"It's a good thing you're the wise child you are! You understand perfectly that the Holtons are not for you in this world. And if your father weren't the gentleman he is he would have made a big row about those people being asked to your party: it was an insult, too deep for my powers of description. Those women treat your father as though he were a halfway idiot--a fool to be thrust around when it pleases them, and to be the object of simpering tears when they want to play the pathetic in speaking of your mother to people. They are detestable, contemptible. And Jack Holton's turning up at Amzi's was the very last straw." Phil gazed at Nan with increasing surprise. This was not the familiar Nan Bartlett of the unfailing gentleness, the whimsical humor. This was almost a scene, and scenes were not to the liking of either of the Bartlett sisters. "Daddy hardly referred to that, Nan. I don't think it really troubled him." "That's the worst of it, dear child! Of course he wouldn't show feeling about it! That's the heartbreaking thing about that father of yours, that he has borne that old trouble so bravely. It was ghastly that that man of all men should have stumbled into Amzi's house in that way. Nothing was ever nobler than the way your father bore it." She knelt suddenly and clasped Phil in her arms as though to shield her from all the wrongs of the world. There were tears in Nan's eyes, unmistakably, when Phil stroked her cheek, and then for the first time with a sudden impulse Nan kissed her. Phil's intercourse with the Bartletts had been in the key of happy companionship, marked with a restraint that the girl respected and admired. There had been an imperceptible line beyond which she had never carried her pranks with them. Tears she had never associated with either of the sisters. She would have assumed, if it had ever been a question in her mind, that Rose would have been the likelier to yield to emotion.