Gedge bitterly upbraided his daughter, both for her desertion of his business and her criminal folly in abandoning it so as to help mend the shattered bodies of fools and knaves who, by joining the forces of militarism, had betrayed the Sacred Cause of the International Solidarity of Labour.

His first ground for complaint was scarcely tenable; with his dwindling business the post of clerk had dwindled into a sinecure.

To sit all day at the receipt of imaginary custom is not a part fitted for a sane and healthy young human being.

Still, from Gedge's point of view her defection was a grievance; but that she could throw in her lot openly with the powers of darkness was nothing less than an outrage.
I suppose, in a kind of crabbed way, the crabbed fellow was fond of Phyllis.

She was pretty.