"Lily, Lily, haven't you learnt not to make excuses for yourself yet? I hoped all my girls were taught that in the lowest form in the school!"
Lily looked as thoroughly disconcerted as she felt. Was it making excuses for herself to try and explain what she felt to be the truth, even though it happened to run contrary to Miss Melody's judgment?
"No, no, child," Miss Melody was grave again now. "Never be ashamed to own up to your weaknesses. I want you to think about backbone, dearie. It's what you need. I know, childie—perhaps more than you think. All sorts of girls have passed through my care, and I'm very, very proud to think that I've known something about each one of them—perhaps been able to give each one a little help. And there are no two alike, Lily, and each one has to be studied individually."
"And do you—have you really——?" Lily wanted to ask whether Miss Melody had really penetrated to the true self of every one of her pupils. It seemed so incredible, that girls like Dorothy Hardinge, for instance, should really have an inward life, even as Lily herself, and that Miss Melody should enter therein, and understand it all.
"Do I really study each one individually? Indeed I do, Lily, although it may seem to you girls that you see very little of the headmistress except in school, and on state occasions. Oh, I know," and Miss Melody laughed again.
Then she dropped her deep, soft voice impressively.
"I've studied you, childie dear, and thought about you very often. There's weakness, Lily—there's weakness. You'll have to be very much on your guard. I should like to have seen you much keener about games, much more in earnest for the honour of the school at our hockey and cricket matches. You may think that those things are of no very great importance in themselves, but there's a fine spirit behind it all, you know—a thoroughly English spirit. It's that keenness that you seem to me to lack."
Miss Melody paused, and looked with her characteristic air of profound scrutiny at Lily.
"Well?" she said encouragingly.
Lily felt that she was letting slip an opportunity for just such a clarification of issues as she had long sought after, but the habits of obscure and muddled thinking into which she had all her life been led stood in her way.
She made a consciously inadequate effort, belatedly.
"I think I could be more—keen—about things, if I only felt they were more worth it," she said confusedly. "I know I'm no good at games, but it isn't only that—it doesn't seem to me to matter frightfully whether one's good at them or not—and it's the same about other things, even lessons. I do enjoy them—some of them at least—but all the time I've got a sort of feeling—what's it all for?"
She paused, confused and frightened.
"Go on——" said Miss Melody. Her voice was slightly melancholy, but she was slowly nodding her head, as though in comprehension.
"I think if I could find something that seemed to me thoroughly worth while I could—could really let myself go and give my whole self to it. Something like a—a person one loved very much, or a sort of life one felt was right for oneself—not just right in itself——" Lily stopped, in utter disarray.
She knew that she had not succeeded in conveying her meaning by those halting, ill-expressed phrases, but the extent of her failure was not apparent to her until Miss Melody spoke again.
"I'm very, very glad you should have spoken, childie ... perhaps we can get this straightened out between us. That's a terrible idea of yours, you know, that things aren't worth while. Why, at your age, anything ought to be worth while—over and over again, Lily. The games and the lessons, and the little brother at home—it's all worth while, dearie. While you're thinking and dreaming away about some imaginary call to devote yourself to someone or something, all the little opportunities are slipping by you—you're squandering all your energies on fancies that mean nothing. You must learn to put your whole self into what you're doing, Lily—into the living present. Why, it's all worth while! As I told you just now, it isn't the number of runs you make in the cricket match that matters, it's the spirit that holds the whole eleven together, that makes each one keen to see her side win the match. That's what matters!"
Lily looked with unhappy eyes at Miss Melody. Why could she feel no real response within herself to these rousing truths?
At that moment she hated her own tepidity, her own secret, alien standards. She made an earnest and violent endeavour to relinquish the latter for ever, and to range herself under Miss Melody's inspiring banner.
"The games in themselves are only games. True," said Miss Melody. "But there's something else, Lily. I wonder if you've ever thought of it? Everything we do, great or small, can be turned to the greater honour and glory of God. I think you know very well that the Apostle Paul has written about that—didn't we have it, not so very long ago, at our reading? And don't you think, if you want a motive, that you have an adequate one there? If you think of that, childie, you won't ask again 'what's it all for' or whether it's worth while, will you?"
Could Lily, at seventeen years old, have formulated her own obstinate, inmost certainty, and have replied to Miss Melody?—"The Apostle Paul spoke for himself. Neither he nor anyone else can speak for me. Until I have evolved my own convictions, I shall continue to suffer from that lack of motive which I have most inadequately tried to put before you, and of which you have quite obviously understood nothing at all."
Nothing is more certain than that no such arrogant lucidity sprang either to her mind or to her lips.
"I'll try, Miss Melody——" she said, earnestly and meekly.
"I know you will, I'm quite sure of it. There's a big effort to be made, Lily, before you can shake off that supineness of yours, but it can be done, dearie. Now, when you leave here I want you to feel that you can write to me quite freely and I shall always find time to answer you. Do you know that girls who left me fifteen and twenty years ago still write to me? Some of them have girls of their own at school by now.
"Tell me, childie dear, have you ever thought of what your own future is to be? Is it to be a career, or the making of a home for the little brother, or do you want a home of your very own—marriage, Lily?"
The mere knowledge that she had never before heard the word mentioned in such a connection by Miss Melody, made Lily blush foolishly.
The headmistress smiled—an omniscient smile. "I thought so—I thought so. Well, Lily, although I haven't married myself, I always advocate marriage for the majority of my girls. Most women are happier in the beaten track, and I don't think you're one of those that are called upon to stand alone. Oh, there's nothing derogatory in that. Marriage is a very high calling, child, and there's a great deal to it—a great deal of responsibility, Lily."
Miss Melody's arch smile underlined the word, as though it had become a catchword, used to denote their dual consciousness of Lily's weakness.
Lily smiled back again, faintly protesting.
"Ah, you don't like that! It's the old bugbear, isn't it? Well, well, childie...." Miss Melody appeared to lose herself in reflectiveness.
The fiction of Lily's dread of responsibility was now firmly established between them.
"If I can give you any advice, or help you in any way, just let me know, dear child. We've had a nice, long talk, and I think it's been helpful to you."
Miss Melody paused so significantly that Lily almost involuntarily said: "Yes, Miss Melody."
"I'm very thankful for that, Lily—very proud and thankful. You must come to me again before the breaking up. Bless you, childie dear."
Lily understood that the interview was at an end.
Acutely sensitive as she was to Miss Melody's kind and serious interest in her welfare, it was almost inevitable that she should come to the sorrowful conclusion that Miss Melody, in her vast and tolerant experience, must be correct in her estimate of Lily's self. The thought depressed her.
She lacked backbone, and she was a shirker, squandering all her energies upon fancies that meant nothing.
