I had a bitter experience—­an experience that you could have spared me, and Lydia before me, if you had cared!—­and I had a girl’s hell to bear; I had to go about among my friends ashamed!  You didn’t comfort me; you didn’t tell me that if I learned a little French, and brushed up my hair, and bought white shoes, the next young man wouldn’t throw me over for a prettier and more accomplished woman!  You were ashamed of me!  Sally, just as ignorant as Teddy is this minute, dashed into marriage; she was afraid, as I was, of being a dependent old maid!  She married a good man—­but that wasn’t your doing!  I married a bad man, a man whose selfishness and cruelty ruined all my young days, crushed the youth right out of me, and he might be living yet, and Teddy and I tied to him yet but for a chance!  I suffered dependence and hunger—­ yes, and death, too,” said Martie, crying now, “just because you didn’t give me a livelihood, just because you didn’t make me, and Sally, and Lydia, too, useful citizens!  You did Len; why didn’t you give us the same chance you gave Len?  Len had college; he not only was encouraged to choose a profession, but he was made to!  Our profession was marriage, and we weren’t even prepared for that!  I didn’t know anything when I married.  I didn’t know whether Wallace was fit to be a husband or a father!  I didn’t know how motherhood came—­all those first months were full of misgivings and doubts!  I knew I was giving him all I had, and that financially I was just where I had been—­worse off than ever, in fact, for there were the children to think of!  Why didn’t I have some work to do, so that I could have stepped into it, when bitter need came, and my children and I were almost starving?  What has Len cost you, five thousand dollars, ten thousand?  What did that statue to Grandfather Monroe cost you?  Sally and I have never cost you anything but what we ate and wore!”

Malcolm had risen, too, and they were glaring at each other.  The old man’s putty-coloured face was pale, and his eyes glittered with fury.

“You were always a headstrong, wicked girl!” he said now, in a toneless dry voice, hardly above a whisper.  “And heartless and wicked you will be to the end, I suppose!  How dare you criticise your father, and your sainted mother?  You choose your own life; you throw in your fortune with a ne’er-do-well, and then you come and reproach me!  Don’t—­don’t touch me!” he added, in a sort of furious crow, and as Martie laid a placating hand on his arm:  “Don’t come near me!”

“No, don’t you dare come near him!” sobbed Lydia.  “Poor, dear Pa, always so generous and so good to us!  I should think you’d be afraid, Martie—­I should think you’d actually be afraid to talk so wickedly!”

She essayed an embrace of her father, but Malcolm shook her loose, and crossed the hall; they heard the study door slam.  For a few minutes the sisters stared at each other, then Martie went to the side door, and called Teddy in as quiet a voice as she could command, and Lydia vanished kitchenward, with only one scared and reproachful look.