Candy Read Free Page B

clocklike regularity.
    “Well,” said Candy, coming forward to give him a kiss on the forehead, which he received with a grunt. “An A-plus on my last philosophy thesis! From Professor Mephesto! He never gives more than one for the whole class! Isn’t it wonderful?”
    Mr. Christian’s questions were, of course, rhetorical, but so was his interest, so he could sustain the line of them easily enough.
    “Oh?” he said, in slightly rising inflection, continuing to look at his paper, though with a frown which showed he was just scanning, and was, certainly, listening to his daughter too, “what was the subject of the thesis?”
    “‘Contemporary Human Love,’” said Candy, putting her things away.
    Mr. Christian shook his paper, clearing his throat. “That sounds practical,” he said. He tried to force a little laugh to show that philosophy courses weren’t serious, but he was too basically ill-tempered to manage it, so he shook his paper again, clearing his throat and frowning a bit more darkly than before.
    Candy ignored it; she was determined to salvage something of her triumph, and she wasn’t going to let him spoil it.
    “And—” she said, coming over to sit down near him, “I was invited to a conference with Professor Mephesto! To ‘have a drop.’”
    The name of Professor Mephesto had come up previously, and Mr. Christian loathed it with the most simple-minded unrestrained jealousy. He took his pipe and began to empty it vigorously against the nearest ashtray. “What did he want?” he asked, in frank contempt. “Oh, Daddy! Really! It’s the greatest honor to be invited to Professor Mephesto’s office, and have a drop! I’ve told you that a dozen times! Good Grief!”
    “Have-a-drop-of-what?” asked Mr. Christian slowly, feigning the patience of a saint.
    “Of sherry, of course! I told you that a hundred times!”
    “Sherry wine?” asked her father, making his frown one great black hole.
    “No, sherry banana-split! Silly! Of course, sherry wine! He has a glass of sherry and a bit of cheese in the afternoon—some people prefer tea, but others find tea lacking. Whereas sherry has body and edge, and tea is so messy at best, don’t you . . . well, Good Grief, I mean it’s a taste he acquired in the best possible circles!”
    “And he gives this wine to students?” That was the big point with Mr. Christian.
    “Oh, Daddy!”
    Candy got up and walked over to the window. Where she had begun by feeling just slightly ambiguous about her conference with Mephesto, now she felt in it the strength and rightness of the world itself.
    Mr. Christian puffed on his pipe.
    “I simply want to know—”
    “I don’t wish to discuss it,” said Candy, primly.
    What was going on in her father’s mind, behind that impossibly dark brow, it is difficult to convey in full. Certainly he was furious with her, strove to dominate her, would argue, sulk and yet not raise a hand against her. Did he know he was playing a losing game? And is it, moreover, too much to believe that he enjoyed, not simply losing the game, but being a bad loser as well? In any event, he immediately lunged upon another very sore point between them.
    “Then perhaps you will discuss this,” he said, tight-lipped. “Mrs. Harris said you were talking to Emmanuel again yesterday.”
    Emmanuel was the Mexican boy who came to mow the lawn. Mr. Christian had strictly forbidden Candy to talk to him as she had shown, on a number of occasions, an inclination to do. Mr. Christian had said that he, personally, was broad-minded enough not to mind, but that it “looked funny” to the neighbors. He somehow associated the event with Professor Mephesto. But for Candy this was the last straw. “And I certainly won’t discuss that!” she said. “I’m so ashamed of you about that that I could die. Why, if Professor Mephesto knew that you had said that, I would never have been invited to his office! Not in a million years!”
    Her father felt a