In a vague and general way, Lily resolved to abjure those fancies and to readjust her scale of relative values so that it should include all that Miss Melody had meant by such words as "keenness"—"a thoroughly English spirit" and "doing everything to the greater honour and glory of God."
VI
The least highly spirited amongst us, however easily cowed by outside influence, seldom finds it easy or desirable to practise meekness when dealing with a near relative at home.
This law, which is a practically invariable one, deserves a candid recognition which it seldom receives.
Certainly it was never openly admitted to exist by Philip Stellenthorpe, whose house furnished a striking example of its workings after Lily had finally returned from Bridgecrap.
At school, she had been the victim of a diffidence engendered in the consciousness of failure.
At home, the consciousness of failure merely roused her to covert and irritable defiance of criticism.
She was no longer the sensitive and over-intuitive child steadily denying her own instincts wherever she foresaw that they must run counter to her father's unalterably sentimental ideals. But neither had she the moral courage nor the training in honesty of thought that would have enabled her boldly to analyze the causes of her own discontent.
She was resentful of Philip's arbitrary conventions, for which he never gave any other reason than that "Father says it will be best that way," and at the same time she believed her resentment to be wrong and undutiful.
She thought, and was shocked and unhappy to think, that there were times when she hated her father, whereas her hatred was in reality wholly for certain manifestations of his solicitude and affection for herself.
"A child that is impatient of its parent's love," Philip once called her, in bewildered pain and disappointment.
Lily felt herself to be unutterably heartless, cried herself sick with remorse and despair, and then had to bite her tongue to prevent herself from protesting aloud in exasperation the very next time that Philip called her his little pet.
A perpetually tête-à-tête existence might well have brought the state of tension between them to an unforgettable climax, but that the situation was saved by the Hardinges.
The Hardinges came to live within a mile of Philip Stellenthorpe.
The shock to him was less severe than if they had been people of whom he knew nothing, and the sacred tradition of Eleanor's day, that "the children were happiest in their own little nursery," was allowed to lapse when Lily was between eighteen and nineteen years old, and Kenneth in his first term at school. Subtle and intangible conflict and the presence of the cheerful, commonplace Hardinges were unthinkable together in the same atmosphere.
Dorothy Hardinge, no longer able to play hockey with any regularity, philosophically turned her attention to other forms of amusement, and was quite ready to make a companion of Lily Stellenthorpe. Having reluctantly put up her hair and lengthened her skirts, she made the best of privileges that she had never coveted, took her clothes quite seriously, and discovered frankly, for the first time, that Lily had at least one undeniable advantage over other girls that had never been recognized at school, in that she was extremely and unusually pretty.
Janet was less simple-minded, or less generous than Dorothy, and always made Lily conscious of her faint contempt.
Sylvia was still called Lily's friend, although they had much less in common than had Lily and Dorothy, now that Lily was accounted grown up, while Sylvia had three more years of school before her.
Charlie and Ethel Hardinge gave tennis parties and small dances, and picnic parties, and talked as proudly and volubly of "the girls" as they had once talked of "the kiddie-widdies."
They included Lily and Kenneth in everything.
"We've got two boys coming to stay with us next week. It ought to be rather fun," Dorothy Hardinge proclaimed. "There are never enough men to go round, here."
"There are so few families with sons, and anyway the boys always seem to be years younger than the girls—like Kenneth," said Janet discontentedly.
It had been the fashion at Bridgecrap to deride as early Victorian any assumption of the desirability of masculine society under any conditions, but Dorothy Hardinge at least had candidly readjusted her point of view amongst her new surroundings.
"We shall try and give a dance, while they're here. One of them is father's ward, Colin Eastwood—he's eighteen and awfully nice. Sort of quiet, you know, but nice. And he's bringing a friend, someone we don't know. Father said he might. He's at some University or other, and he's about twenty-two, or something like that. He'll probably think himself as old as anything, compared to us," said Dorothy with a little laugh that betrayed excitement.
Lily felt excited, too. She had met very few boys indeed that were beyond the age of sailor suits, but she had indulged in as many romantic fancies of possible future conquests for herself, as were allowed her by the ineradicable memory of the convent theory that masculinity was ipso facto something to be, as far as possible, ignored by the modest feminine.
Much reading and an uncontrollable imagination had merely eradicated the recollection of conventual shibboleths, but Lily was still sufficiently bound by them to feel very much ashamed when she found herself wondering whether Colin Eastwood and his friend would think that she was pretty. Dorothy said that she was.
From time to time, when she had on a new hat or put on a summer frock for the first time, her father looked at her with an air of rather melancholy gratification, and then made some small, detached observation at the very end of the day, when it might be assumed to have no special significance to the immediate occasion:
"My little Lily is getting quite a grown-up girl, now. It's quite a duty for little people to take care of their complexions, you know, we're given these small advantages to be a pleasure to those who care about our looks."
Lily had thereby deduced that Philip was afraid of her becoming vain, and that therefore he, also, thought her pretty.
She sometimes took long and furtive observations of herself in the glass. Her eyes, dark-lashed and rather deeply set, were not nearly as blue as Dorothy Hardinge's, but her nose at least was straight where Dorothy's turned up, and her soft skin had no freckles, and was sun-burned olive instead of red. She thought that her lips were too full, but at all events they were firmly closed, since she had always breathed through her nose, which not one of the three Hardinges could do for any length of time. And her hair was lovely.
Lily would never have applied to it, even in her own mind, such an adjective—redolent of vanity, according to the code—but nevertheless, that was what she really thought of it, when she brushed out the long, silky brown waves.
She counted vanity as being amongst her besetting sins, and strove to persuade herself that, against the evidence of her own senses, she really ought to believe herself plain and unattractive.
It was a mark of her own unregeneracy, that this should prove to be so extraordinarily difficult.
It became more difficult than ever, when Colin Eastwood and Lily began to meet one another every day at the parties and excursions arranged by the Hardinges in honour of their two guests.
Colin, as Dorothy had said, was nice, and very quiet. The indications of his admiration for Lily were so shyly offered that she only became aware of it by subtle and gradual degrees.
So restrained and delicate was that impalpable idyll of their extreme youth, that it never became the object of jarring and facetious comment, as was Dorothy's loud flirtation with Colin's cheerful and amusing friend, embarked upon within an hour of their first acquaintance.
Lily, at first, had indeed been inwardly mortified at the promptness of Dorothy's conquest. The undergraduate was a Real Live Person—so was Dorothy. So were all the others. Lily, just as at school, felt herself to be but an indifferent masquerader, through the badly sustained pretensions of whom they could all see plainly.
