“Then it came into Alison’s head that she wanted to ’make something of her life,’—­as she expressed it.  She said she was wasting herself, and began going to lectures with a lot of faddish women, became saturated with these nonsensical ideas about her sex that are doing so much harm nowadays.  I suppose I was wrong in my treatment from the first.  I never knew how to handle her, but we grew like flint and steel.  I’ll say this for her, she kept quiet enough, but she used to sit opposite me at the table, and I knew all the time what she was thinking of, and then I’d break out.  Of course she’d defend herself, but she had her temper under better control than I. She wanted to go away for a year or two and study landscape gardening, and then come back and establish herself in an office here.  I wouldn’t listen to it.  And one morning, when she was late to breakfast, I delivered an ultimatum.  I gave her a lecture on a woman’s place and a woman’s duty, and told her that if she didn’t marry she’d have to stay here and live quietly with me, or I’d disinherit her.”

Hodder had become absorbed in this portrait of Alison Parr, drawn by her father with such unconscious vividness.

“And then?” he asked.

In spite of the tone of bitterness in which he had spoken, Eldon Parr smiled.  It was a reluctant tribute to his daughter.

“I got an ultimatum in return,” he said.  “Alison should have been a man.”  His anger mounted quickly as he recalled the scene.  “She said she had thought it all out:  that our relationship had become impossible; that she had no doubt it was largely her fault, but that was the way she was made, and she couldn’t change.  She had, naturally, an affection for me as her father, but it was very plain we couldn’t get along together:  she was convinced that she had a right to individual freedom,—­as she spoke of it,—­to develop herself.  She knew, if she continued to live with me on the terms I demanded, that her character would deteriorate.  Certain kinds of sacrifice she was capable of, she thought, but what I asked would be a useless one.  Perhaps I didn’t realize it, but it was slavery.  Slavery!” he repeated, “the kind of slavery her mother had lived . . . .”

He took a turn around the room.

“So far as money was concerned, she was indifferent to it.  She had enough from her mother to last until she began to make more.  She wouldn’t take any from me in any case.  I laughed, yet I have never been so angry in my life.  Nor was it wholly anger, Hodder, but a queer tangle of feelings I can’t describe.  There was affection mixed up in it—­I realized afterward—­but I longed to take her and shake her and lock her up until she should come to her senses:  I couldn’t.  I didn’t dare.  I was helpless.  I told her to go.  She didn’t say anything more, but there was a determined look in her eyes when she kissed me as I left for the office.  I spent a miserable day.  More than once I made up my mind to go home, but pride stopped me.  I really didn’t think she meant what she said.  When I got back to the house in the afternoon she had left for New York.