Free Daphne Deane by Grace Livingston Hill Page B

that."
    "No, I know you didn't, but I know it must be so. Any man who can stand out against you and do something you don't want done is a winner."
    Anne lifted her proud head nonchalantly.
    "He's not a winner with me unless I choose to let him be!" she stated, with much more assurance than she felt. "I'm not sure I want to take the trouble to bother with him. I'm frightfully angry at him."
    "What's the cause?"
    "Oh, he undertook to tell me what to wear at the fashion show! Or rather what not to wear!"
    "He did? Well he has more courage than I'd have. What is he, anyway? A man-dressmaker? Or one of these long-haired artists that want to combine mud and garbage and call them artistic."
    "Oh, no, nothing like that!" said the girl. "He's just old-fashioned. Didn't want me to go out in public in a stylish bathing suit. He'd be perfectly satisfied, I suppose, if I'd staged a long-sleeved high-necked black dress with a skirt and stockings for swimming."
    Her father looked at her quizzically.
    "Ummm! I'm not so sure he isn't right after all. It makes me hot under the collar sometimes to see you cutting around with nothing on but a scrap like a skimpy pocket handkerchief. It wasn't the way your mother would have dressed you!"
    "Oh, Dad! You're hopeless! My mother would of course have dressed me as other girls are dressed."
    "I'm not so sure!" sighed the unscrupulous man of the world. "Your mother was an unusual woman."
    "Well, I wouldn't have stood for it if she had tried to put me into anything weird."
    "I've a notion you would, Babe! I think you would have grown up with a few different ideas, if she had lived. And I guess I'd have been different, too! I guess I've been a mighty poor hand to raise a girl-child! All I knew was to make money and hire other people to do the raising."
    "Heavens, Dad! Don't call me Babe! And why the sob stuff? You don't feel sick or anything, do you? I thought you came up here to help me in my difficulties, but instead you seem to have taken the other side."
    "Oh, no!" said the man with a sigh and a settling of his heavy frame deeper into the big chair. "I was just talking. But go on with your tale. What's the story? Why didn't the young man turn up at the office today as you promised me last night he would do?"
    "I told you. We had a fight. He got angry, and I couldn't get anywhere with anything else after that."
    "You mean, you didn't tell him?"
    "Oh, I told him, all right! But I might as well have told it to a stone wall for all the impression it made."
    "You mean, he didn't answer you at all?"
    "Oh, he answered me. He answered me plenty!"
    "What did he say? Wasn't he grateful that I was willing to let him in on some deep stuff and put him on Easy Street?"
    "I should say not! Anything but! He as much as told me that such get-rich-quick schemes weren't honest!"
    "What?"
    "Well, not in so many words. But he gave the effect all right, and then he said he was an architect. I gathered that he considered himself foreordained from all eternity to be an architect and that he would be committing sacrilege to be anything else."
    The father's face was a study. He was divided between indignation and a kind of admiration for the young man who had the audacity to take such a stand.
    "Well, how did he think an architect was going to support you in the manner to which you are accustomed?"
    "I put that idea across to him," said Anne meditatively, "and he held his proud head high and went off!"
    "Perhaps he intended to allow me to continue to have that privilege." The father gave a brief derisive grin. "Like several others of your brilliant followers."
    "Oh, no!" said Anne sharply. "Nothing of that sort. In fact, he made it very plain to me that anybody who married him would live on what he could make or not live at all!"
    "I see!" said the father. "One of those proud-but-poor-and-intends-to-stay-so! Well, and so you didn't actually tell him at all that I was willing to meet him this morning, that it was in the nature of