Not that Willy Cameron made any excuses to himself.
He had a sort of idea that if he saw the magnificence
that housed her, it would through her sheer remoteness
kill the misery in him. But he regarded himself
with a sort of humorous pity, and having picked up
a stray dog, he addressed it now and then.
“Even a cat can look at a king,” he said
once. And again, following some vague train
of thought, on a crowded street: “The People’s
voice is a queer thing. ‘It is, and it
is not, the voice of God.’ The people’s
voice, old man. Only the ones that count haven’t
got a voice.”
There were, he felt, two Lily Cardews. One lived
in an army camp, and wore plain clothes, and got a
bath by means of calculation and persistency, and
went to the movies on Friday nights, and was quite
apt to eat peanuts at those times, carefully putting
the shells in her pocket.
And another one lived inside this great pile of brick,—he
was standing across from it, by the park railing,
by that time—where motor cars drew up,
and a footman with an umbrella against a light rain
ushered to their limousines draped women and men in
evening clothes, their strong blacks and whites revealed
in the light of the street door. And this Lily
Cardew lived in state, bowed to by flunkeys in livery,
dressed and undressed—his Scotch sense of
decorum resented this—by serving women.
This Lily Cardew would wear frivolous ball-gowns,
such things as he saw in the shop windows, considered
money only as a thing of exchange, and had traveled
all over Europe a number of times.
He took his station against the park railings and
reflected that it was a good thing he had come, after
all. Because it was the first Lily whom he loved,
and she was gone, with the camp and the rest, including
war. What had he in common with those lighted
windows, with their heavy laces and draperies?
“Nothing at all, old man,” he said cheerfully
to the dog, “nothing at all.”
But although the ache was gone when he turned homeward,
the dog still at his heels, he felt strangely lonely
without it. He considered that very definitely
he had put love out of his life. Hereafter he
would travel the trail alone. Or accompanied
only by History, Politics, Economics, and various
divines on Sunday evenings.
“Well, grandfather,” said Lily Cardew,
“the last of the Cardews is home from the wars.”
“So I presume,” observed old Anthony.
“Owing, however, to your mother’s determination
to shroud this room in impenetrable gloom, I can only
presume. I cannot see you.”
His tone was less unpleasant than his words, however.
He was in one of the rare moods of what passed with
him for geniality. For one thing, he had won
at the club that afternoon, where every day from four
to six he played bridge with his own little group,
reactionaries like himself, men who viewed the difficulties
of the younger employers of labor with amused contempt.
For another, he and Howard had had a difference of
opinion, and he had, for a wonder, made Howard angry.
