you?" he asked trenchantly.

Gravely for a moment the girl sat studying her father's weather-beaten
features, the thin hair, the pale, shrewd eyes, the gaunt cheeks, the
indomitable old-young mouth. Then a little shy smile flickered across
her face and was gone again.

"As a parent, dear," she drawled, "I love you to distraction! But as a
daily companion?" Vaguely her eyebrows lifted. "As a real playmate?"
Against the starch-white of her pillows the sudden flutter of her
small brown throat showed with almost startling distinctness. "But as
a real playmate," she persisted evenly, "you are so--intelligent--and
you travel so fast--it tires me."

"Whom do you like?" asked her father sharply.

The girl's eyes were suddenly sullen again--bored, distrait,
inestimably dreary. "That's the whole trouble," she said. "You've
never given me time--to like anybody."

"Oh, but--Eve," pleaded her father. Awkward as any schoolboy, he sat
there, fuming and twisting before this absurd little bunch of nerve
and nerves that he himself had begotten. "Oh, but Eve," he deprecated
helplessly, "it's the deuce of a job for a--for a man to be left all
alone in the world with a--with a daughter! Really it is!"

Already the sweat had started on his forehead, and across one cheek
the old gray fretwork of wrinkles began to shadow suddenly. "I've
done my best!" he pleaded. "I swear I have! Only I've never known how!
With a mother, now," he stammered, "with a wife, with a sister, with
your best friend's sister, you know just what to do! It's a definite
relation! Prescribed by a definite emotion! But a daughter? Oh, ye
gods! Your whole sexual angle of vision changed! A creature neither
fish, flesh, nor fowl! Non-superior, non-contemporaneous,
non-subservient! Just a lady! A strange lady! Yes, that's exactly it,
Eve--a strange lady--growing eternally just a little bit more
strange--just a little bit more remote--every minute of her life! Yet
it's so--damned intimate all the time!" he blurted out passionately.
"All the time she's rowing you about your manners and your morals, all
the time she's laying down the law to you about the tariff or the
turnips, you're remembering--how you used to--scrub her--in her first
little blue-lined tin bath-tub!"

Once again the flickering smile flared up in little Eve Edgarton's
eyes and was gone again. A trifle self-consciously she burrowed back
into her pillows. When she spoke her voice was scarcely audible. "Oh,