“Just listen to me, and ask yourself. Since I was ’most a baby, I’ve known that some way my folks were different from other girls’ fathers and mothers. I guess it was pappa’s high-toned manners, and mamma’s never having more than half a voice in her own house; and you know as well as I do, though we don’t have other people see it, what an icy terror pappa can be yet when he likes. Why, we wouldn’t be here if he could have helped it.” Maimie smiled grimly at this allusion to the circumstances attending their departure for England. Mr Steinherz, summoned suddenly to London on the business of his Euphrates Syndicate, had telegraphed to his daughter that he was leaving New York by the next day’s boat. Félicia, who had for years demanded a visit to Europe in vain, was touched in her tenderest point. Telegrams flashed backwards and forwards, and when Mr Steinherz went on board, the first person he saw was his daughter, holding a farewell reception of her fashionable friends, with Maimie and a maid and a marvellous pile of luggage in the background. “Yes, we fixed things pretty smartly that time,” pursued Félicia; “but he has played it awfully low down on us since, Maimie. I think it’s real mean of him to bring us along to this hotel, where there are only dowdy English people, and not let us go to the Continent at all, except that two days in Paris. And to have us decline all of those invitations that Lord Usk would have got us!” “But he hasn’t been ugly, Fay, as he might have been. And when you think of some girls’ folks----” “Oh, I know. Why, there’s Sadie van Zyl, in the smartest set here and the very toniest society everywhere--what she must suffer when she has to produce either her husband or her father! I don’t wonder she has a nerve-attack most times, and goes off to some cure or other.” “Well, now, you need never feel badly like that, you know.” “That’s so, but then I never have the chance of exhibiting pappa. I should admire to have him go with us to all sorts of places, but he won’t. Now, Maimie, if those Van Rensselaer girls knew just this, what would they say? Why, that there was some reason why he didn’t care to show himself in Europe. That may be so, or it may not; I don’t choose to inquire, but I incline to think that he settled in the States because he had taken a hand in some political game, and it didn’t eventuate just the way he hoped it would. Whatever the mystery was, your mother was in it, but not your father.” Maimie nodded. “Then we’ll take that as understood, and you’ll see I have to hoe my own row. Now Lord Usk is real nice to pappa, and from all we hear I don’t see but pappa will think his folks just lovely. So I’m on.” “Wait, just wait!” entreated Maimie. “Don’t go ahead so fast.”