"The Hutchinsons had a hired butler and gold spoons, and they didn't
think I was the dust beneath their feet. I don't know what to say to
her. I said ain't, and I wasn't refined, and I'll only just be a
disgrace to you. I'd rather go back to Cape Cod, and go out to work,
and stand Albertina and everything."

"If you think it's the square thing to do," David said slowly, "you
may go, Eleanor. I'll take you to New York to-morrow and get one of
the girls to take you to Colhassett. Of course, if you do that it will
put me in rather an awkward position. The others have all had you for
two months and made good on the proposition. I shall have to admit
that I couldn't even keep you with me twenty-four hours. Peter and
Jimmie got along all right, but I couldn't handle you at all. As a
cooperative parent, I'm such a failure that the whole experiment goes
to pieces through me."

"Not you--her."

"Well, it's the same thing,--you couldn't stand the surroundings I
brought you to. You couldn't even be polite to my mother for my
sake."

"I--never thought of that, Uncle David."

"Think of it now for a few minutes, won't you, Eleanor?"

The rain was beginning to lash the windows, and to sweep the lawn in
long slant strokes. The little girl held up her face as if it could
beat through the panes on it.

"I thought," she said slowly, "that after Albertina I wouldn't _take_
anything from anybody. Uncle Peter says that I'm just as good as
anybody, even if I have been out to work. He said that all I had to do
was just to stand up to people."

"There are a good many different ways of standing up to people,
Eleanor. Be sure you've got the right way and then go ahead."

"I guess I ought to have been politer," Eleanor said slowly. "I ought
to have thought that she was your own mother. You couldn't help the
way she acted, o' course."

"The way you acted is the point, Eleanor."

Eleanor reflected.

"I'll act different if you want me to, Uncle David," she said, "and I
won't go and leave you."

"That's my brave girl. I don't think that I altogether cover myself
with glory in an interview with my mother," he added. "It isn't the
thing that I'm best at, I admit."

"You did pretty good," Eleanor consoled him. "I guess she makes you
kind of bashful the way she does me," from which David gathered with
an odd sense of shock that Eleanor felt there was something to
criticize in his conduct, if she had permitted herself to look for
it.