"Not an inch," her mother asserted. "Nothing, after a little, suited
him. He'd sit up like a poker, just as I've seen you, with his lips
tight together in the Lowrie manner. It didn't please him no matter
what you'd do. He wouldn't blow out at you like a Christian and I
never knew where I was at. I'd come down in a matinee, the prettiest
I could buy, and then see he didn't like it. He would expect you to
be dressed in the morning like it was afternoon and you going out.
And as for loosening your corsets for a little comfort about the
house, you might as well have slapped him direct.

"That wasn't the worst, though; but his going away without as much
as a flicker of his hand; and with me like I was. Nobody on earth
but would blame him for that. I only got what was allowed me after
we had changed back to my old name, me and you. He never asked one
single question about you nor tried to see or serve you a scrap. For
all he knew, at a place called Santa Margharita in Italy, you might
have been born dead."

She was unable, Linda recognized, to defend him in any way; he had
acted frightfully. She acknowledged this logically with her power of
reason, but somehow it didn't touch her as it had her mother, and
as, evidently, the latter expected. She was absorbed in the vision
of her father sitting, in the Lowrie manner, rigid as a poker; she
saw him quietly take up his hat and go away forever. Linda
understood his process completely; she was capable of doing
precisely the same thing. Whatever was the matter with her--in the
heartlessness so often laid to her account--had been equally true of
her father.

"You ought to know what to say to them," Mrs. Moses Feldt cried, "or