While Jennie was reading this, Edith Collingham, at breakfast at Marillo Park, was springing a question on her father. She sprang it at breakfast because it was the only time she was sure of seeing him alone.
"Father, how far are children obliged to marry or not to marry in deference to their parents' wishes, and how far have fathers and mothers the right to interfere?"
Dauphin, who was on his haunches near his master's knee, removed himself to a midway position between the two ends of the table, as if he felt that in the struggle he perceived to be coming he couldn't throw his influence with either side. Through the open window Max could be seen in perpetual motion on the lawn, yet pausing every two minutes to look wistfully down the avenue in the hope of some loved approach.
Without answering at once, Collingham tapped an egg with a spoon. The broaching of so personal a question between one of his children and himself was something new. It had been an established rule in the household that, however free the intercourse between the boy and the girl and their mother, the approach to their father was always indirect. Junia had made it her lifelong part to explain the children to their father and the father to his children, but rarely to give them a chance of explaining themselves to each other. Collingham had acquiesced in this for the reason that the duties of a parent were not those for which he felt himself, in his own phrase, specially "cut out."
The duties for which he did feel himself cut out were those that had to do with the investment of money. On this ground, he spoke with authority; he was original, intuitive, inspired. When it came to a flair for the stock which was selling to-day at fifty and which to-morrow would be worth five hundred, he belonged to the _illuminati_. This being the highest use of intelligence known to man, he felt it his duty to specialize in it to the exclusion of everything else.
As already hinted, there were two Collinghams. There was the natural man, a kindly, generous fellow who would never have made a big position in the world; and there was the other Collingham, standardized to the accepted, forceful, American-business-man pattern, and who, now that he was sixty-odd, was the Collingham who mainly had the upper hand.