Without answering at once, Collingham tapped an egg with a spoon. The broaching of so personal a question between one of his children and himself was something new. It had been an established rule in the household that, however free the intercourse between the boy and the girl and their mother, the approach to their father was always indirect. Junia had made it her lifelong part to explain the children to their father and the father to his children, but rarely to give them a chance of explaining themselves to each other. Collingham had acquiesced in this for the reason that the duties of a parent were not those for which he felt himself, in his own phrase, specially "cut out." The duties for which he did feel himself cut out were those that had to do with the investment of money. On this ground, he spoke with authority; he was original, intuitive, inspired. When it came to a flair for the stock which was selling to-day at fifty and which to-morrow would be worth five hundred, he belonged to the _illuminati_. This being the highest use of intelligence known to man, he felt it his duty to specialize in it to the exclusion of everything else. As already hinted, there were two Collinghams. There was the natural man, a kindly, generous fellow who would never have made a big position in the world; and there was the other Collingham, standardized to the accepted, forceful, American-business-man pattern, and who, now that he was sixty-odd, was the Collingham who mainly had the upper hand. Mainly, but not completely. The natural Collingham often made timid attempts to speak and had to be stifled. He was being stifled while the standardized Collingham tapped his egg. It was the pupil of Junia, Bickley, and the business world who finally sought to gain time by asking a counter-question. "What do you want to know for?" Edith was prepared for this. "Because I may make a marriage that you and mother wouldn’t like; and I think it possible that Bob may do the same." Whatever the natural Collingham might have said to this, the man who had been evolved from him could have but one response. "People who act on their own responsibility should be prepared to go the whole hog." Edith sipped her coffee while she worked out the significance of this. "Does that mean that you wouldn’t give us any money?" "Rather that, being so extremely independent, you wouldn’t ask for it." "Oh, ask for it—no; and yet—" "And yet you think I ought to hand it out." "I was thinking rather of a kind of _noblesse oblige_—" "In which all the _noblesse_ must be mine." "Not exactly that. In which perhaps the _noblesse_ should be _ours_. Even if I should marry a poor man, I can’t help being a Collingham, a member of a family with large ideas and a large way of living." "Yes; but, you see, you’d be giving them up."