No, she was not doing a thing particular. "Better come up home and have a cup of tea with us." Then in a tone less impersonal: "Your mother would like to see you." The blood rushed over Melia's face. At first she feigned not to hear, but that did not help her. Dignity had many demands to make, but the brusque insistence of this father of hers seemed to cut away the ground on which it stood. "Say what time and I'll send the car for you." The tone was so final that anything she could raise in the way of protest seemed weakly ridiculous. But the car for _her_! She didn't want the car and she mustered force enough to say so. "Might as well have it. Doing nothing Sunday. Save you a climb up the hill this hot weather." Of one thing, however, she was quite sure. She didn't want the car. This recent and remarkable expression of her father's wealth and ever-growing social importance had taken the form of a superb motor and a smart lady chauffeur in the neatest of green liveries which already she had happened to see on two occasions in Waterloo Square. No, such a vehicle was not for her; and she contrived to say so with the bluntness demanded by the circumstances, yet tempered a little by a certain regard for anything her father might be able to muster in the way of feelings. "Might as well make use of it," he said. "Eating its head off Sunday afternoon." But she remained quite firm. The car was not for her. "Well, it's there for you if you want it." His air was majestic. "Better pay that money into the bank. And I shall tell your mother to expect you Sunday tea time." It was left at that. He had gained both his points. The third was subsidiary; it didn't matter. All the same it was like Josiah to raise it as a cover for those that did. XXVII Melia was frankly annoyed with herself for not having put up a better resistance. The sight of her father strutting down the street with the honors of war upon him was a little too much for her. He had been guilty of sixteen years of tyrannical cruelty and she was unable to forgive. In those sixteen years she had suffered bitterly and her stubborn nature had great powers of resentment. Who was he that he should walk down Love Lane not merely as if he owned it--in sober truth he now owned half--but also the souls of the people who lived there? She could not help resenting that invincible flare, that overweening success, particularly when she compared it with the fecklessness of the man she had so imprudently married. After all, she was the first-born of this vain image and she knew his shortcomings better than he knew them himself. He had had more than his share of luck. No matter what the world might think of him, however fortune might treat him, he was not worthy of the position he had come to occupy.