Grace hardly heard her.
“Lily,” she asked, “you are not
in love with this Cameron person, are you?”
But Lily’s easy laugh reassured her.
“No, indeed,” she said. “I
am not. I shall probably marry beneath me, as
you would call it, but not William Wallace Cameron.
For one thing, he wouldn’t have grandfather
in his family.”
Some time later Mademoiselle tapped at Grace’s
door, and entered. Grace was reclining on a chaise
longue, towels tucked about her neck and over her
pillows, while Castle, her elderly English maid, was
applying ice in a soft cloth to her face. Grace
sat up. The towel, pinned around her hair like
a coif, gave a placid, almost nun-like appearance
to her still lovely face.
“Well?” she demanded. “Go
out for a minute, Castle.”
Mademoiselle waited until the maid had gone.
“I have spoken to Ellen,” she said, her
voice cautious. “A young man who does
not care for women, a clerk in a country pharmacy.
What is that, Mrs. Cardew?”
“It would be so dreadful, Mademoiselle.
Her grandfather—”
“But not handsome,” insisted Mademoiselle,
“and lame! Also, I know the child.
She is not in love. When that comes to her we
shall know it.”
Grace lay back, relieved, but not entirely comforted.
“She is changed, isn’t she, Mademoiselle?”
Mademoiselle shrugged her shoulders.
“A phase,” she said. She had got
the word from old Anthony, who regarded any mental
attitude that did not conform with his own as a condition
that would pass. “A phase, only.
Now that she is back among familiar things, she will
become again a daughter of the house.”
“Then you think this talk about marrying beneath
her—”
“She ’as had liberty,” said Mademoiselle,
who sometimes lost an aspirate. “It is
like wine to the young. It intoxicates.
But it, too, passes. In my country—”
But Grace had, for a number of years, heard a great
deal of Mademoiselle’s country. She settled
herself on her pillows.
“Call Castle, please,” she said.
“And—do warn her not to voice those
ideas of hers to her grandfather. In a country
pharmacy, you say?”
“And lame, and not fond of women,” corroborated
Mademoiselle. “Ca ne pourrait pas etre
mieux, n’est-ce pas?”
Shortly after the Civil War Anthony Cardew had left
Pittsburgh and spent a year in finding a location
for the investment of his small capital. That
was in the very beginning of the epoch of steel.
The iron business had already laid the foundations
of its future greatness, but steel was still in its
infancy.
Anthony’s father had been an iron-master in
a small way, with a monthly pay-roll of a few hundred
dollars, and an abiding faith in the future of iron.
But he had never dreamed of steel. But “sixty-five”
saw the first steel rail rolled in America, and Anthony
Cardew began to dream. He went to Chicago first,
and from there to Michigan, to see the first successful
Bessemer converter. When he started east again
he knew what he was to make his life work.
