A smile spread itself over John Webster's face and it was then he went to sit on the floor at his daughter's feet and tell her the rest of the story of his married life. There was after all a kind of wicked satisfaction to be got out of his situation. As for his daughter, well, it was a fact too, that nature had made the connection between them quite inevitable. He might throw into his daughter's lap the new aspect of life that had come to him and then, did she choose to reject it, that would be a matter for her to decide. People would not blame her. "Poor girl," they would say, "what a shame she should have had such a man for a father." On the other hand and if after hearing all he had to say she decided to run a little more swiftly through life, to open her arms to it, in a way of speaking, what he had done would be a help. There was Natalie whose old mother had made herself a great nuisance by getting drunk and shouting so that all the neighbours could hear and calling her hard-working daughters whores. It was perhaps absurd to think that such a mother might be giving her daughters a better chance in life than a quite respectable mother could possibly have given them and still, in a world upset, turned upside down as it were, that might be quite true too.

At any rate there was a quiet sureness in Natalie that was, even in his moments of doubt, amazingly quieting and healing to himself. "I love her and I accept her. If her old mother, by letting go of herself and shouting in the streets in a kind of drunken splendour of abandonment, has made a clear way in which Natalie may walk, all hail to her too," he thought, smiling at his own thoughts.

He sat at his daughter's feet talking quietly and as he talked something within her became more quiet. She listened with constantly growing interest, looking down at him occasionally. He sat very close to her and occasionally leaned over a little and laid his cheek against her leg. "The devil. He was quite apparently making love to her too." She did not think such a thought definitely. A subtle feeling of confidence and sureness went out of him into her. He began the tale of his marriage again.

On the evening of his youth, when his friend and his friend's mother and sister had come into the presence of himself and the woman he was to marry, he had suddenly been overcome by the same thing that afterward left so permanent a scar on her. Shame swept over him.

Well what was he to do? How was he to explain this second running into that room and into the presence of the naked woman? It was a matter that could not be explained. A mood of desperation swept over him and he ran past the people at the door and down the hallway, this time getting into the room to which he had been assigned.