"You're not having me; I'm having me, which is a very different thing. If you had driven me into the kitchen with loud, furious words, I should have rebelled--screamed, and made a terrible scene. But you did nothing of the kind. It happened in this wise. Glancing up quite by chance, as it were, you beheld me pouring coffee of my own brewing. Fatherly pride extinguished any feeling of shock or chagrin. You have smothered any class feeling that may linger in your aristocratic soul and are making a good bluff at enjoying the eating of your breakfast with the lady who cooked it. Could anything be more beautiful? The ayes seem to have it; the ayes have it, as I used to be fond of saying when I was boss of the Philomathean. I wish now I'd taken the domestic science course more seriously and spent less time in the gymnasium. But thus it is we live and learn." Phil's tone made rebuke difficult. He loved her foolishness just as her Uncle Amzi did--just as every one did except her aunts, for whom the affected stiltedness of her speech was merely a part of her general deplorable unconventionality. "Well, Phil, the idea of your cooking the meals for this establishment isn't debatable. You're overruled and the debate closed." "Still harping on my daughter's cooking! Please, in current idiom, cut it out. Try marmalade on that too, too perfect toast." He accepted marmalade and returned to the attack. "You see, Phil, everything's different now. You've got to wake up to your social responsibilities." "And be a perfect lady? I know. Amy got me into the back room of the bank yesterday and told me. One's aunts had bullied the old dear into springing the sad intelligence. Then Nan had already given me a session. And now you, too, Brutus, are about to lay the matter before me in a few crisp sentences. But why all this assumption that I'm not a real lady? There's a good deal of loose thinking on that subject, to use one of your own best phrases. If there is nothing more before the house--" Phil had been studiously stuccoing her toast with marmalade, and she bit into it before looking at her father. "You know perfectly well what I mean, Phil. This is a serious time in your life. You've got to adapt yourself to the ways of the world--the world of convention. You must consider yourself as a member of society. It's only in a limited sense that we can be individualists. And I can't have my daughter weighed down with such cares as these you threaten to assume. It would hurt me more than I can tell you if I believed it necessary. But it isn't necessary. None the less I know perfectly well that if it were necessary you would be equal to it--you are equal to anything you undertake. But I can't have you wasting yourself on such things." "Daddy dear, this is getting terribly philosophical. Let us be really serious for a little bit. You know, we haven't much money, have we? Not very much, anyhow."