"Oh-no-Father," said little Eve Edgarton. Indolently she withdrew her eyes from her father's and stared off Nunko-Nonoward-in a hazy, geographical sort of a dream. "Good old John Ellbertson-good old John Ellbertson," she began to croon very softly to herself. "Good old John Ellbertson. How I do love his kind brown eyes-how I do-"
"Brown eyes?" snapped her father. "Brown? John Ellbertson's got the grayest eyes that I ever saw in my life!"
Without the slightest ruffle of composure little Eve Edgarton accepted the correction. "Oh, has he?" she conceded amiably. "Well, then, good old John Ellbertson-good old John Ellbertson-how I do love his kind-gray eyes," she began all over again.
Palpably Edgarton shifted his standing weight from one foot to the other. "I understood-your mother," he asserted a bit defiantly.
"Did you, dear? I wonder?" mused little Eve Edgarton.
"Eh?" jerked her father.
Still with the vague geographical dream in her eyes, little Eve Edgarton pointed off suddenly toward the open lid of her steamer trunk.
"Oh-my manuscript notes, Father, please!" she ordered almost peremptorily, "John's notes, you know? I might as well be working on them while I'm lying here."
Obediently from the tousled top of the steamer trunk her father returned with the great batch of rough manuscript. "And my pencil, please," persisted little Eve Edgarton. "And my eraser. And my writing-board. And my ruler. And my-"
Absent-mindedly, one by one, Edgarton handed the articles to her, and then sank down on the foot of her bed with his thin-lipped mouth contorted into a rather mirthless grin. "Don't care much for your old father, do you?" he asked trenchantly.
Gravely for a moment the girl sat studying her father's weather-beaten features, the thin hair, the pale, shrewd eyes, the gaunt cheeks, the indomitable old-young mouth. Then a little shy smile flickered across her face and was gone again.
"As a parent, dear," she drawled, "I love you to distraction! But as a daily companion?" Vaguely her eyebrows lifted. "As a real playmate?" Against the starch-white of her pillows the sudden flutter of her small brown throat showed with almost startling distinctness. "But as a real playmate," she persisted evenly, "you are so-intelligent-and you travel so fast-it tires me."
"Whom do you like?" asked her father sharply.
The girl's eyes were suddenly sullen again-bored, distrait, inestimably dreary. "That's the whole trouble," she said. "You've never given me time-to like anybody."
"Oh, but-Eve," pleaded her father. Awkward as any schoolboy, he sat there, fuming and twisting before this absurd little bunch of nerve and nerves that he himself had begotten. "Oh, but Eve," he deprecated helplessly, "it's the deuce of a job for a-for a man to be left all alone in the world with a-with a daughter! Really it is!"
Already the sweat had started on his forehead, and across one cheek the old gray fretwork of wrinkles began to shadow suddenly. "I've done my best!" he pleaded. "I swear I have! Only I've never known how! With a mother, now," he stammered, "with a wife, with a sister, with your best friend's sister, you know just what to do! It's a definite relation! Prescribed by a definite emotion! But a daughter? Oh, ye gods! Your whole sexual angle of vision changed! A creature neither fish, flesh, nor fowl! Non-superior, non-contemporaneous, non-subservient! Just a lady! A strange lady! Yes, that's exactly it, Eve-a strange lady-growing eternally just a little bit more strange-just a little bit more remote-every minute of her life! Yet it's so-damned intimate all the time!" he blurted out passionately. "All the time she's rowing you about your manners and your morals, all the time she's laying down the law to you about the tariff or the turnips, you're remembering-how you used to-scrub her-in her first little blue-lined tin bath-tub!"
Once again the flickering smile flared up in little Eve Edgarton's eyes and was gone again. A trifle self-consciously she burrowed back into her pillows. When she spoke her voice was scarcely audible. "Oh, I know I'm funny," she admitted conscientiously.
"You're not funny!" snapped her father.
"Yes, I am," whispered the girl.
"No, you're not!" reasserted her father with increasing vehemence. "You're not! It's I who am funny! It's I who-" In a chaos of emotion he slid along the edge of the bed and clasped her in his arms. Just for an instant his wet cheek grazed hers, then: "All the same, you know," he insisted awkwardly, "I hate this place!"
Surprisingly little Eve Edgarton reached up and kissed him full on the mouth. They were both very much embarrassed.
"Why-why, Eve!" stammered her father. "Why, my little-little girl! Why, you haven't kissed me-before-since you were a baby!"
"Yes, I have!" nodded little Eve Edgarton.
"No, you haven't!" snapped her father.
"Yes, I have!" insisted Eve.
Tighter and tighter their arms clasped round each other. "You're all I've got," faltered the man brokenly.
"You're all I've ever had," whispered little Eve Edgarton.
Silently for a moment each according to his thoughts sat staring off into far places. Then without any warning whatsoever, the man reached out suddenly and tipped his daughter's face up abruptly into the light.
"Eve!" he demanded. "Surely you're not blaming me any in your heart because I want to see you safely married and settled with-with John Ellbertson?"
Vaguely, like a child repeating a dimly understood lesson, little Eve Edgarton repeated the phrases after him. "Oh, no, Father," she said, "I surely am not blaming you-in my heart-for wanting to see me married and settled with-John Ellbertson. Good old John Ellbertson," she corrected painstakingly.
With his hand still holding her little chin like a vise, the man's eyes narrowed to his further probing. "Eve," he frowned, "I'm not as well as I used to be! I've got pains in my arms! And they're not good pains! I shall live to be a thousand! But I-I might not! It's a-rotten world, Eve," he brooded, "and quite unnecessarily crowded-it seems to me-with essentially rotten people. Toward the starving and the crippled and the hideously distorted, the world, having no envy of them, shows always an amazing mercy; and Beauty, whatever its sorrows, can always retreat to the thick protecting wall of its own conceit. But as for the rest of us?" he grinned with a sudden convulsive twist of the eyebrow, "God help the unduly prosperous-and the merely plain! From the former-always, Envy, like a wolf, shall tear down every fresh talent, every fresh treasure, they lift to their aching backs. And from the latter-Brutal Neglect shall ravage away even the charm that they thought they had!
"It's a-a rotten world, Eve, I tell you," he began all over again, a bit plaintively. "A rotten world! And the pains in my arms, I tell you, are not-nice! Distinctly not nice! Sometimes, Eve, you think I'm making faces at you! But, believe me, it isn't faces that I'm making! It's my-heart that I'm making at you! And believe me, the pain is not-nice!"
Before the sudden wince in his daughter's eyes he reverted instantly to an air of semi-jocosity. "So, under all existing circumstances, little girl," he hastened to affirm, "you can hardly blame a crusty old codger of a father for preferring to leave his daughter in the hands of a man whom he positively knows to be good, than in the hands of some casual stranger who, just in a negative way, he merely can't prove isn't good? Oh, Eve-Eve," he pleaded sharply, "you'll be so much better off-out of the world! You've got infinitely too much money and infinitely too little-self-conceit-to be happy here! They would break your heart in a year! But at Nunko-Nono!" he cried eagerly. "Oh, Eve! Think of the peace of it! Just white beach, and a blue sea, and the long, low, endless horizon. And John will make you a garden! And women-I have often heard-are very happy in a garden! And-"
Slowly little Eve Edgarton lifted her eyes again to his. "Has John got a beard?" she asked.