"But here I am," I finished, "telling you about my troubles and
forgetting what I came for. You'll have to go out to the shelter-house,
Miss Patty. And I guess you're expected to fix it up with your father."

She stopped unfastening her long braids of hair.

"Certainly I'll go to the shelter-house," she said, "and I'll shake a
little sense into Dorothy Jennings--the abominable little idiot! But
they needn't think I'm going to help them with father; I wouldn't if I
could, and I can't. He won't speak to me. I'm in disgrace, Minnie." She
gave her hair a shake, twisted it into a rope and then a knot, and
stuck a pin in it. It was lovely: I wish Miss Cobb could have seen her.
"You've known father for years, Minnie: have you ever known him to be
so--so--"

"Devilish" was the word she meant, but I finished for her.

"Unreasonable?" I said. "Well, once before when you were a little girl,
he put his cane through a window in the spring-house, because he thought
it needed air. The spring-house, of course, not the cane."

"Exactly," she said, looking around the room, "and now he's putting a
cane through every plan I have made. Do you see my heavy boots?"

"It's like this," I remarked, bringing the boots from outside the door,
"if he's swallowed the prince and is choking on the settlement question
he might as well get over it. All those foreigners expect pay for taking
a wife. Didn't the chef here want to marry Tillie, the diet cook, and
didn't he want her to turn over the three hundred dollars she had in the
bank, and her real estate, which was a sixth interest in a cemetery lot?