This was the cause of the obstinacy that puzzled and even provoked him during a week of intermittent arguing upon the matter. Elsie was sure that one thing he said was only too true: “Young people are pretty much the same the world over nowadays”; and in her imagination she could conjure up no picture of herself occupying among her cousin Cornelia Cromwell’s friends a position different from that she held among her own. They would be polite to her for the first hour or so, she knew, and then they would do to her what had always been done to her. They would treat her as a weightless presence, invisible and inaudible, a left-outer. Her aunt and Cornelia would expect much of her; and they would be kind in their disappointment; but they would have her on their hands and secretly look forward to the relief of her departure. Elsie could predict it all, and in sorry imaginings foresee the weariness of her aunt and cousin as they would daily renew the task of privately goading reluctant young men and preoccupied girls to appear conscious that she was a human being, not air. The visit would mean only a new failure, a new one on a grander scale than the old failure at home. The old one was enough for her; she was used to it, and the surroundings at least were familiar. The more her father urged her, the more she was terrified by what he urged. “I’ve made up my mind to compel you,” he told her one evening in the library. “I’m serious, Elsie.” She did not look up from her book, but responded quietly: “I’m twenty. Women are of age in this state at eighteen, Papa.” “Are they? I wrote your aunt yesterday that you’re coming.” “I wrote her yesterday, too. I told her I couldn’t.” “No other explanation?” “Of course I said you needed me to run the house, Papa.” “I didn’t bring you up to tell untruths,” he said. “You’ve learned, it seems; but this one won’t do you any good. You’re going, Elsie, and if you want some new dresses or hats or things you’d better be ordering ’em. You don’t seem to understand I really mean it.” She dropped her book in her lap and sighed profoundly. “What for?” she asked. “Why do you make such a point of it?” “Because I’ve been watching you and thinking about you, and I don’t believe I’m doing my duty by you. Not as”—his voice showed feeling—“not as your mother would have me do it. Sometimes you cheer up and joke with me, but I don’t believe you’re happy.” “But I _am_.” “You’re not,” he returned with conviction. “And the reason is, you lead too monotonous a life. A monotonous life suits elderliness, but it isn’t normal for youth. Really, you’re getting to lead the life of a recluse, and I won’t have it. If these provincial young people here bore you so that you won’t run about and play with them as the other girls do, why then you’ve got to try a different kind of young people.” “But you said young people were all the same, Papa, the world over; and it’s true.”