She found herself paired with Colin, in all the expeditions, and thought that it was because he had such nice manners that he always stayed beside her. But in a very little while she knew that, actually, Colin manœuvred for the place next her, and that his gaze always sought hers to share in the frequent jokes and allusions that had so soon come into being amongst them all.
He liked her better than Dorothy, or Janet or any of them.
It was just such a first romance as is only possible to certain diffident and highly sensitized temperaments, as yet unawakened to any thought of the cruder and more obvious manifestations of mutual attractions. Colin Eastwood was very nearly as ingenuous as Lily, and quite as shy.
He sat next her at picnics, and looked pitiful if the privilege was accidentally usurped by others. He once, daringly, and with shaking fingers, fastened her glove for her.
He asked her to call him Colin, and when she shyly acquiesced he was transported, but looked at her with a gaze that implored a yet further privilege.
Lily blushed at first, and then said timidly:
"And will you call me Lily?"
He said breathlessly: "Oh, I should love to." The audacity of the words made both their hearts beat quicker, so that they could say no more.
When they played tennis at the Hardinges' house, Lily was generally assigned to Colin for a partner, as it was necessary to equalize the sets by coupling the weakest player, as Lily indubitably was, with the strongest.
At first she thought that he must resent her inferiority, but it was soon evident that he did not even acknowledge it to exist. When she played well, he praised her rapturously, and when she played badly he put aside her apologies with assurances that the sun, or the wind, or some mistaken movement of his own had been against her.
Under the stimulus of his admiration, Lily suddenly blossomed into a self-confidence hitherto unknown to her, and actually learnt to like tennis, and to play passably well.
Occasionally Colin was her adversary, and then he served his balls to her as gently as possible, and she knew it, and was thrilled by his chivalry, although she never made acknowledgment of it to him in any spoken words.
Such tiny little things seemed to count. The way one looked, or didn't look—the seat one chose in the garden at tea-time. The allusions that proved how carefully certain predilections or desires had been noted. And there were the photographs.
All of them had cameras, and groups were taken. Colin always placed himself next to Lily, or sitting at her feet, or standing just behind her, for these.
Colin took photographs of Lily, because that was such a very pretty hat, if she didn't think it rude of him to make a personal remark. And might he take one of her without a hat on at all, for a change?
Lily would just take one snapshot of Colin, because he had put her camera to rights, and they must see if it had been a successful operation.
Colin manœuvred the unsuspecting Sylvia into making use of his Kodak, which was much superior to her own Brownie, so that the photograph which she took of Colin and Lily, alone together on the tennis court, appeared to be a sudden inspiration of her own.
But Lily knew that the whole was a deeply thought-out plot of Colin's, although he never said so. When the films were developed and printed, however, though Colin exhibited them freely, he let Lily know, casually, that only she and he were to have copies of that particular photograph.
The glamour of perfect summer weather lay over it all, and the scent and colour of the innumerable roses with which the Hardinges' garden seemed to be eternally decked. It was the beginning of August, when the halcyon days drew to a close, and on the last evening, they all, under a red harvest moon, went out to the favourite scene of their many excursions—a stretch of common land whereon the heather had just burst into purple bloom.
The undergraduate challenged Dorothy to a race through the thick, impeding clumps, and they sped far ahead, the youth gaining upon her every moment, in spite of a long start and the silk skirt that she had daringly wound round her waist, exposing her frilled petticoats and a shapely length of leg.
Sylvia and two contemporaries, encountered upon the way, linked arms and could be heard singing fragmentarily as they went. Kenneth, excited by the unwonted lateness of the hour, ran with the Hardinges' dog, and alternately teased and chattered to Janet, always left odd-man-out, and now relegated to the society of her father, who told her instructive things about the moon. Lily and Colin lingered far behind them all.
They were not articulate, even now, in spite of the soft allurement of the melancholy that possessed them both.
In Lily's mind, there floated a fragment once read somewhere:
... De cet adieu, si douce est la tristesse.
She said tremulously:
"I'm sorry you're both going away to-morrow."
She had not wanted to say both, but the word mysteriously forced itself from her.
"I'm sorry, too," Colin answered fervently. "I shall never forget this time. It's been the happiest of my whole life."
"I think it's been the happiest of mine, too."
Shyness overwhelmed and silenced them both.
"You don't want to catch up with the others, do you?" spoke Colin entreatingly.
"No—oh no. They're too far ahead," said Lily hurriedly.
The hillside became steeper, and the gorse-bushes that stood up amidst the tough springing heather became more numerous.
"I think I'd better go first and—and help you, if I may."
He thrust the stiff, green spires aside, and held out his hand.
Lily tremulously placed hers within his grasp.
They climbed slowly, without speaking.
"Shall we sit down for a minute?" Colin suggested, when the end of the steep path was reached, and Lily had softly, but definitely, withdrawn her hand from his.
They leant against a boulder, and Colin detected a tiny tuft of white heather.
"Let's each pick a piece of it, and not tell anyone where we found it."
Then they exchanged their pieces, rather solemnly and without speaking much. Colin's fingers lingered round Lily's as she tendered her little spray towards him, and they looked long at one another in the moonlight.
"I shall always keep mine," he murmured.
"As a remembrance," whispered Lily.
"I shan't need anything to make me remember," said the boy reproachfully. "Will you keep yours?" he added beseechingly.
"Yes."
Colin kissed his piece of heather and put it into a little pocketbook.
Lily tucked hers tenderly into the front of her gown. Then it was all over and the others joined them, and they went down the hill again all together, singing "For Auld Lang Syne," and Lily and Kenneth were left at their own lodge-gates.
And for the next few days, Lily found the picnics dull, and the tennis parties no longer events to be looked forward to, and the taking of photographs not worth while.
Once Dorothy Hardinge said to her, quite calmly: "I believe Colin Eastwood was awfully in love with you, Lily."
"Father says Colin is frightfully susceptible," said Janet quickly. "I heard Father and Mother laughing about him."
Lily did not mind the laughter of good-natured Cousin Charlie and his wife.
She wondered with shy, delicious tremors whether Colin really was in love with her, and whether some day he would come back again and ask her to marry him, and take her away to some nebulous dream world in which all true lovers had their being.
Her dreams and fancies were nearly as unsubstantial as those that she had woven round imaginary adventures, and told herself from day to day, at school. She was still only pretending to be like other people. Really Lily knew that it was all pretence to say that she was now grown up.
Philip said it from time to time, even while himself still treating her as a child, with no slightest claim to either judgment or individuality of her own.
But when he one day found her, more or less surreptitiously, childishly devouring toffee in the garden, he reminded her seriously and with displeasure, of her years.
