That it was not an amusing conversation would have been clear from the agitation of Derek’s manner as he strode up and down the room, as well as from the rigidity with which his cousin, usually a limp person, held herself erect, in the attitude of a woman who has no intention of retiring from the stand she has taken.

“You force me to speak more plainly than I like, Derek,” she was saying, “because you make yourself so obtuse.  You seem to forget that years have a way of passing, and that Dorothea is no longer a very little girl.”

“She’s barely seventeen—­no more than a child.”

“But a motherless child, and one who has been allowed a great deal of liberty.”

“Is there any reason why a girl shouldn’t be a free creature?”

“Only the reason why a boy shouldn’t be one.”

“That’s different.  A boy would be getting into mischief.”

“Even a girl isn’t proof against that possibility.  It mayn’t be a boy’s kind of mischief, but it’s a kind of her own.”

Unwilling to credit this statement, and yet unable to contradict it, Pruyn continued his march for a minute or two in silence, while Miss Lucilla waited nervously for him to speak again.  It was one of the few points in the round of daily existence on which she was prepared to give him battle.  It was part of the ridiculous irony of life that Derek, with the domestic incompetency natural to a banker and a club-man, should have a daughter to train, while she whose instinct was so passionately maternal must be doomed to spinsterhood.  She had never made any secret of the fact that to watch Derek bringing up Dorothea made her as fidgety as if she had seen him trimming hats, though she recognized the futility of trying to snatch the task from his hands in order to do it properly.  The utmost she had been able to accomplish was to be allowed to plod daily from Gramercy Park to Fifth Avenue, in the hope of keeping bad from becoming worse; and even this insufficient oversight must be discontinued now, since Aunt Regina would monopolize her care.  If she took the matter to heart, it was no more, she thought, than she had a right to do, seeing that Derek was almost like a younger brother, and, with the exception of Uncle James in Paris, and Aunt Regina in New York, her nearest relative in the world.

As she glanced up at him from time to time she reflected, with some pride, that no one could have taken him for anything but what he was—­a rising young New York banker of some hereditary line.  As in certain English portraits there is an inborn aptitude for statesmanship, so in Derek Pruyn there was that air, almost inseparable from the Van Tromp kinship, of one accustomed to possess money, to make money, to spend money, and to support moneyed responsibilities.  The face, slightly stern by nature, slightly grave by habit, and tanned by outdoor exercise, was that of a man who wields his special kind of power with a due sense of its importance, and yet wields it easily.