All the way home in the surrey Colonel Webb was silent and so were they—herself and Mrs. Webb. Josephina was singing some song to herself. By this time Doris knew that the colonel was turning every event of the day over and over in his unstable brain. Perhaps it was cunning or perhaps merely demented. Merely. Her mouth was dry and her hands jerked with involuntary movements in the fear somebody had seen her and Simon walking together among the pecan trees and the ravens floating above, spying. In hopeless tones Mrs. Webb tried to talk about the afternoon at San Pedro Springs, very refined, how lovely it was, how everyone had admired Doris’s playing and how Mr. Duerler was certainly, certainly impressed. She was met with an ominous silence.

The colonel wanted a tirade to please the devil that possessed him and so he would have it. The Webb house was shut up with closed windows and lamps turned low. He gathered them all in the long parlor for a lecture on decorum, on loyalty, on respect. He strode back and forth. He never stopped, even when he lifted up a short thick glass of amber whiskey, sipped at it, and returned to his obsessive accusations.

“Josephina has told me many things, Doris, many interesting things about your behavior. She has been embarrassed to be seen with you. She is humiliated by your conduct.” He turned a cold face to her. Mrs. Webb tossed her head in a theatrical gesture of contempt. Josephina twirled her braid over her shoulder and wound the tail of it around her finger and stared at Doris with wide blank eyes.

Doris sat in confused silence. She was seated on a low stool with her skirts crumpled around her. They were in the parlor off the long room, that room which was for receptions, for display, and nearly empty because the Webbs did not have enough furniture for it, so it rang with echoes like a barn. This was the most beautiful house Doris had ever lived in, but she would have given every cent she had and the hair on her head besides to get out of it and be free of the Webbs, who were all worse than Lord Dennys himself for haughtiness and drink.

“She says you have been sneaking out at night to go to the Mexican fandangos in the houses along Camaron Street, you have been dancing with the Mexican men in the most abandoned ways.”

Doris’s mouth dropped open. She said, “Excuse me?”

“Yes, yes.” He smiled. It was a grim smile. “She has told me that you go about with some traveling musician whose name nobody seems to know, you sneak off to commit indiscretions in the woods. You are seen with Lieutenant Whittaker talking and chatting in Military Plaza when you go to the market with Mercedes. You lay your hand on his arm, you go into saloons with him. That you drink whiskey there and come out in an embarrassing condition. This is what you are doing with that money you earn. From now on, you will turn your earnings over to me.”

Josephina stared off into the distance of the hallway and shrugged. And then she turned and smirked at Doris Dillon of Ireland, holding in her child’s heart a sordid treasury of secret thoughts.

Doris sat in a stunned and empty silence for a long moment. “You can’t believe that.”

“Not believe my own daughter?”

He is truly mad. Lunatic. And now apparently Josephina has taken it from him like a disease.

“You have the right of it,” she said. “Not believe your own daughter.”

“Doris!” Mrs. Webb was in a state of shock.

“Be quiet!” Webb paced up and down again in front of his captive audience. He addressed some cohort of spectators not present but both knowing and eager, moving restlessly at the edge of his mind. “She has brought shame on this family, shamed us in front of everybody, just bold as brass, impudent, what insolence, never have I! Right in front of the whole town!”

Mrs. Webb regarded Doris with a lofty distaste but behind it was dread of more of the same in years to come and for a second Doris was sorry for her and her precarious existence, but she had other matters to deal with. She glanced over at Josephina, who had dropped her braid and turned to running her hems through her fingers as if searching for a loose place and then the girl turned a contemptuous face to her. Doris ignored the pain this caused her; she put it away quickly.

“You should apologize for your behavior,” said Mrs. Webb. Hoping that he would accept it and they could all get away from him and go to their rooms. Except poor Mrs. Webb had to sleep in the same bed with him. Enjoy your bed of thorns.