"You don't want to eat unwholesome sweetstuff, between meals, like a little schoolboy. That's all very well for the nursery," said Philip, disregarding the fact, resentfully remembered by Lily, that no such practice had ever been allowed prevalence in the Stellenthorpe nursery.
"I don't like to see you behaving so babyishly, Lily. It's—it's undignified, and unsuitable. I don't like to see it."
He saw it no more.
Lily, although regarding detection as shameful, was either not sufficiently convinced of the heinousness of eating toffee at nineteen years old, or else lacked sufficient self-control to refrain from surreptitiously indulging her desire for sweet things.
She made inconspicuous expeditions to the village sweet-shop, and returned with her purchases in her pocket, thoroughly despising herself the while.
Guilt, and a ludicrously disproportionate terror showed plainly in her face when she once met her father, on her return by the least frequented entrance to the house.
"What have you been doing, my little pet?" Philip enquired with a suspiciousness foreign to his nature, but which must have been engendered in the most trusting of parents by Lily's confused and disconcerted expression.
"I just went up to the village," she stammered, and felt herself flushing.
Philip stared at her in a puzzled manner. "What for?" he said at last.
"Nothing, Father. Just a—a walk."
Lily hastened away from further questions with the sense of her own degradation strong upon her. She hated herself for having told a lie, and supposed that she had done so from a natural and ingrained tendency to deceive in the first place, and an uncontrollable and dishonouring passion for sweets in the second. She had become incapable of analyzing impartially the true grounds of her own moral cowardice.
Had her natural honesty of mind been less systematically and thoroughly warped, she might have received illumination from the sequel of the affair.
Philip, during the afternoon that followed their encounter, was silent with that peculiar silence which Lily knew, too well, denoted in him both grief and perplexity.
Then, at the end of the evening, he said to her suddenly:
"My little child would never do anything foolish without telling me, eh, Lily?"
"No, Father," automatically said Lily, neither of them awake to the absurd and improbable inconsistency of prefacing an act of folly by announcing it in a quarter where it would certainly receive scant encouragement.
"You must never play little, underhand tricks," said Philip nervously.
It was quite evident that he intensely disliked saying whatever he had set himself to say, and Lily's heart sank with the familiar feelings of shame and dismay as she realized that he was obliquely referring to her morning's walk.
"It's—it's not quite ladylike, not to be open and above-board. And little people have to be specially careful when they're rather older. There must never be anything like—well, like setting up a correspondence, for instance, with some youth or other, without saying anything about it."
For a moment Lily felt utterly bewildered.
"We don't want to put anything at all unpleasant into words," her father said hastily, "but sometimes a little hint.... You see, my little pet, very young people can be rather thoughtless sometimes, and then it may lead to things that are perhaps a little bit undesirable—you'll understand better when you're older. But clandestine expeditions to post letters, or to call for them, are quite out of the question, and might lead to a great deal of talk and unpleasantness."
Philip stopped to shudder at the distasteful vista of possibilities thus opened up, and the perception suddenly flashed upon Lily of his ingenious misinterpretation of the object of her morning expedition.
It afforded her the most unaffected relief.
There was no humiliation, and but little inconvenience, in being suspected of misdemeanours on a scale to which she had never aspired. It was even, mysteriously, rather gratifying.
"You understand what I mean, my darling?"
"Yes," said Lily, trying to keep extreme thankfulness out of her voice.
"Then we needn't say anything more about it." But Philip still fidgetted uneasily with his newspaper and it was evident that he had more to say, and that he much disliked the prospect of saying it.
"Of course, one likes you to have plenty of innocent and ladylike amusement," he said at last, in reluctant and distrustful tones. "Certainly one does. And Cousin Charlie's daughters and—and their friends—are everything that is nice and proper, no doubt. But I shouldn't like to think that you ever get at all—excited, or unguarded, so that people might find you a little bit—undignified."
Lily's relief was now merged in acute discomfort.
Her father must be thinking of Colin Eastwood. Had she really been undignified?
To Lily's thinking it was an unendurable word, denoting indefinable forms of unrestraint, of an underbred lack of self-respect.
"One of these days," said Philip, carefully looking away from his daughter's discomfited face and perhaps scarcely less embarrassed than was she, "one of these days I hope to see my little girl happily engaged and married to some good, suitable man. But not for a long, long while yet, and in the meantime my little Lily mustn't cheapen herself by foolish boy-and-girl nonsense."
"I haven't——" stammered Lily, scarlet.
"Hush, hush, now. You know you mustn't contradict Father like that."
The form of Philip's serious and unvehement rebukes had not varied since the days of Lily's babyhood.
"You'll be a good child, my pet, I know. If only your mother had been spared to us, there would never have been any little difficulties. You must talk to Cousin Ethel, if there's anything she can help you about——"
"But there isn't anything——" Lily was frenziedly repudiating she knew not what.
"Well, well, we needn't talk of sad, uncomfortable things, my child. Only no little hole-and-corner affairs with letter-writing, remember."
But Lily had ceased to derive relief from the evident immunity from detection of the toffee scandal that was thus implied.
Her idle dreaming about that impalpable summer romance was over, and she strove with shame to forget the very name of Colin Eastwood.
VII
"You must have a talk with Ethel, have a talk with Ethel," said Charlie Hardinge. "My dear fellow, you must have a talk with Ethel."
Philip looked gloomy and distrustful.
He did not tell himself that Ethel Hardinge always roused in him a feeling of irritation that temporarily embraced the whole family of Hardinge, nor did he realize that she had a precisely similar effect upon most of those people who, with reluctant admiration, spoke of her as being such a good mother.
He told himself instead that Ethel was the mother of three daughters, and that therefore she understood everything about all young girls.
Without enthusiasm, he embarked upon a talk with Ethel.
"My motherless little child," said Philip, thereby involving himself in misunderstanding at the very outset, since Ethel supposed him to be alluding to little Kenneth.
"No, no," said Philip, pained. "Kenneth is at school. Besides, he is a boy. It's my poor little Lily that troubles me."
"Oh, but she's not a child," said Ethel brightly. "I assure you, you mustn't think of her as a child. A girl of nineteen is grown up, or she ought to be. My Dorothy is a year younger than Lily, but I should never dream of saying she wasn't grown up. Besides, she'd resent it so much if I did!"
"I think Lily is content to let me judge for her——" said Philip stiffly.
Nothing in Lily's conduct justified the assertion—rather the reverse—but while Philip's necessity constrained him to ask for assistance, his dignity constantly impelled him to deny any need of it. This naturally increased the delicacy of his adviser's position, but Ethel Hardinge was cheerfully impervious to atmospheric conditions.
"There's a stage when they get discontented and out of hand," she remarked thoughtfully. "I went through it with Dorothy, and I'm going through it with Janet now. Girls thinking they can't get on at home, you know."
