So jerkily she thrust her slender throat forward with the speech, her whole facial expression seemed suddenly to have undercut and stunned her father’s.

“Always, Father,” she attested grimly, “with your horrid old books and specimens you have crowded my dolls out of my steamer trunk.  But never once—­” her tightening lips hastened to assure him, “have you ever succeeded in crowding—­Henrietta—­and the others out of my mind!”

Quite incongruously, then, with a soft little hand in which there lurked no animosity whatsoever, she reached up suddenly and smoothed the astonishment out of her father’s mouth-lines.

“After all, Father,” she asked, “now that we’re really talking so intimately, after all—­there isn’t so specially much to life anyway, is there, except just the satisfaction of making the complete round of human experience—­once for yourself—­and then once again—­to show another person?  Just that double chance, Father, of getting two original glimpses at happiness?  One through your own eyes, and one—­just a little bit dimmer—­through the eyes of another?”

With mercilessly appraising vision the starving Youth that was in her glared up at the satiate Age in him.

“You’ve had your complete round of human experience, Father!” she cried.  “Your first—­full—­untrammeled glimpse of all your Heart’s Desires.  More of a glimpse, perhaps, than most people get.  From your tiniest boyhood, Father, everything just as you wanted it!  Just the tutors you chose in just the subjects you chose!  Everything then that American colleges could give you!  Everything later that European universities could offer you!  And then Travel!  And more Travel!  And more!  And more!  And then—­Love!  And then Fame!  ’Love, Fame, and Far Lands!’ Yes, that’s it exactly!  Everything just as you chose it!  So your only tragedy, Father, lies—­as far as I can see—­in just little—­me!  Because I don’t happen to like the things that you like, the things that you already have had the first full joy of liking,—­you’ve got to miss altogether your dimmer, second-hand glimpse of happiness!  Oh, I’m sorry, Father!  Truly I am!  Already I sense the hurt of these latter years—­the shattered expectations, the incessant disappointments!  You who have stared unblinkingly into the face of the sun, robbed in your twilight of even a candle-flame.  But, Father?”

Grimly, despairingly, but with unfaltering persistence—­Youth fighting with its last gasp for the rights of its Youth—­she lifted her haggard little face to his.  “But, Father!—­my tragedy lies in the fact—­that at thirty—­I’ve never yet had even my first-hand glimpse of happiness!  And now apparently, unless I’m willing to relinquish all hope of ever having it, and consent to ‘settle down,’ as you call it, with ’good old John Ellbertson’—­I’ll never even get a gamble—­probably—­at sighting Happiness second-hand through another person’s eyes!”