She was waited upon at the popular counter by Miss Whirtle herself, whom Cally remembered by figure if not by name; and she was so extremely agreeable and mollifying in her manner that the Saleslady’s arrogance thawed away, and they were soon discussing questions of neck-sizes and sleeve-lengths in the friendliest intimacy.  There were collars and neckties purchased, too,—­these items Cally added on her own account, being in the vein of making presents to people to-day,—­and here Miss Whirtle’s taste was invaluable in assisting one to decide which were the nobby shapes and swell patterns and which the contrary.  The robust one patted her transformation many times at Miss Heth, invited her at parting to call again; and later on—­that night, it was—­reported the whole conversation in detail in the Garland dining-room, imparting, we need not doubt, her own witty flavor to it all.

In Baird & Himmel’s Cally met several other acquaintances, and finally Evey McVey, who was delighted to see her out again, but seemed to be examining her rather curiously, doubtless with reference to Hugo and what had happened in that quarter.  Evey herself complained of being tired; so Cally drove her second-best friend to the McVey residence in the car, but pleaded duties at home against getting out for a little visit.

And then, bowling homeward in the brisk airs, she could return to her own thoughts again, which, as by the rubbing of an Aladdin’s lamp, had suddenly become so happy and so absorbing.  Later, she must think about mamma, and with what time and solaces she could close that breach.  But in these hours her thought was all for her father, whom she seemed just to be beginning to understand for the first time in her life....

Now all the imaginative dreads and nightmare terrors were faded away, and she felt beneath her feet the solid sanity of Hugo’s self.  She had seen the Works on an exceptionally bad day; she had gone there, overdrawn and ignorant, looking for horrors; what she had actually seen and felt had been mysteriously intensified a hundredfold by her violent encounter with Colonel Dalhousie.  For all that she knew, to this very moment, the Works might be, indeed (as the beautifully tactful girl Corinne had said), the best place to work in town.

But what Cally was thinking now was that, in sitting in judgment on her father, she had blindly judged him as if he were a free man—­she, of all people, who had felt so poignantly the imprisoning powers of a groove.  Now it appeared, as by a sudden light upon him, that papa had always been clamped fast in a groove of his own, exactly as she had been; a groove fixed for him by his place in society, by the way other men ran their cheroot factories,—­for, of course, papa must do as his competitors did, or be crowded out, and the hardest-driving, meanest man set the pace for the kind ones, like papa,—­and last and chiefly by the extravagances of a wife and daughter who always cried “give, give,” and didn’t care at all where the gifts came from.  How could papa possibly be free with two costly women on his back all the time?...  Strange that she hadn’t grasped all this clearly, the minute she had recognized herself as a horse-leech’s daughter....