Дедушка

   Дафна Бреттон бесцеремонно бросила колледж. Она не знала своего отца и не любила его настолько, чтобы дать ему прозвище. Но в тот знаменательный день, о котором идет речь, когда она ворвалась в кабинет незнакомого ей родителя в незнакомой комнате в незнакомом городе и выложила ему на заваленный книгами стол печальную новость, прозвище сорвалось с ее суровых губ, словно это была единственная фраза, которую она могла произнести.

"Старина! - воскликнула она. - Меня исключили из колледжа!"

Из-под нелепой копны белоснежных волос ее
молодой отец поднял свое необычайно молодое лицо с гримасой
, похожей на рычание испуганного животного.

«почему?— Почему Дафна? - выдохнул он. «что?»…
Daphne Bretton's peremptory departure from college she had
neither known nor liked her father well enough to distinguish
him with a nick name. But on that momentous day in question,
when blurting into the problematical presence of an unfamiliar
parent in an unfamiliar room in an unfamiliar city she flung her
unhappy news across his book-cluttered desk, the appellation
slipped from her stark lips as though it were the only fluid
phrase in a wooden-throated world.

"Old-Dad!" she said, "I have been expelled from college!"

From under the incongruous thatch of his snow-white hair her
young father lifted his extraordinarily young face with a snarl
like the snarl of a startled animal.

"Why?—Why Daphne!" he gasped. "What?"

With her small gloved hand fumbling desperately at the great
2
muffly collar of her coat the young girl repeated her statement.

"I—I have been expelled from college!" she said.

"Yes, but Daphne!—What for?" demanded her father. His own face
was suddenly as white as hers, his lips as stark. "What for?" he
persisted.

Twice the young girl's lips opened and shut in an utter agony of
inarticulation. Then quite sharply the blonde head lifted, the
shoulders squared, and the whole slender, quivering little body
braced itself to meet the traditional blow of the traditional
Avenger.

"For—for having a boy in my room—at night," said the girl.

Before the dumb, abject misery in the young blue eyes that
lifted so heavily to his, a grin like the painted grin on a sick
clown's face shot suddenly across the father's mobile mouth.