Gunner Kelly

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Colonel Butler loved all his three girls equally, but (as he was accustomed to tell himself when they presented their problems to dummy1

him) differently. Because, notwithstanding the identical red of their hair, they were entirely different people.

And that was why Jane had his attention now across the breakfast table, absolutely but unequally with the disquiet which he might have diverted from his Times to Sally or Diana.

“I said, Father,” she repeated, “I think I have done something rather silly. ”

“Yes.” Butler nodded gravely, just as he would have done for Sally or Diana, but without the pretence which paternal gravity would have required for them. “I heard you the first time, Jane.”

He stopped there, and the difference widened with his silence and hers. With Sally and Diana he would have added some soothing verbal placebo. But then, with Sally it would have been merely something to do with horses, and with Diana merely something to do with men; but it was the horse that Sally loved, not (in spite of temporary infatuations) any particular horse; and Diana, whose physical resemblance to her late mother went disturbingly more than skin deep, seemed to feel much the same way about men; and in both cases Colonel Butler and his money had together proved more than a match for any emergency in the past.

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