Free Earth and High Heaven by Gwethalyn Graham Page A

let her pass.
    â€œYou’d better let me pay for your dinner and then I’ll be sure you won’t forget to go without it.”
    He took a bill from his pocket and held it out to her but she did not take it, and he asked, “What time do you think you’ll be back?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œIs something the matter?”
    Her eyes moved up to his face, then down again, and said, “Let me go please, Charles. I’m late enough already.”
    It was the first time that he could remember Erica ever having gone off without saying what was on her mind and for a while he had been thoroughly upset. He was sensitive to the moods of everyone with whom he lived or worked, particularly where his wife and Erica were concerned, and he had watched his daughter disappear down the long flight of steps which led from their street to the one below, still holding the two-dollar bill in his hand and wondering if he had been right to act on his hunch about the fellow, after all.
    Since then, however, he had had four hours in which to think it over, four hours during which he had, in fact, found it impossible to think about anything else. He had intended to spend the evening rearranging and listing fifty or sixty miscellaneous records which were at present scattered through half a dozen big albums so that he could never find anything without searching for it. He had got out all the records and grouped them, according to the composer, on the big, flat-topped desk which he had had brought up from his office for just this sort of thing, and had then lost interest. The listing would have to wait. Having returned the records to their albums in even worse disorder than they had been in to start with, he had then tried to read for a while, and had finally ended up by simply sitting, waiting to hear the front door open and the sound of Erica’s footsteps in the hall below.
    In the meantime, he had come to certain conclusions. The fact that Erica could be so worried by his behaviour toward a complete stranger that she would first go up to her room and cry, and then refuse even to tell him where she was going to have her dinner or so much as thank him for having offered to pay for it, was clear proof that his hunch had been right. Besides that, even if it had been entirely groundless, what he did in his own house was his own business, and it was not up to Erica either to regard his unwillingness to meet René’s singularly ill-chosen friend as an injury to herself, or to take it out on him by refusing to be even civil.
    He said, “Whatever you want to talk about can wait till the morning. You’d better go to bed.”
    Instead of going to bed, she left the door and went over to the windows, asking with her back to him, “Why did you do it, Charles?”
    She heard him knocking his pipe against the brass ashtray standing beside his chair and finally his voice saying, “If you’ll think back to what I said when you first told me that René had turned up with some Jewish lawyer ...”
    â€œHis name is Marc Reiser.” The apple tree in the garden next door had turned to mist and silver; it looked like a ghost in the moonlight. “Anyhow, that isn’t enough to explain it.”
    â€œI don’t think I’m called upon to give explanations.”
    Erica swung around, so that she was facing him. She was still inwardly raging; like her father, she had had four hours in which to think over his behaviour at the foot of the stairs, but she had come to somewhat different conclusions. Still managing to keep her voice fairly level, however, she said, “It’s no use talking like that to me, Charles. It isn’t going to work. I’ve been going around in circles all evening trying to find some way of straightening this thing out. So far as Marc’s concerned, there doesn’t seem to be any — nothing you or I can say will make the slightest difference,