Nedda in love! He felt blank and ashy.

That special feeling of owning her more than any one else, which was so warming and delightful, so really precious--it would be gone! What right had she to take it from him, thus, without warning! Then he remembered how odious he had always said the elderly were, to spoke the wheels of youth, and managed to murmur: "Good luck to you, my pretty!" He said it, conscious that a father ought to be saying: 'You're much too young, and he's your cousin!' But what a father ought to say appeared to him just then both sensible and ridiculous.

Nedda rubbed her cheek against his hand.
"It won't make any difference, Dad, I promise you!" And Felix thought: 'Not to you, only to me!' But he said: "Not a scrap, my love! What WERE you crying about ?" "About the world; it seems so heartless." And she told him about the water that had run along the nose of the old four-wheeler man.
But while he seemed to listen, Felix thought: 'I wish to God I were made of leather; then I shouldn't feel as if I'd lost the warmth inside me.
I mustn't let her see.

Fathers ARE queer--I always suspected that.

There goes my work for a good week!' Then he answered: "No, my dear, the world is not heartless; it's only arranged according to certain necessary contraries: No pain, no pleasure; no dark, no light, and the rest of it.