The Prodigal Girl by Grace Livingston Hill

were almost to the car, and Chester Thornton was wondering whether he could hold out, when Betty dealt her final blow.
    In a cold, hard, matter-of-fact tone she said:
    “Well, I hate you, and I’m off you for life!”
    The impact quivered through his trembling flesh like an actual blow. He realized that here was another thing with which he would have to live out the years, and never forget!
    Betty! His little Betty! His first baby girl!
    There was an instant’s struggle again as they reached the car. Betty was determined not to be carried home ignominiously. But he held her fast.
    “Will you get in quietly, or shall I have to tie you?” he asked in a strange panting voice that somehow startled her in spite of her hardness.
    “Oh, have it your own way,” she said, relaxing suddenly into indifference. “I’m getting terribly sleepy anyway and might as well go home.” She summoned a casual yawn.
    How had the universe got turned around? This was his Betty! The child for whom he had but a few short hours before been planning an expensive Christmas surprise and exulting in her probable delight in it. How had all this awful change come about?
    He tried as he drove along through the night to think of a wise mode of approach, for he must have it out with her before he reached home. He would have to tell her all those awful words that that foulmouthed boy had said. There was no way to spare her from it. She ought to know the truth. Her humiliation would have to be complete before she could be brought to her senses.
    Betty was leaning back, feigning sleep.
    Very gently, very tenderly, with the deep, hurt love in his voice and words chosen from the depths of his suffering heart he began:
    “Betty, it is because I love you—” he started in a voice she used to love.
    “Rot!” said Betty sleepily. “Save your breath, Chester. That kind of mush is out of date.”
    Appalled, he summoned new words, sharp with truth, and began to tell her what he had heard in the train.
    She listened through to the finish, and then her scornful laugh rang out like a flashing knife:
    “Oh, is that all you’ve got on your chest?” she scorned. “I thought you were off your nut. But you’ve only got a Victorian complex after all. Poor Dad, you’ll recover, but you’ve lost out as far as I’m concerned. I thought you had an open mind!”
    “Betty! What do you mean? Don’t you—Aren’t you—?”
    “No, I don’t think Dud is a beast! No, I’m not shocked or humiliated or any of the other things you want me to be. This is an enlightened age, and things have changed since you were young. I have my doubts whether they were so very sanctimonious as you try to make out even then, but of course you want me to think they were. But as for Dud, he’s all right. He’s no worse than all of the rest of us. We’re just frank and honest. All the boys talk like that. That’s nothing. We’re just living our lives in the new free way, that’s all. You lived your life, and it’s our turn now to live ours as we please, and there’s no use in thinking we’re going to be tied now by any antiquated whims that people tried to kid themselves into a century ago, for we won’t do it.”
    “My child!” he said sadly. “Right and wrong do not change. God is always the same. There are certain laws—”
    “Oh, bilge!” broke in Betty. “You don’t really believe that. That’s all baloney!”
    Appalled, at last he gave it up and silently drove her to her home.
    There was nothing left to tell her, nothing to say, because she did not care for any of the standards he set up. She had torn them down with a laugh and flung them to the breeze. She had declared her inalienable right to do as she pleased and flouted the idea that there was such a thing as right and wrong.
    He groped for the right word and wondered what it had been in his youth that had held him back from many things. Sin—that was it, a sense of sin. Why, she seemed to have no sense of