“We had a muzzled press during the war,”
she said, “and now we’ve got free speech.
And one’s as bad as the other. She must
love him terribly, mother,” she added.
But Grace harked back to Suzette, and the last of
the Cardews harked with her. Later on people
dropped in, and Lily made a real attempt to get back
into her old groove, but that night, when she went
upstairs to her bedroom, with its bright fire, its
bed neatly turned down, her dressing gown and slippers
laid out, the shaded lamps shining on the gold and
ivory of her dressing table, she was conscious of
a sudden homesickness. Homesickness for her bare
little room in the camp barracks, for other young lives,
noisy, chattering, often rather silly, occasionally
unpleasant, but young. Radiantly, vitally young.
The great house, with its stillness and decorum,
oppressed her. There was no youth in it, save
hers.
She went to her window and looked out. Years
ago, like Elinor, she had watched the penitentiary
walls from that window, with their endlessly pacing
sentries, and had grieved for those men who might
look up at the sky, or down at the earth, but never
out and across, to see the spring trees, for instance,
or the children playing on the grass. She remembered
the story about Jim Doyle’s escape, too.
He had dug a perilous way to freedom. Vaguely
she wondered if he were not again digging a perilous
way to freedom.
Men seemed always to be wanting freedom, only they
had so many different ideas of what freedom was.
At the camp it had meant breaking bounds, balking
the Military Police, doing forbidden things generally.
Was that, after all, what freedom meant, to do the
forbidden thing? Those people in Russia, for
instance, who stole and burned and appropriated women,
in the name of freedom. Were law and order,
then, irreconcilable with freedom?
After she had undressed she rang her bell, and Castle
answered it.
“Please find out if Ellen has gone to bed,”
she said. “If she has not, I would like
to talk to her.”
The maid looked slightly surprised.
“If it’s your hair, Miss Lily, Mrs. Cardew
has asked me to look after you until she has engaged
a maid for you.”
“Not my hair,” said Lily, cheerfully.
“I rather like doing it myself. I just
want to talk to Ellen.”
It was a bewildered and rather scandalized Castle
who conveyed the message to Ellen.
“I wish you’d stop whistling that thing,”
said Miss Boyd, irritably. “It makes me
low in my mind.”
“Sorry,” said Willy Cameron. “I
do it because I’m low in my mind.”
“What are you low about?” Miss Boyd had
turned toward the rear of the counter, where a mirror
was pasted to a card above a box of chewing gum, and
was carefully adjusting her hair net. “Lady
friend turned you down?”
Willy Cameron glanced at her.