But for now they were siding with him, with whatever his mood might be, and this was out of fear, perhaps. No, certainly out of fear. That’s the thanks I get, Doris thought. Seeing to the cooking and the meals, I should have poisoned you all. The lamplight glittered on the cut-glass tumblers and the decanter that Mrs. Webb had cherished and wrapped in muslin, shipped from one army post to another, guarded against breakage to be placed on white linen as signs and signals of their station in life. Upstairs creaking noises; Mercedes creeping to the landing to listen down the stairwell.

Doris looked down demurely, thinking of her choices. Another one of these evenings of great raving tirades she would not be able to endure, not one more. Especially this one; Josephina’s imaginative lies had broken through some border of decency, even rational thought. It had been bad enough in Ohio, but since then the colonel’s drinking had increased, month by month, glass by glass, and bottle by bottle.

“An apology wouldn’t be good enough, Miss Dillon! Not good enough! Every family in this town is most likely thinking that we are harboring some abandoned hussy straight out of an immigrant ship and didn’t we give you a roof and clothes and food? Did we not? Did we not?”

He turned around to regard the windows and then at the door to the hall. Again he seemed to be stepping about in a kind of dance, a strut, looking for the invisible audience and its applause and the cause of this was the drink and its rivers carving their way through the brain. His heavy, uncharitable face.

She wanted to say And so? Or The more fool you. But she said, “Indeed.” It was dark outside. Despite her insubordinate thoughts she was tattering in some way because of Josephina. This time she felt like crying. She must not cry in front of this maniac.

“Oh indeed, she says, indeed!” He paused to drink and to gather his wits. He filled his glass again and looked at the three females as if to be sure he was the absolute center of attention, like a dark sun and them all moving around him in captive orbits.

“Yes, sir, and I shall say more, because . . .”

“Oh no you will not. You just stepped right out to go for a carriage ride with that insubordinate Lieutenant Whittaker. By yourselves! Everybody saw this, this display, and then some local musician, a redheaded fiddler, flaunting yourself with some low-class clown! And now, and now, we have to give an evening dance for Commissioner Davis, he’s on the Constitutional Committee itself, I am being asked to be his host, an honor, an honor, it will be costly and I have allowed Mrs. Webb a sufficient amount and I am telling you, if you make an exhibit of yourself at that occasion you will regret it to your dying day.”

He jerked his chin and stared about again at his unseen spectators. Ghosts and admirers.

He picked up the decanter and poured the last of the whiskey. “We’ll have music for Commissioner Davis’s reception because Mrs. Webb has asked to find the musicians, a dance, she wanted a dance, very well, she has asked in the most graceful and polite ways, you see. She must get them at a low price and she will. And now I tell you, you will conduct yourself with propriety at this event, no dancing, not with Lieutenant Whittaker or anyone, one moment of impudence out of you and you are out on the street.”

Doris stared down at her clasped hands. She was relieved that his suspicions had lighted for the most part on Whittaker. She knew it was not about the lieutenant or fandangos, it was some terrible pleasure it gave him that they were forced to sit and listen, turn on one another, appease. The devil was on him and making him dance in rage. She had a wordless vision of freedom, she and Simon standing on the bank of some river. A wide sky with cirrus like horses’ manes.

“You will not see any young men, not now and not as long as you are under my roof. You will not go about dancing in fandangos or dancing anywhere, you will not be seen in any of the saloons and drinking establishments, you will not humiliate this family further by your vile behavior, or you will be out on the street in short order.”

Doris said, “Colonel Webb, she made it up. Surely you don’t believe that.”

Josephina dropped both hands into her lap, hung her head, and burst into tears. She said, “Oh, the girls are all talking about you!” She wiped the tears away. “I can’t stand it. They’re laughing about you!”

From this she understood it was Josephina herself who had been talking about her, spinning these wild tales of her dancing in fandangos and sporting about in saloons. She looked over at the child she had cared so much for and knew that fourteen-year-old girls will believe whatever they hear as long as it is scandalous and saw Jo’s slyness, her abandoned knowledge. The colonel would believe it as well, as by now his brains were fixed in whiskey like some scientific specimen preserved in a bottle of spirits.