“I suppose the utter selfishness of this idea of yours has not struck you,” he said at last.  “You may think you would like this kind of life, though you wouldn’t if you tried it, but how about your mother?”

“She won’t like it,” Julia admitted; “but then, on the other hand, there is father.  I suppose you know he has taken to drink lately and at all times gambled as much as he could.  What do you think would become of him in a boarding-house in some fashionable place, with nothing to do, and any amount of opportunity?”

Mr. Ponsonby did not feel able or willing to discuss the Captain’s delinquencies with his daughter; his only answer was, “What will become of your mother keeping pigs and poultry and living in an isolated cottage?  It would be social extinction for her.”

“The boarding-house would be moral extinction for father.”

Mr. Ponsonby grew impatient.  “I suppose you think,” he said irritably, “that you have reduced it to this—­the sacrifice of one parent or the other.  You have no business to think about such things; but if you had, to which do you owe the most duty?  Who has done the most for you?”

“Well,” Julia answered slowly, “I’m not sure I am considering duty only; people who don’t pay their debts are not always great at duty, you know.  Perhaps it is really inclination with me.  Father is fonder of me than mother is; I have never been much of a social success.  Mother did not find me such good material to work upon, so naturally she rather dropped me for the ones who were good material.  I admire mother the more, but I am sorrier for father, because he can’t take care of himself, and has no consolation left; it serves him right, of course, but it must be very uncomfortable all the same.  Do you see?”

“No, I don’t,” her uncle answered shortly; “I am old-fashioned enough to think sons and daughters ought to do their duty to their parents, not analyse them in this way.”  He forgot that he had in a measure invited this analysis, and Julia did not remind him, although no doubt she was aware of it.

“I should like to do my duty to them both,” she said; “and I believe I will do it best by going to the cottage.  Father would get to be a great nuisance to mother at the boarding-house after a time, almost as bad as the pigs and poultry at the cottage.  Also, if we had the boarding-house, father’s moral extinction would be complete, but if we lived at the cottage mother’s social one would not; she could go and stay with Violet and other people the worst part of the time, while we were shortest of money.  Besides all that, there are two other things; I like the cottage best myself, and I believe it to be the best—­I know the sort of living life we should live at a boarding-house—­and then there is Johnny Gillat.”

Mr. Ponsonby had no recollection of who Johnny Gillat was, and he did not trouble to ask; Julia’s other reason was the one he seized upon.  “You like it!” he said; “yes, now we have come to the truth; the person you are considering is yourself; I knew that all along; you need not have troubled to wrap it up in all these grand reasons—­consideration for your father, and so on!”