“I want to be engaged a long time, Louis.
We have so much to learn about each other.”
He thought that rather childish. But whatever
had been his motive in the beginning, he was desperately
in love with her by that time, and because of that
he frightened her sometimes. He was less sure
of himself, too, even after she had accepted him, and
to prove his continued dominance over her he would
bully her.
“Come here,” he would say, from the hearth
rug, or by the window.
“Certainly not.”
“Come here.”
Sometimes she went, to be smothered in his hot embrace;
sometimes she did not.
But her infatuation persisted, although there were
times when his inordinate vitality and his caresses
gave her a sense of physical weariness, times when
sheer contact revolted her. He seemed always
to want to touch her. Fastidiously reared, taught
a sort of aloofness from childhood, Lily found herself
wondering if all men in love were like that, always
having to be held off.
Ellen was staying at the Boyd house. She went
downstairs the morning after her arrival, and found
the bread—bakery bread—toasted
and growing cold on the table, while a slice of ham,
ready to be cooked, was not yet on the fire, and Mrs.
Boyd had run out to buy some milk.
Dan had already gone, and his half-empty cup of black
coffee was on the kitchen table. Ellen sniffed
it and raised her eyebrows.
She rolled up her sleeves, put the toast in the oven
and the ham in the frying pan, with much the same
grimness with which she had sat the night before listening
to Mrs. Boyd’s monologue. If this was
the way they looked after Willy Cameron, no wonder
he was thin and pale. She threw out the coffee,
which she suspected had been made by the time-saving
method of pouring water on last night’s grounds,
and made a fresh pot of it. After that she inspected
the tea towels, and getting a tin dishpan, set them
to boil in it on the top of the range.
“Enough to give him typhoid,” she reflected.
Ellen disapproved of her surroundings; she disapproved
of any woman who did not boil her tea towels.
And when Edith came down carefully dressed and undeniably
rouged she formed a disapproving opinion of that young
lady, which was that she was trying to land Willy Cameron,
and that he would be better dead than landed.
She met Edith’s stare of surprise with one of
thinly veiled hostility.
“Hello!” said Edith. “When
did you blow in, and where from?”
“I came to see Mr. Cameron last night, and he
made me stay.”
“A friend of Willy’s! Well, I guess
you needn’t pay for your breakfast by cooking
it. Mother’s probably run out for something
—she never has anything in the house—and
is talking somewhere. I’ll take that fork.”
But Ellen proceeded to turn the ham.
