“So I’m too hard on you, am I?” he said, looking at her with a cold glint in his eye.  “I provide you with a first-class education, I house you, clothe you, keep you in idleness, and I’m too hard on you.  What do you expect?”

“Why, I want you to like me,” cried Kate, her face flushing.  “I simply want to be your daughter.  I want you to take me out with you, to give me things.  I wanted you to give me a Christmas present.  I want other things, too,—­things that are not favors.”

She paused and he looked at her with a tightening of the lips.

“Go on,” he said.

“I am not being kept in idleness, as I think you know very well.  My time and energies are given to helping you.  I look after your office and your house.  My time is not my own.  I devote it to you.  I want some recognition of my services—­I want some money.”

She leaned back in her chair, answering his exasperated frown with a straight look, which was, though he did not see it, only a different sort of anger from his own.

“Well, you won’t get it,” he said.  “You won’t get it.  When you need things you can tell me and I’ll get them for you.  But there’s been altogether too much money spent in this house in years gone by for trumpery.  You know that well enough.  What’s in that chest out there in the hall?  Trumpery!  What’s in those bureau drawers upstairs?  Truck!  Hundreds of dollars, that might have been put out where it would be earning something, gone into mere flubdub.”

He paused to note the effect of his words and saw that he had scored.  Poor Mrs. Barrington, struggling vaguely and darkly in her own feminine way for some form of self-expression, had spent her household allowance many a time on futile odds and ends.  She had haunted the bargain counter, and had found herself unable to get over the idea that a thing cheaply purchased was an economic triumph.  So in drawers and chests and boxes she had packed her pathetic loot—­odds and ends of embroidery, of dress goods, of passementerie, of chair coverings; dozens of spools of thread and crochet cotton; odd dishes; jars of cold cream; flotsam and jetsam of the shops, a mere wreckage of material.  Kate remembered it with vicarious shame and the blood that flowed to her face swept on into her brain.  She flamed with loyalty to that little dead, bewildered woman, whose feet had walked so falteringly in her search for the roses of life.  And she said—­

But what matter what she said?

Her father and herself were at the antipodes, and they were separated no less by their similarities than by their differences.  Their wistful and inexpressive love for each other was as much of a blight upon them as their inherent antagonism.  The sun went down that bleak Christmas night on a house divided openly against itself.

The next day Kate told her father he might look for some one else to run his house for him.  He said he had already done so.  He made no inquiry where she was going.  He would not offer her money, though he secretly wanted her to ask for it.  But it was past that with her.  The miserable, bitter drama—­the tawdry tragedy, whose most desperate accent was its shameful approach to farce—­wore itself to an end.