"Well, then, you needn't!" said Alfred, rising.
"Nobody will ask you again." "Oh yes they will,"
urged Julia, glancing meaningly from one to the other.
All her life, as it seemed, she had been accustomed to mediate
between these two unpliable and stubborn temperaments.
From her earliest childhood she had understood, somehow,
that there was a Dabney habit of mind, which was by
comparison soft and if not yielding, then politic:
and set over against it there was a Thorpe temper full
of gnarled and twisted hardnesses, and tenacious as death.
In the days of her grandfather Thorpe, whom she remembered
with an alarmed distinctness, there had existed a kind
of tacit idea that his name alone accounted for and
justified the most persistent and stormy bad temper.
That old man with the scowling brows bullied everybody,
suspected everybody, apparently disliked everybody,
vehemently demanded his own will of everybody--and it was
all to be explained, seemingly, by the fact that he was a Thorpe.
After his disappearance from the scene--unlamented, to the best
of Julia's juvenile perceptions--there had been relatively
peaceful times in the book-shop and the home overhead,
yet there had existed always a recognized line of demarcation
running through the household. Julia and her father--a small,
hollow-chested, round-shouldered young man, with a pale,
anxious face and ingratiating manner, who had entered
the shop as an assistant, and remained as a son-in-law,
and was now the thinnest of unsubstantial memories--Julia
and this father had stood upon one side of this impalpable
line as Dabneys, otherwise as meek and tractable persons,
who would not expect to have their own way.
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