Manning, with a mouth of contempt, glanced down at the floor. Evidently to help the air conditioning, a marble bust of Robert Browning—the only ornament of its kind in Manning's office—had been used as a doorstop to keep the door part way open.
Manning, like one whose rage is shown only by murderous care, stepped softly over the bust as he opened the door, and closed the door on it with the same murderous care.
"Hello, Dad!" exclaimed the voice of his younger daughter—brightly and rather shakily.
"Good afternoon, sir," said the voice of Mr. Huntington Davis, Junior.
It was not Manning's arrival which caused tension there. Tension already existed. But it grew stronger each second afterwards.
Manning's office, large and square, was at a corner of the building; there were two windows in the wall on either side of him. But the Venetian blinds had their shutters more than half closed, turning the room dim. Its sombre grey furnishings, including a heavy sofa, were as uncompromising as the muffled carpet or the framed photographs of the Frederick Manning School and its achievements.
And still the silence lengthened, while Manning hung up his hat and sat down unhurriedly behind the big flat-topped desk in the angle of the window walls.
"Dad!" Jean Manning burst out uncontrollably.
"Yes, my dear?"
"I want to ask you a question," said the girl, "and you've got to answer me! Please!"
"Of course, my dear," assented her father. Not once did he glance in the direction of young Mr. Huntington Davis.
"Well..."
Jean braced herself.
She was just twenty-one, and badly upset. Wearing a white silk dress, she sat on the sofa with one leg tucked under her. Though Jean was very pretty, with her yellow hair worn in a long page-boy, she had not the stereotyped prettiness which makes so many girls nowadays look exactly alike: as though they had all stepped simultaneously from the same fashion magazine, and started to parade down Fifth Avenue.
Jean wore very little make-up, perhaps because of her very faint but healthy tan. Her blue eyes were direct and honest, if a trifle naive. When she flung out the question that had been torturing her, an older person might have found it something of an anticlimax.
"Is it true," she demanded, "that you've been running around with this dreadful woman? Just as they say you have?"
For a moment Frederick Manning did not reply.
A detached observer would have said this question, and this question alone, really startled him. For a moment there was a faint twinkle in his eye; then his jaw muscles tightened, and his nostrils distended.
"Aside," he said, "from the term 'running around,' which I hate, and the word 'dreadful, which is inaccurate..
"Oh, stop it!" pleaded Jean, and struck the arm of the sofa.
"Stop what?"
"You know what I mean!" Jean turned back again to the question of the woman. It was as though a spider had run up her bare arm "Are you—are you keeping her?"
"Certainly. I believe that's the correct procedure. It doesn't shock you, does it?"
"No, of course not!" Jean said instantly. She would have been outraged at the suggestion that anything could shock her, though in fact many things did. "It's just—I'm sorry, Dad!—that it seems indecent. For a man as old as you are!"
"Do you honestly think that, my dear?" smiled Manning.
"And that's not all. There's—well, there's mother."
For a moment Manning tapped his fingers on the desk.
"Your mother," he replied, "has been dead for eighteen years. Do you remember her at all?" "No, I don't! But..."
Jean, thoroughly miserable and almost in tears, lost in a romantic dream, did not notice that her father's face was almost as white as her own.
"But," Jean went on doggedly, "you've always told us how you idolized her. How you worshipped her. How you felt,"—Jean's eyes strayed towards the marble bust which served as a doorstop— "how you felt about her like Robert Browning felt about Elizabeth Barrett, even after she was dead?"
Manning closed his eyes..
"Jean," he said, "will you oblige me by not saying 'like' when you mean 'as?' Of all the detestable..."
"Dad! I don't understand you!" Jean cried helplessly. "What difference does it make how I say it?"
And now Manning's face flamed.
"Your speech, my dear, is the speech of Emerson and Lincoln, of Poe and Hawthorne." Manning spoke gently. "Don't debase it."
"Oh, Dad, you're a hundred years behind the times!"
"And yet far too modern, apparently, when I take up relations with Miss Stanley?"
"That woman..." Jean began vehemently. Then she stopped, attempting without great success to imitate the cynical and world-weary air of her twenty-four-year, elder sister, Crystal.
"Oh, I imagine people in the old days had their floozies too." Then her tone changed. "But you! And I still say, Dad, you're a hundred years behind the times! That's probably why your school..."
Again Jean paused, but this time with a different inflection.
"What about the school?" demanded Manning, with the blue veins showing at his temples.
He had seen his daughter's gaze stray towards the black brief case, obviously well filled, which lay on the desk at his right hand. Without haste Manning picked up the brief case, and, as though idly, shut it up in a drawer at the right of his desk.
"What about the school?" he repeated.
Jean looked round for help. "Dave!" she cried.
Mr. Huntington Davis, Junior, cleared his throat and got up from an easy chair at the far end of the room.
The office was so dark, with its sunblinds nearly drawn, that faces looked vague at a distance. Mr. Huntington Davis—the newest partner of his father's old-established brokerage firm of Davis, Wilmot & Davis—had more than the assurance of his thirty years. His black glossy hair, parted to a nicety, gleamed against the sunblinds as he strolled over to Manning's desk.
"May I say a word, sir?" Davis requested easily.
"By all means," agreed Manning. He looked the young man up and down without expression, as he might have looked at a canvas without any painting on it.
Davis smiled his pleasant, white, dental smile. He was of good height, a joy to his tailor, and with a passion for physical exercise which Manning (to say the least) deplored. Under Davis's black hair he was tanned to the colour of an Indian, his pale grey eyes showing light against it.
Negligently he leaned one fist on the desk.
"I'd like to ask you something, Mr. Manning," he said. "What are you really thinking about?"
"I was wondering," mused the other, putting his fingertips together, "why you and I dislike each other so much."
"Dad!" cried Jean.
Davis smiled, a white flash against the tan of the face.
"That's not true, Mr. Manning." he said earnestly. "I certainly don't dislike you. And you can't actually dislike me either."
"What makes you think so?"
Without taking his eyes from the lounging figure behind the desk, Davis extended his hand behind him and beckoned to Jean. Jean slipped off the sofa and hurried to take his hand, pressing it.
"Well!" smiled Davis, with humour wrinkling his forehead. "You don't object to my marrying' Jean, do you? You gave your consent without a murmur."
"I almost always consent," observed Manning, "to avoid fuss and bother. Jean's sister has been married three times."
"Look, sir!" said Davis. There was a note almost of desperation in his self-assured voice. "Jean and I are getting married in August. This is a family matter now. I want to help you! Look, don't you trust me?"