exasperation at his never having told me. I might have lived up to it. But with all the soreness of having dropped short of a possible estimate, that phrase, which might have gone no deeper than his momentary disappointment, is all I have on which to hang the faith that perhaps ... perhaps some vision had shaped on his horizon of what I might become. I was never anything to my mother, I know, but a cuckoo's egg dropped in her creditable nest. "But," said my father, "I _am_ surprised at _you_."