Philip was sincerely horrified.
"That is very sad and shocking," said he gravely. "Home is a young girl's natural sphere above all others, I should have thought. But I hope little Lily has no terrible ideas of that kind in her head."
"Oh, they all go through it," Ethel repeated comfortably. "It'll be my Sylvia next."
"Indeed?" said Philip, who felt no interest in Ethel's Sylvia, but would have thought it unsympathetic not to simulate one.
His conscientious observance of this self-imposed law retarded the course of the consultation a good deal, since everything that either of them said invariably served to remind Ethel of its applicability to one or more of her own children.
"It goes off, once they get other things to think about," Mrs. Hardinge observed optimistically. "Dorothy was quite all right again when we had those nice boys staying here. They had plenty of fun all together, and it quite took her mind off her grievances."
"But why should little chil—should young girls, living at home, have grievances at all?" demanded Philip piteously. "They ought to be as happy as the day is long."
"Of course, our kiddies have everything to make them jolly—and really, I think they know it, at the bottom of their hearts. Dorothy and Sylvia are cheery enough, now, and Janet is only going through a phase. But your Lily—of course it's lonelier for her. And then, she's very affectionate and sensitive, after all—my girls always say she wants bracing—perhaps it rather reacts on her spirits to know that you—that you——"
Ethel called up a fit of coughing to her aid. It was never easy to make a personal remark to Philip Stellenthorpe.
He grew more rigid than ever as the sense of this one was borne in upon him.
"You mean that my own happiness is, naturally, no longer to be found in this life? But my little Lily can know nothing of that," said he in all good faith. "I should never dream of speaking about my grief to her, or allowing it to cloud her spirits."
"I don't see how you can help it," said Ethel bluntly.
Philip sat in astonished silence.
He had never thought of his children save as beings of quite undeveloped perceptions, and it was to him an incredible and unwelcome suggestion that Lily might possibly be aware of anything that had not expressly been put into words for her information.
"We always imagined, Charlie and I, that you'd give Lily a regular season in London as soon as she grew up. I only wish we could afford it for our kiddies—but it's out of the question, with three of them."
"If Lily's dear mother had been spared to us, no doubt there would have been something of that sort," said Philip dejectedly. "But in the circumstances, it hardly occurred to me that I should actually spend three or four months in town, and take her to balls and parties and all the rest of it, myself. And I am really quite out of touch with London society nowadays. But if my duty to the child requires a sacrifice——"
"No—no," said Ethel hastily.
She rightly conjectured that the spirit in which Philip would approach the proposed immolation might safely be counted upon to victimize Lily quite as thoroughly as himself.
"Isn't there anyone to whom you could send her? It's so easy to make arrangements of that sort, as a rule. Most people are only too pleased to take a pretty girl about—by arrangement, of course."
"I could only entrust the charge of Lily to near relations, naturally," said Philip.
If Mrs. Hardinge failed to appreciate the force of the axiom, she made no sign of it.
"Surely there are aunts and people?"
"My wife was an only daughter, as of course you know, and her brothers are not married. I have only one sister, and she is unmarried and lives abroad."
Philip's manner suggested strongly that "abroad" in this connection might cover a multitude of sins. But Ethel knew all about Miss Clotilde Stellenthorpe.
"Oh, but wouldn't she be the very person? I remember her quite well. Last time I was in town taking Sylvia to the dentist I met your sister in the waiting-room. We had quite a long talk."
"My sister has a small villa in Italy, outside Rome. She lives there almost altogether, and I fancy she would dislike London."
Ethel entirely disbelieved that any woman would dislike London for a sojourn of which the expenses of herself and a young and pretty companion would be liberally met. But she felt unable to put this into words which should leave Philip's susceptibilities unwounded.
So she said instead, with an air of bright inspiration:
"Then why not send Lily to Italy? It would be a splendid education. I've often thought how much I should like Janet to get a trip abroad! She's the clever one, you know—it would be rather wasted on Dorothy, I'm afraid. From what your sister told me she has a most interesting circle of friends amongst the English colony in Rome, and knows all the Embassy people."
"Yes, that is so."
Philip appeared to be much more favourably struck with this scheme than with Ethel's previous suggestion.
He put from him the painful recollection of certain heartless words, spoken nearly ten years ago, and tried only to remember that poor Clo was his nearest relation, and Lily's aunt.
After all, she had loved the children in her own way, and Philip had long ago euphemized her terrible speech about Vonnie into "poor Clo's rather unsympathetic way of speaking about things that should be held sacred."
Whenever Philip Stellenthorpe came to within measurable distance of a decision, however, it was his invariable instinct to make earnest search for difficulties or disadvantages that might stand in the way of its execution.
"There are several drawbacks to the plan, of course," he began at once. "My sister may have other arrangements of her own, or the idea may not appeal to Lily."
"I shouldn't dream of consulting her, if I were you," said Ethel in a surprised voice. "Just tell her it's all settled, as a tremendous surprise for her, and she'll be delighted. Girls are like that."
"I'm sure my little girl would never be ungrateful for anything I had arranged on her behalf," said Philip sadly. "But I don't know whether this is the right time of year for Italy. I should have to find out about that."
"You would hardly send her for less than six months, surely," urged the practical Mrs. Hardinge. "Some of that would be sure to be the right time of year."
"And what about the journey?"
Philip pounced upon a further debatable point with gloomy triumph.
Ethel misunderstood him.
"That would be one point in favour of letting her go this autumn. She wouldn't have that long journey in the heat."
"I was wondering who should take her."
"Take her? Isn't she old enough to take herself?"
"It is one of my rules," said Philip sublimely, "that Lily should not go about alone. I have never allowed her to travel by herself, and I shouldn't dream of letting her begin by a journey to Italy."
"Of course, if she's never travelled by herself, she can't begin by going all that way. Our kiddies always go about together—but perhaps one by herself may be different. Only it seems a pity she should be so helpless at her age."
Philip looked offended as he always did at any form of criticism.
"You could send a maid with her."
"My sister's establishment would probably not admit of an additional servant."
"She could see Lily into the train in Paris, and then come back. Come, you wouldn't mind her going straight through in a ladies' carriage by herself, would you?" said Ethel persuasively.
Philip reluctantly conceded that this might be permitted, less because the idea appeared to him satisfactory, than because he had just thought of a fresh objection to the whole scheme, and was desirous of bringing it forward immediately.
"I should be sorry if Lily made her friends amongst Roman Catholics, I must admit."
"I daresay most of Miss Stellenthorpe's friends are English. I believe there's quite a colony there. In any case, she wouldn't be likely to be attracted by a foreigner, would she?"
