I know I'm funny," she admitted conscientiously.

"You're not funny!" snapped her father.

"Yes, I am," whispered the girl.

"No, you're not!" reasserted her father with increasing vehemence.
"You're not! It's I who am funny! It's I who--" In a chaos of emotion
he slid along the edge of the bed and clasped her in his arms. Just
for an instant his wet cheek grazed hers, then: "All the same, you
know," he insisted awkwardly, "I hate this place!"

Surprisingly little Eve Edgarton reached up and kissed him full on the
mouth. They were both very much embarrassed.

"Why--why, Eve!" stammered her father. "Why, my little--little girl!
Why, you haven't kissed me--before--since you were a baby!"

"Yes, I have!" nodded little Eve Edgarton.

"No, you haven't!" snapped her father.

"Yes, I have!" insisted Eve.

Tighter and tighter their arms clasped round each other. "You're all
I've got," faltered the man brokenly.

"You're all I've ever had," whispered little Eve Edgarton.

Silently for a moment each according to his thoughts sat staring off
into far places. Then without any warning whatsoever, the man reached
out suddenly and tipped his daughter's face up abruptly into the
light.

"Eve!" he demanded. "Surely you're not blaming me any in your heart
because I want to see you safely married and settled with--with John
Ellbertson?"

Vaguely, like a child repeating a dimly understood lesson, little Eve
Edgarton repeated the phrases after him. "Oh, no, Father," she said,
"I surely am not blaming you--in my heart--for wanting to see me
married and settled with--John Ellbertson. Good old John Ellbertson,"
she corrected painstakingly.

With his hand still holding her little chin like a vise, the man's
eyes narrowed to his further probing. "Eve," he frowned, "I'm not as
well as I used to be! I've got pains in my arms! And they're not good
pains! I shall live to be a thousand! But I--I might not! It's
a--rotten world, Eve," he brooded, "and quite unnecessarily
crowded--it seems to me--with essentially rotten people. Toward the
starving and the crippled and the hideously distorted, the world,
having no envy of them, shows always an amazing mercy; and Beauty,
whatever its sorrows, can always retreat to the thick protecting wall
of its own conceit. But as for the rest of us?" he grinned with a
sudden convulsive twist of the eyebrow, "God help the unduly
prosperous--and the merely plain! From the former--always, Envy, like
a