“Not any more than I do, dad. Why for years mother has been writing me that after I graduated she and I would be real chums, and now that I am home we do nothing but argue all day long. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on the verge of quarreling with her. We haven’t a single taste in common, and we positively clash on every subject. Why, I’ve found out mother is simply years behind the times and I—well, you know, dad, that none of the girls I’ve been to school with are that, to say the least. I don’t think mother has any conception of modern girls—and I can’t help it if I’m one, can I?” Hugh shook his head. “You suit me, dear,” he answered consolingly. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised, either, if there isn’t a good deal in your argument. But I expect you’ll have to do what I have for a long time, and make the best of it. Your mother is too set in her opinions to attempt to change her now—so you’ll have to be content with me and your girl friends for chums.” Neither of them saw Marjorie Benton as she came slowly down the wide flower-banked stairway and drooped across the hall to the door leading to her ballroom. With one hand holding aside the blossom curtain, she stopped and gazed wide-eyed at what she saw, as though she could hardly believe what the glittering chandelier lights revealed. It was a picture that some might have called appealing and beautiful—that fairy-like girl of eighteen with her neck and arms of marble whiteness and smoothness nestling in her handsome father’s arms. To Marjorie Benton, however, the beauty of the picture was lost. It was something else she saw that brought a stern light into eyes faded by years of unrequited yearning, and hardened the features with which time had not dealt so lightly as it had with her husband. As she stood there for the moment unseen, ready for her daughter’s debut, Marjorie Benton could not by any stretch of the imagination have been placed in the picture class herself. Sixteen years of loneliness and weary waiting had wrought havoc with her delicate beauty, and where now, at forty, she should have been at the full blush of womanly beauty, she might have been a woman of sixty-five. Golden her hair was still—but it had lost its sheen and taken on instead the dull luster of carelessly-kept gold and silver. There was as much silver as gold at forty, too. The corners of her mouth drooped pathetically—all the starlight had long since departed from her eyes that bore an expression merely of weariness. Now, too, her gown of amethyst velvet with lace of the same shade, cut in severely plain lines, would have been most appropriate for a woman of sixty-five. Hugh and Elinor turned with a start, the girl to take on an expression of defiance as the mother’s voice came low, tense, compelling, from the doorway: “Elinor! Your dress!” “Well,” was the pert retort. “Don’t you like it? Dad does. Don’t you, dad?” But Marjorie was not to be placated.