Ethel's abrupt descent from the general to the particular slightly scandalized her hearer.
"No—no. I don't know that I was thinking of anything very specific," he said untruthfully. "Only on general grounds."
"Oh well, of course, she's very pretty. There are sure to be plenty of people who'll admire her. That boy we had here, Colin Eastwood, was a good deal smitten."
Ethel laughed comfortably, but Philip remained quite unsmiling.
"Boy-and-girl nonsense is all very well," he remarked in tones which implied the contrary, "but of course it can't lead to anything, and only puts foolish ideas into the heads of little people. I naturally hope to see my poor little Lily happily and suitably settled some day, but there's plenty of time before her."
"I approve of early marriages," Ethel declared stoutly. "I hope if our girls are to marry, that they'll all marry young."
"I have no doubt of it," mechanically said Philip. "Thank you a thousand times for your help. I shall think over our discussion, and let you know what I decide."
He went away trying not to let himself perceive that it would afford his own harassed sense of paternal responsibility an immense relief to send Lily away from home for several months.
It was a disappointment to him when she received his announcement almost doubtfully, although he would certainly have felt, and said it, to be sad and unnatural had she exhibited unrestrained pleasure at the prospect of leaving home.
They continued to remain, therefore, at cross-purposes during the correspondence embarked upon with Aunt Clo, and the resulting arrangements for Lily's journey in September to the villa at Genazzano.
"No doubt Aunt Clo will either meet you in Rome herself, or send somebody else to meet you, and take you to Genazzano. The difficulty is your journey as far as Rome. Your Cousin Ethel suggested sending one of the maids with you to Paris, and letting her see you into the train there. Or I could take you so far myself."
Philip sighed heavily. He detested travelling.
"Why couldn't I go by myself?" Lily demanded, suddenly rebellious. "I'm sure Cousin Ethel would let Dorothy."
Philip looked at her in unfeigned surprise.
"Why, my little pet," he said gently, "you know very well that Father doesn't allow you to go about alone."
"But why?"
"Not that argumentative tone, my child. Some day you will be very, very grateful for all the care that I have lavished on you, and perhaps when it's too late you may wish that you'd shown a more affectionate and dutiful recognition of it. Now, don't let me hear anything more about it. You know it's a very old rule that you mayn't go about by yourself, so there's no more to be said."
And such was the time-honoured immutability of those arbitrary rules, that there really was no more to be said. It occurred not at all to Philip and only remotely to Lily, that the manner, if not the matter, of his prohibitions was senselessly tyrannical. He was honestly convinced that his favourite catchword—"Father says it will be better so" would serve as ample justification to the minds of his children for any commands that he might choose to lay upon them.
The resulting condition of resentful obedience induced in Lily, who was at once too sensitive and too fond of her father to risk reducing him to one of those states of despairing depression that were his only form of displaying vexation, Philip described as "a nice, happy, friendly, little home-party, with no unpleasant discussions."
Since the death of his wife, he had known no more definite happiness than his own pitifully negative contentment whenever such a state of affairs appeared to him to prevail in his house. He would have thought it a disloyalty to Eleanor's memory to suppose that he could ever be happy again.
The children might be so—in fact he wished them to be so, and was bewildered and hurt when his own lack of proportion created an atmosphere to which Lily, at least, reacted at a cost infinitely greater to herself than either of them realized.
Kenneth, ten years younger, was different.
The "difference" of Kenneth, in fact, was becoming positively appalling, to his entirely humourless father.
Kenneth disregarded the code with blatant impunity, and that not from a spirit of defiance, but apparently from sheer constitutional inability to regard it seriously.
He obviously did not believe that grown-up people were infallible.
Remonstrance never made him cry, nor imputations of heartlessness and disloyalty.
He never willingly sat upon anybody's knee after he was three years old, but would say cheerfully: "I'd rather not, thank you," as he walked away.
He held opinions of his own, and expressed them freely.
He did not instantly relinquish them when Philip gravely and gently told him that he was an ignorant little boy and that Father always knew best.
He was addicted to making personal remarks.
He spoke crudely and candidly about subjects that Philip had always tacitly impressed upon his children as being sad or unpleasant, and therefore unfit to be mentioned freely.
He asked indiscreet questions.
"How old are you, Father?"
"Hush, hush, little boy. That's a very rude question. You know you must never ask grown-up people their age."
"Why not?"
"Because it's very bad manners."
"Cousin Charlie asked Lily how old she was, the other day, and Lily didn't mind."
"That's different." Philip was at last beginning to learn that one could not put an end to Kenneth's enquiries merely by saying: "Come, come, you know Father doesn't like arguments."
"Cousin Charlie is a great deal older than Lily, and can say what he likes to her."
"Then it's only old people who mind being asked their age. Is that why you won't tell me yours, Father, because you're so old?"
Philip was exceedingly sensitive about his age, and quite incapable of assessing the utter meaninglessness of his son's estimate.
"That's a naughty, heartless way of speaking," he said, deeply hurt. "I don't want to talk any more to little people who can speak like that."
"Oh well, it doesn't matter," said Kenneth with supreme indifference. "I s'pose you're about seventy or eighty. I didn't know you'd mind being asked."
In the last assertion lay the painful core of the matter. Kenneth really didn't know, as Lily, and even Vonnie, had known, as much by intuition as by training, what Philip would "mind."
He transgressed constantly, and was gaily impervious to the devastating effect of his transgressions upon his father and, by reflection, upon Lily. But Lily secretly admired Kenneth, and envied him that pachydermatous courage of his own convictions that she herself had never acquired.
Kenneth was never afraid of being himself, although that self in no slightest degree corresponded to Philip's ideal of a motherless little boy of nine years old.
He went to school and was not in the least homesick, and he seemed to be neither grieved nor ashamed when Philip expressed great disappointment at his first report.
"I hoped you would have been proud to bring back some nice prize or other to show me," said Philip wistfully.
"Prizes are fearful rot," said Kenneth.
He afterwards remarked in a detached way to Lily that, after all, what he did at school was his own business, more or less.
"Father pays for you to go there," said Lily, instinctively aware that only such practical considerations would carry any weight to her youthful hearer.
"Yes, of course. But he needn't want to know whether I've made any nice friends, and rot of that sort."
"I know it's rather aggravating to be asked about that sort of thing," half whispered Lily, feeling herself to be guilty of treason. "But after all, it's because he's fond of us, that he wants to know everything about us."
"Being fond is such rot," said Kenneth, in his graceless and limited vocabulary.
Lily was quite glad to see him return to school before her own departure for Italy.
"I'm afraid you won't see your sister at home next holidays, my boy, so you and I will have to cheer one another up," said Philip nervously. "But it'll be a great treat for Lily to go abroad."
