“It’s for the children we do it,” said Dryfoos.  “We got to give them their chance in the world.”

“Oh, the world!  They ought to bear the yoke in their youth, like we done.  I know it’s what Coonrod would like to do.”

Dryfoos got upon his feet.  “If Coonrod ’ll mind his own business, and do what I want him to, he’ll have yoke enough to bear.”  He moved from his wife, without further effort to comfort her, and pottered heavily out into the dining-room.  Beyond its obscurity stretched the glitter of the deep drawing-room.  His feet, in their broad; flat slippers, made no sound on the dense carpet, and he came unseen upon the little group there near the piano.  Mela perched upon the stool with her back to the keys, and Beaton bent over Christine, who sat with a banjo in her lap, letting him take her hands and put them in the right place on the instrument.  Her face was radiant with happiness, and Mela was watching her with foolish, unselfish pleasure in her bliss.

There was nothing wrong in the affair to a man of Dryfoos’s traditions and perceptions, and if it had been at home in the farm sitting-room, or even in his parlor at Moffitt, he would not have minded a young man’s placing his daughter’s hands on a banjo, or even holding them there; it would have seemed a proper, attention from him if he was courting her.  But here, in such a house as this, with the daughter of a man who had made as much money as he had, he did not know but it was a liberty.  He felt the angry doubt of it which beset him in regard to so many experiences of his changed life; he wanted to show his sense of it, if it was a liberty, but he did not know how, and he did not know that it was so.  Besides, he could not help a touch of the pleasure in Christine’s happiness which Mela showed; and he would have gone back to the library, if he could, without being discovered.

But Beaton had seen him, and Dryfoos, with a nonchalant nod to the young man, came forward.  “What you got there, Christine?”

“A banjo,” said the girl, blushing in her father’s presence.

Mela gurgled.  “Mr. Beaton is learnun’ her the first position.”

Beaton was not embarrassed.  He was in evening dress, and his face, pointed with its brown beard, showed extremely handsome above the expanse of his broad, white shirt-front.  He gave back as nonchalant a nod as he had got, and, without further greeting to Dryfoos, he said to Christine:  “No, no.  You must keep your hand and arm so.”  He held them in position.  “There!  Now strike with your right hand.  See?”

“I don’t believe I can ever learn,” said the girl, with a fond upward look at him.

“Oh yes, you can,” said Beaton.

They both ignored Dryfoos in the little play of protests which followed, and he said, half jocosely, half suspiciously, “And is the banjo the fashion, now?” He remembered it as the emblem of low-down show business, and associated it with end-men and blackened faces and grotesque shirt-collars.