There is
something beneath their cold faces that you can't get at.
CHAPTER XI
Gedge bitterly upbraided his daughter, both for her desertion of
his business and her criminal folly in abandoning it so as to help
mend the shattered bodies of fools and knaves who, by joining the
forces of militarism, had betrayed the Sacred Cause of the
International Solidarity of Labour. His first ground for complaint
was scarcely tenable; with his dwindling business the post of
clerk had dwindled into a sinecure. To sit all day at the receipt
of imaginary custom is not a part fitted for a sane and healthy
young human being. Still, from Gedge's point of view her defection
was a grievance; but that she could throw in her lot openly with
the powers of darkness was nothing less than an outrage.
I suppose, in a kind of crabbed way, the crabbed fellow was fond
of Phyllis. She was pretty. She had dainty tricks of dress. She
flitted, an agreeable vision, about his house. He liked to hear
her play the piano, not because he had any ear for music, but
because it tickled his vanity to reflect that he, the agricultural
labourer's son and apprentice to a village carpenter, was the
possessor both of a Broadway Grand and of a daughter who, entirely
through his efforts, had learned to play on it.
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