"Mind you send me some stamps for my collection, Lily," Kenneth said earnestly.
"Come, come, Kenneth. Try and not think quite so much about your own little concerns. Now say good-bye, my boy."
But the most determined sentimentalist upon earth could extract no conventional emotion out of Kenneth.
"Good-bye," he said casually, and turned an inattentive cheek to Lily's salute.
She would willingly have omitted the ceremony of kissing him altogether, knowing that he disliked it, but for her certainty that Philip, shocked and pained, would have insisted upon its due performance.
"I hope little Kenneth is not a heartless boy," said his father, turning away dejectedly from the scene of farewell that had impressed him so unsatisfactorily.
But hope was not the predominant note in his voice.
Lily was so sorry for her father—all the sorrier because she was conscious that her own inmost sympathies lay with Kenneth's point of view—that she felt it incumbent upon her to show no elation at all at her own projected departure, although she was in reality fast becoming both excited and pleased at the prospect of going into entirely new surroundings.
The result of which filial piety was that Philip told Ethel Hardinge, in a resigned way and with a smile of great melancholy, that little people realized very few of the sacrifices made for them, and one must not expect to see them display gratitude.
VIII
"Aha!" cried Aunt Clo in a loud, ringing contralto.
She stood on the small, empty platform and waved her hand above her head with a spacious, graceful gesture, as Lily got out of the train.
Miss Stellenthorpe's short, iron-grey curls were uncovered and parted in a masculine style on one side of her head, and she wore a dark-blue, fisherman's jersey and a pair of dark-blue knickerbockers. Her large, well-shaped legs and feet were bare.
"Aha! Good! Good!"
She kissed Lily upon both cheeks in an emphatic, foreign sort of way, and gazed at her with a fondly humorous smile.
"Ecco!" said Aunt Clo.
She hurried Lily across the little platform, affectionately grasping her arm, and talking so cordially all the while that her niece felt quite unable to interrupt her.
At last she said:
"My luggage, Aunt Clo. I'm afraid there's a trunk——"
"A trunk! Dio mio! Let us not forget the trunk!"
Aunt Clo sped back again, appearing not at all disconcerted, and disposed of the trunk question with much animation.
"The trunk," she exclaimed to Lily in mock-bombastic style, "the trunk is provided for. All is well with the trunk. It appears at the gate of Il Monasterio au plaisir de ce brave Lorenzo."
There were many French phrases and a few Italian ones scattered through Aunt Clo's conversation, and she frequently gave a strangely foreign construction to the sentences that she spoke in English.
Lily was impressed by her fluency, by the perfection of her French, and by a certain humorous candour that Aunt Clo displayed in voicing her opinions.
Nevertheless, she could not quite kill her remembrance of having, as a child, disliked Aunt Clo.
Outside the station was a very small waggonette with a striped red and yellow awning. A sleepy, good-natured-looking peasant, his shirt open at the neck, sat on the box.
"Ecco, Umbertino!"
Miss Stellenthorpe waved her niece into the waggonette and sprang in after her. The vigor of her ascent seemed out of all proportion to the dilatory progress that they made along a baked and arid-looking road, the fields on either side unrelieved by any shade.
"But the vineyards round Genazzano!" said Aunt Clo expressively. "Patienza!"
Genazzano proved to be a small village consisting of one cobble-stoned street, winding up the side of a steep hill, and an ancient grey pile that stood raised from the roadside at the top of half a dozen irregular steps.
"The Cathedrale," Aunt Clo introduced it.
A mattress, imperfectly concealed behind a heavy red curtain, hung before the entrance to the cathedral after the Italian fashion.
A small, brown-skinned child was squeezing its way inside, and a sturdy peasant woman, carrying a baby and a basket, was pushing her way out.
"Buon' giorno, Teresa mia!" cried Aunt Clo, waving her hand.
The woman smiled in reply.
"This is the country of the Miraculous Virgin," Miss Stellenthorpe told Lily. "The Madonna of Genazzano. The statue is in the cathedral and we have a wonderful procession once a year. Ah! ce cher Genazzano!"
Tenderness radiated from her face and voice.
The waggonette drew up before a small iron fence that enclosed a tiny stone house, built along the four sides of a square. A little cloister ran all round the house, and the space in the middle formed a courtyard where shrubs flowered in painted green pots.
There was no garden, other than the small and apparently untended courtyard, but within the house, Aunt Clo waved through the window at a thick trellis covered with vine tendrils and fig-leaves, and framing a sturdy arbour beneath which stood a rustic bench and table, and said:
"La Tonnelle."
Beyond lay a sloping track of ground on which the vines grew round poles that stood in long, converging lines, reminding Lily of a miniature edition of a Kentish hop-field.
"Truly have not my lines fallen to me in pleasant places?" Aunt Clo enquired musingly. It was perhaps a slight relief to Lily that her tone required no reply. A bald negative or affirmative seemed so inadequate a rejoinder to Aunt Clo's rounded, elaborate periods.
When they were sitting in the tonnelle that evening, however, just before the falling of the brief Italian dusk, Miss Stellenthorpe made enquiries to which more detailed answers were necessary.
"And what of Philip—what of your father, Lily?"
Lily answered as fully as was compatible with that old obsession that it was disloyal to present one's near relations to the gaze of another in any aspect save that particular one in which they might choose to regard themselves. She knew that Philip often described himself as a broken man, and conscientiously did her best to put a picture of a broken man before Aunt Clo.
"Aha!" said Aunt Clo, and "Ecco!" and nodded with deliberation, as though merely acquiescing in the recital of a state of affairs that had long been known to her.
"Nous nous aimons de loin," she said with resignation. "It doesn't do to remove the crutches before a lame man is ready to walk. I myself have stood without a prop all my life, and I wanted to see your father and mother strong and straight and unsupported, too. But perhaps I was hard and hasty. I was young. They clutched at the artificial supports that I tried to make them spurn—they resented the council of perfection.... Well, well ... I thank whatever gods there be, that I myself have learnt to stand upright and face the sunlight."
Aunt Clo drew up her tall person as she spoke, and threw back her head in a gesture expressive of freedom and gallantry.
Later on, when Lily and she had dinner together, Miss Stellenthorpe became less metaphorical and more colloquial.
Her appearance was a surprise to her niece. She had discarded the blue jersey and the knickerbockers for an admirably fitting drapery of flame-coloured brocade, closely following the lines of her fine figure, and a Greek fillet encircled her head. Her arms were bare to the shoulder and Lily, glancing surreptitiously downwards, saw that she wore flame-coloured stockings and shoes that were laced sandal-wise.
