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Martie, the Unconquered by Kathleen Thompson Norris
page 23 of 469 (04%)
suspected by neither. But Martie knew that she did not like the
faint odour of his moustache, his breath, and his skin, on those
rather infrequent occasions when he kissed her, and her father was
well aware that in baffling him, evading him, and anticipating him,
Martie was more annoying than the three other children combined.

"Where's your son?" asked the man of the house, as the dinner,
accompanied by his wife, came in from the kitchen.

"I don't know, Pa," Mrs. Monroe said earnestly yet soothingly.
"Come, girls. Come, Pa!"

Malcolm rose stiffly, and went to his place.

"He comes and goes as if his father's house was a hotel, does he?"
he asked, as one merely curious. "Is that the idea?"

"Why, no, Pa." Mrs. Monroe was serving an uninteresting meal on
heavy plates decorated in toneless brown. Soda crackers and sliced
bread were on the table, and a thin slice of butter on a blue china
plate. The teaspoons stood erect in a tumbler of red pressed glass.
The younger girls had old, thin silver napkin rings; their mother's
was of orange-wood with "Souvenir of Santa Cruz" painted on it; and
Lydia and her father used little strips of scalloped and embroidered
linen. Lydia had read of these in a magazine and had made them
herself, and as her daughterly love swept over all the surface
ugliness of his character, she alone among his children sometimes
caught a glimpse of her father's heart. She had an ideal of
fatherhood, had gentle, silent, useless Lydia--formed upon the
genial, sunshiny type of parent popular in books, and she cast a
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