Patricia by Grace Livingston Hill

Author:Grace Livingston Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Barbour Publishing Inc
Published: 2015-07-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

And then the summer came and the Prentisses talked about going to the seashore. They talked about getting a cottage on the beach, and Mr. Prentiss said that maybe he could arrange to come down every evening and they would have a real time together.

“Lovely!” said Mrs. Prentiss. “Get a good big cottage so we can have guests. I want to have the Bellinghams down. It’s high time I repaid some of the nice invitations I have had from them. Mrs. Bellingham has taken me five times to the theater and twice to the symphony concerts!”

There was a dead silence in the room for a minute, and a grayness seemed suddenly to descend upon Patricia’s face. Her father saw it and looked up quickly.

“That settles it!” he said firmly. “If that female dreadnought is in danger of coming, nothing doing! Pat and I’ll stay at home and take our vacation together.”

“Now, Mr. Prentiss!” protested his wife. “Why do you have to be so impossible! Don’t you understand that you have a young daughter growing up and you’ve got to think about that? Patricia must have some nice boyfriends or she won’t have a good time at all. She’ll want to go sailing and swimming and fishing, and it will be so nice and safe to have a boy who is well mannered to take care of her. You might get a cottage that has a tennis court, too, perhaps, and not too far from a country club with a good golf course, you know. Then everybody could have a good time and we could feel perfectly safe about our child.”

“Not on your life!” said Father Prentiss with a quick look at the ghastly horror in his daughter’s eyes. “I don’t want any young chump like that Thorny lying around in the way all summer, and I don’t believe Pat does either. Do you, girl?”

The young girl lifted expressive eyes to her father’s.

“Mother knows I don’t want him around, Daddy,” she said in a low tone.

“There!” said the mother indignantly. “Now I hope you see, Mr. Prentiss, just what you have done to your daughter, making her disagreeable and self-conscious and unable to have any friendships with nice boys. If she ever gets free from that dreadful school, I shall have a pretty time training her for her social life.”

“I don’t see that she needs any training,” said her father, with a cheering smile and a wink. “I think she’s a pretty nice kind of a girl now, myself.”

“Yes, that’s just about as much as you know about social life,” said his wife. “You never had any yourself, you know.”

“Well, I’ve managed to rub along fairly well and get enough money to support you in ordinary comfort and a little over. But I draw the line at those Bellinghams. If you like them, all right. Go and see them all you want to, but don’t ring Pat and me in on them, that’s all I ask. And if you can’t

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