“I’ve just told you,” said Ellen,
her face setting. “She sent for me.”
“Why didn’t you say you were in bed?”
“I’m no liar, Mademoiselle. Besides,
I guess it’s no crime to see a boy I’ve
known all his life, and his mother and me like sisters.”
“You are a fool,” said Mademoiselle, and
turning clumped back in her bedroom slippers to her
room.
Ellen went up to her room. Heretofore she had
given her allegiance to Mademoiselle and Mrs. Cardew,
and in a more remote fashion, to Howard. But
Ellen, crying angry tears in her small white bed that
night, sensed a new division in the family, with Mademoiselle
and Anthony and Howard and Grace on one side, and
Lily standing alone, fighting valiantly for the right
to live her own life, to receive her own friends,
and the friends of her friends, even though one of
these latter might be a servant in her own house.
Yet Ellen, with the true snobbishness of the servants’
hall, disapproved of Lily’s course while she
admired it.
“But they’re all against her,” Ellen
reflected. “The poor thing! And just
because of Willy Cameron. Well, I’ll stand
by her, if they throw me out for it.”
In her romantic head there formed strange, delightful
visions. Lily eloping with Willy Cameron, assisted
by herself. Lily in the little Cameron house,
astounding the neighborhood with her clothes and her
charm, and being sponsored by Ellen. The excitement
of the village, and the visits to Ellen to learn what
to wear for a first call, and were cards necessary?
Into Ellen’s not very hard-working but monotonous
life had comes its first dream of romance.
For three weeks Lily did not see Louis Akers, nor
did she go back to the house on Cardew Way.
She hated doing clandestine or forbidden things, and
she was, too, determined to add nothing to the tenseness
she began to realize existed at home. She went
through her days, struggling to fit herself again
into the old environment, reading to her mother, lending
herself with assumed enthusiasm to such small gayeties
as Lent permitted, and doing penance in a dozen ways
for that stolen afternoon with Louis Akers.
She had been forbidden to see him again. It
had come about by Grace’s confession to Howard
as to Lily’s visit to the Doyles. He had
not objected to that.
“Unless Doyle talks his rubbish to her,”
he said. “She said something the other
night that didn’t sound like her. Was any
one else there?”
“An attorney named Akers,” she said.
And at that Howard had scowled.
“She’d better keep away altogether,”
he observed, curtly. “She oughtn’t
to meet men like that.”
“Shall I tell her?”
“I’ll tell her,” he said.
And tell her he did, not too tactfully, and man-like
shielding her by not telling her his reasons.
