In time, as weeks and months rolled on, the blow, so unendurable at
first, so crushing and terrible, softened, as such things will, and a
busy world again engrossed a busy man. But the intimacy between father
and daughter remained, and continued unimpaired. Indeed, it grew even
closer, for now laughter came into it, and gay bubbling little
confidences, and a delightful hour before bedtime, full of eagerness and
zest. Mr. Ladd, cigar in mouth, and his keen handsome face as
deferential as any courtier’s, listened to the interminable doings of
Satty and Nelly and Jessie, with an enjoyment that never seemed to tire.

He, too, had his budget of the day, which, often begun whimsically, not
seldom ended in a serious exposition of his difficulties and problems.
It amused him to state such complexities in simple language; to bring
them down, by some homely metaphor, to the comprehension of this
adorable little coquette, who tried with so many childish arts to dazzle
and ensnare him. Even at thirteen she was learning the value of drawing
out a man about himself; she was quite willing to understand the
Interstate Commerce Law, and become pink and indignant over a new
classification of “Coal at the pit’s mouth”–if it meant her father
would hold her a little tighter, and give her one of those sudden
glances of approval.

Such intercourse with a shrewd, strong, brilliant mind–to a child
naturally precocious and adaptive–could not fail to have far-reaching
consequences on her development. She caught something of her father’s
independence; of his lofty and yet indulgent outlook on a universe made
up so largely of fools and knaves; learned the greatest and rarest of
all imaginative processes–to put oneself in the other fellow’s shoes.
When Joe Howard turned traitor at the state legislature, and sold out
the K. B. and O. on the new mileage bill, her wrath at his duplicity
rose to fever. “Well, there’s his side to it,” said Mr. Ladd, with
unexpected serenity. “He hasn’t a cent; he’s mortgaged up to the ears;
and has a sick daughter dying of consumption. He’s a well-meaning man,
and I suppose would be honest if he could. But if I were in his place,
and your life was at stake, and the doctor ordered you to some
ten-dollar-a-minute place in Colorado or somewhere, I guess I’d sell out
the K. B. and O. too!”

And for that he got a hug that nearly choked him.

“Money and love, my lamb,” he said to her once, “those are the wheels
the old wagon runs on. Miss Simpkins will fluff you up with a whole lot
of fancy fixings–but I tell you, it boils right down to that.”

“Papa,” she asked him on another occasion, with round wondering eyes,
“if it’s all like that, why are you honorable and noble and splendid?”

“I don’t know,” he answered, smiling. “I guess it’s pride more than
anything else. Theoretically the man with the fewest scruples gets
farthest in the race; but thank the Lord, most of us are handicapped
with some good qualities that stick to us like poor relations.”

“But Miss Simpkins says that anybody who is bad gets punished for it
sooner or later. She says that was why her brother-in-law’s house
burned down; because he was so uncharitable.”

“It may be so with the people Miss Simpkins is acquainted with,” said
Mr. Ladd, “but it doesn’t hold in the railroad business, nor anywhere
else that I have seen, and I can’t help thinking she’s a trifle more
hopeful than the traffic can bear!”

This philosophy, so picturesquely expressed, so genial, so amiably
cynical, was not perhaps the best training for an unusually
impressionable mind. Miss Simpkins learned to dread Phyllis’ preface:
“But Papa says–” What Papa said was often a bombshell that blew shams
to pieces; tore down the pretty pink scenery of conventional illusions;
and drove cobble-stones through the gauze that separated Miss Simpkins
and her kind from the real world beyond. It was a harsh process, and
bad for gauze.

At first, not knowing how else to maintain a fairly large establishment,
Mr. Ladd had sought the services of a “managing housekeeper.” But the
trouble with her–or rather with them, for he had a succession–was that
the “managing” was considerably overdone. They were discharged, the one
after the other, without having “managed” to achieve their one consuming
ambition, which was to capture the rich widower, and lead him to the
altar. After a while, growing weary of being hunted, and altogether at
his wits’ end, he invited his unmarried sister, Henrietta Ladd, to take
the foot of his table, and a place at his hearth.

She was a thin, plain, elderly woman, with a very low voice and a
deceptive appearance of meekness. The casual guest at Mr. Ladd’s board
might have taken her for a silent saint, who, unwillingly sojourning in
this vale of tears, was waiting with ladylike impatience for a heavenly
crown. In some ways this description would have fitted Aunt Henrietta
well enough, though it took no account of a perverse and interfering
nature that was more than trying to live with. The silent saint
attempted to rule her brother and her niece with a rod of iron, and so
far succeeded that her two years “tenure of the gubernatorial chair” (as
Mr. Ladd bitterly called it), was fraught with quarrels and unhappiness.
Her tyranny, like all tyrannies, ended in a revolution. Mr. Ladd
brought his “unmarried misery”–also his own phrase–to a sharp
conclusion, and Henrietta departed with a large check and a still larger
ill-will.

“Phyllis,” he said, “I guess we’ll just have to rustle along by our poor
little selves. The people who take charge of us seem to take charge too
hard. They mean well, but why should they stamp on us?–Yes, let’s try
it ourselves.”

And Phyllis, not quite fifteen years old, became the acknowledged
mistress of the big house.