In reply she rose and stood drumming lightly with her fingers on the table-top.

“‘Daughter am I in my mother’s house, but Mistress in mine own,’” she quoted.

Hamilton Burton took several turns back and forth across the floor.  The whole situation was surprising and intolerable.  Never had son or brother been more lavish in waving the magician’s wand for the pleasure of his family, but never had any other member forgotten for an instant the obedience they owed to his paramount genius.  Men who fought him, he could crush, and did crush ruthlessly and with no afterthought, but his own sister, crossing his will, became a problem of more difficult solution.

“It is a trifle whether you breakfast in bed or not,” he said suddenly, halting in his walk and standing before her.  “It is vital that you remember that you are a girl and that I am the head of this family, whose right and duty it is to direct you.  It was I who brought this family out of obscurity and drudgery.  But for me you would now be mending some lumberjack’s socks and washing his dishes and living in the gray monotony of unvaried days.  There has been only one productive member in our household and that is myself.  There has been just one who could, with no outside aid, meet the world and conquer it, and the family which I have brought up with me from an abandoned farm to the high places of success must regard my wishes.”

“You have summarized with the modesty of a tyrant and a czar,” she replied as her eyes suddenly broke into an unexpected fire and her uptilted chin set itself defiantly, “the many favors that your hand of self-made royalty has conferred upon your suppliant family.”  Her musical voice took on a deeper thrill.  “You have reminded me that my father and mother, my brother and myself, are all but parasites that feed upon your so-great powers of achievement. Eh bien, you have made a mistake.  My mother is a saint—­”

“If any one dared to contradict that—­” interrupted Hamilton hotly, but she halted him with an imperious wave of her hand.

“If my czar-like brother will permit his sister to address his throne,” she said with quiet sarcasm, “I shall esteem it a gracious favor.  Let us be frank with each other.  My mother is a saint and my father a good man.  My brother, Paul, is a genius in music—­and a weakling—­but, as you say, each of them is without power.  Each of them is a parasite and you are the oak upon which they grow and bloom.  But as for me—­” She stopped and laughed, and suddenly Hamilton Burton realized that his sister Mary was not the child he had always regarded her:  not the slip of a girl that had been sent away in the infancy of his fortune to be educated abroad, but a woman of twenty-five, and an unusual woman.