"I mean I'm going to find out the why and wherefore of the way you're behaving yourself. You're my daughter, and not of age yet, and I have a right to know what you do and where you go. Keep still!" he snapped, as she started to interrupt. "Speak when you're spoken to.... I'm going to have a serious talk with you, young woman.... What's all this I hear about your losing your job and going on the stage?" IV For a brief moment Joan sat agape, meeting incredulously the keen, contemptuous gaze of her father. Then she pulled herself together with determination to be neither browbeaten nor overborne. "Where'd you hear that about me?" she demanded ominously. Thursby shook his ponderous head: "It makes no difference--" "It makes a lot of difference to me!" she cut in, sharply contentious. "You might's well tell me, because I won't talk to you if you don't." Butch brushed the brim of his hat an inch above his eyes and threw her a glance of approbation. Thursby hesitated, his large, mottled face sullen and dark in the bluish illumination provided by the single gas-jet wheezing above the table. Then reluctantly he gave in. "Old Inness was in the store this evening. He said--" "Never mind what _he_ said! I guess I know. Gussie's been shooting off her face about me at home. And of course old Inness hadn't nothing better to do than to run off and tell you everything he knew!" "Then you don't deny it?" Thursby insisted. "I don't have to. It's true. No, I don't deny it," she returned, aping his manner to exasperation. "How'd you come to lose your job?" "Mr. Winter insulted me--one of the floor-walkers--if you've got to know." Thursby's head wagged heavily while he weighed this information, and he regarded his daughter with a baleful, morose glare, his fat hands trembling. "What did you say to this man, Winter?" he asked presently. "Told him I'd slap his face if he tried anything like that on me again. So he reported me up to the management--lied about me--and I got fired." There was a long silence, through which Thursby pondered the matter, his thick lips moving inaudibly, while Joan sat upright, maintaining her attitude of independence and defiance, and Butch, grinning lazily, as if at some private jest, manufactured ring after ring of smoke in the still, close air. Before her father spoke again, Joan became cognizant of Edna and her mother, like twin ghosts in their night-dresses, stealing silently, barefooted, to listen just within the door of the adjoining bedroom. "And what do you propose to do now?" asked Thursby at length, lifting his weary, haunted gaze to his daughter's face. "What's this about your going on the stage?" Joan set her jaw firmly. "That's what I'm going to do." Thursby shook his head with decision. "I won't have it," he said.