“Millie’s a perfect darling!” said Leila. “She’s so lovely to her father and mother! They’re really very nice. Everybody knocks Doc Harden, but he’s not a bad sort. It’s a shame the way people treat them. Mrs. Harden’s a dear, sweet thing; plain and sensible and doesn’t look pained when I cuss a little.” She gave her father a sly look, but he feigned inattention. “Dada, how do you explain Millie?” “Well, I don’t,” replied Mills, with a broad smile at the abruptness of the question. “It’s just as well that everything and everybody on this planet can’t be explained and don’t have to be. I’ve come to a time of life when I’m a little fed up on things that can be reduced to figures. I want to be mystified!” Leila pointed her finger at him across the table. “I’ll say you like mystery! If there was ever a human being who just had to have the facts, you’re it! I know because I’ve tried hiding milliners’ bills from you.” “Well, I usually pay them,” Mills replied good-humoredly. “Now that you’ve spoken of bills, I’d like to ask you----” “Don’t!” Leila ejaculated, placing her hands over her ears with simulated horror. “I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to ask why I bought that new squirrel coat. Well, winter’s coming and it’s to keep me from freezing to death.” “Well, the house is well heated,” Mills replied dryly. “The answer is for you to spend a little time at home.” Leila was a spoiled child and lived her own life with little paternal interference. After Mills had failed utterly to keep her in school, or rather to find any school in which she would stay, he had tried tutors with no better results. He had finally placed her for a year in New York with a woman who made a business of giving the finishing touches to the daughters of the provincial rich. There were no lessons to learn which these daughters didn’t want to learn, but Leila had heard operas and concerts to a point where she really knew something of music, and she had acquired a talent that greatly amused her father for talking convincingly of things she really knew nothing about. He found much less delight in her appalling habit of blurting out things better left unsaid, and presumably foreign to the minds of well-bred young women. Her features were a feminized version of her father’s; she was dark like him and with the same gray eyes; but here the resemblance ended. She was alert, restless, quick of speech and action. The strenuous life of her long days was expressing itself in little nervous twitchings of her hands and head. Her father, under his benignant gaze, was noting these things now. “I hope you’re staying in tonight, Leila?” he said. “It seems to me you’re not sleeping enough.” “Well, no, Dada. I was going to the Claytons’. I told Fred Thomas he might come for me at nine.” “Thomas?” Mills questioned. “I don’t know that I’d choose him for an escort.”