"I am what I have always been, and it is not my fault that I am the daughter of M.Jean Jacques Barbille! I have never done anything which was not good enough for the Manor Cartier." She held her head firmly as she said it.
Now Jean Jacques flushed, and he did hesitate in his reply.

He hated irony in anyone else, though he loved it in himself, when heaven gave him inspiration thereto.

He was in a state of tension, and was ready to break out, to be a force let loose--that is the way he would have expressed it; and he was faced by a new spirit in his daughter which would surely spring the mine, unless he secured peace by strategy.

He had sense enough to feel the danger.
He did not see, however, any course for diplomacy here, for she had given him his cue in her last words.

As a pure logician he was bound to take it, though it might lead to drama of a kind painful to them both.
"It is not good enough for the Manor Cartier that you go falling in love with a nobody from nowhere," he responded.
"I am not falling in love," she rejoined.
"What did you mean, then, by looking at him as you did; by whispering together; by letting him hold your hand when he left, and him looking at you as though he'd eat you up--without sugar!" "I said I was not falling in love," she persisted, quietly, but with characteristic boldness.