"Certainly, I descend to the conventions in the evening," cried Aunt Clo, not altogether truthfully, as her gaze followed Lily's. "Would you believe it, Lily, that I shocked Genazzano profoundly when I first lived here!"
Lily felt that she could believe it easily.
"'But,' they cried, 'the signorina shows her legs! She wears clothes like a man! It is immodest!' Imagine it—such a point of view here in Genazzano, which is like an earthly Paradise. I was confounded."
"'But is this Suburbia?' I asked. One expects Suburbia to be shocked—or even the provinces. Lily!" cried Aunt Clo in a tone of playful accusation. "I believe your father would be shocked. My legs—the legs that God gave me—would shock your father, if he saw them uncovered."
Once more the very fervour of Lily's inward acquiescence kept her silent.
"Oh, these people who are shocked!" said Aunt Clo with a musical groan. "But Genazzano is now used to my knickerbockers—who knows but that one day your father may be reconciled to the thought of uncovered legs? Or would he say—ha, ha!—would he say that they were immodest? an indecent spectacle?... I believe that's what he would say!"
Aunt Clo, speaking with mournful roguishness, seemed disposed, in a breezy, open-minded sort of way, to attribute the most prurient-minded views and expressions to the rest of humanity.
She told Lily that there was a girl in the village who was suspected of being about to have an illegitimate child. She was only fifteen.
"I have sent for her to come up here to-morrow. Naturally, her relations can get nothing out of her. They have frightened her, and made her believe that she has done something to be ashamed of."
She leant forward and scrutinized Lily's face by the indifferent light of the two oil-lamps in the room.
"Biglia Mia! But I've made you blush! It suits you, and is charming—but why—why?"
Lily was indeed blushing, deeply annoyed with herself for so doing, and yet irresistibly compelled to it by Aunt Clo's open mention of subjects that were never referred to at home, and had only been furtively whispered about by the least endurable of the girls at school.
"I—I suppose I'm not used to hearing those things talked about," she stammered. "I've never been told anything—I'm not even sure that I know what 'illegitimate' means, exactly."
"Philip's child—Philip's child!" almost moaned Aunt Clo. "I might have guessed it! He would never face life himself, and he brings up his child to suppose that ignorance means innocence. Oh, horrible!"
She shuddered and almost sprang from her seat. "Come out under the starlight, my child—you want no fruit? That's right—you and I must have some talk."
Lily felt ashamed of the irrepressible feeling of disappointment with which she followed Miss Stellenthorpe, whirled away from her beautiful untasted plateful of ripe figs.
But, of course, illegitimacy was not a subject to be discussed over dessert.
Aunt Clo, however, said nothing more about illegitimacy. She began instead to tell Lily how, long ago, she had solemnly warned Philip and Eleanor that they were refusing to face Truth; to look at facts as they were.
"It was about the poor little Yvonne. She would have been saved, if they had brought themselves to acknowledge her weakness, instead of trying to persuade themselves and the world that she was like other children. Let me see—you were two years younger—but you can remember?"
"Yes," said Lily rather curtly.
Vonnie had been so seldom mentioned, since her death, and then always in such consecrated phrases that Lily felt Aunt Clo's outspokenness almost as an indecency.
"Aha! nous avons changé tout cela—but when you were mites together, I remember very well how superior you thought yourself to poor little Vonnie. Hardly your fault, child—you were the favourite. They never disguised it, although, of course, they never would acknowledge it, in so many words. Ah, quel système!"
Aunt Clo shook her head.
"Dear little one, how much you've improved since then!"
There was delicate approbation in her tone, and in the large, genial, scrutinizing eye that Lily could just perceive, gleamingly turned upon her in the moonlight.
Although, theoretically, Lily supposed herself to be striving after perfection, it caused her a distinct feeling of resentment to hear that she had "improved," but she dishonestly attributed her annoyance to her growing conviction that it would be in better taste if Aunt Clo were rather less candid in criticism of her niece's nearest relations.
With her disconcerting penetration, Miss Stellenthorpe seemed to be aware of some such unsympathetic atmosphere surrounding her.
"You mustn't resent my plain speaking. Pour moi, il n'y a que la vérité. When we have known one another a little longer, my Lily, you will realize that truth is an obsession with me. Nothing but the truth. Deceit in any shape or form is the one unforgivable sin!"
Lily gave a fleeting glimpse to certain aspects of herself with a feeling of veritable horror, and a most sincere resolution that these must be for ever concealed from her hostess.
It was impossible not to desire Miss Stellenthorpe's approval. She was so spaciously generous in her appreciations, so gravely despondent in her well-weighed condemnations.
It was true that Lily was sometimes surprised at the courses taken by appreciation or condemnation alike.
There was the case of the village girl, Carla. Nothing could be more evident than that Aunt Clo's impassioned interest in her situation amounted to positive enjoyment. Lily heard her aunt's voice in fluent rhetoric, morning after morning, encouraging and upholding Carla, exhorting and rebuking Carla's tearful mother, eloquently proclaiming her championship of Carla to her own servant, to the young man who brought the milk, to the postman, in fact to anyone of the little community of peasantry at Genazzano who would listen to her.
"Of course the man is the parish priest at Sta. Lucia—I don't doubt it. So, thank God, there can be no question of making him marry her. Thank God for that, say I!" Aunt Clo fervently told Lily at breakfast one morning.
"But wouldn't it be better if she was married before—before——?" Lily blushed again, bewildered.
"Never!" said Miss Stellenthorpe, striking the table with her open hand. "It would be a far greater wrong than the first, to compel that poor child to marriage."
The point of view implied was so new to Lily that she immediately felt, in her complete reaction from the standards set before her in her childhood, that it was probably the right point of view.
But as, for some inexplicable reason, she very much objected to those prolonged dissections of the affaire Carla in which Aunt Clo was so ready to indulge, Lily gently turned the conversation to a christening which she had seen take place in the cathedral on the previous afternoon. Aunt Clo was always ready to be intensely interested in ceremonies celebrated by the Catholic or other alien denominations, that would have bored her extremely in the Church to which she belonged.
But on this occasion, she showed but little enthusiasm on the subject of the postmaster's twins.
"Ah, and they've a child not a year old yet—and Heaven alone knows how many Augustino and Maria have had altogether. Criminal, criminal! When will they learn the folly and wickedness of breeding in that reckless way!"
Lily could suggest no helpful solution to a problem of which she scarcely grasped the outline.
To her it merely seemed as if Aunt Clo had no approbation to spare for babies unless they were illegitimate ones.
Staying at Genazzano, Lily began for the first time to experience in some slight degree what is meant by the liberty of the individual.
Aunt Clo showered books and opinions upon her, but encouraged her to form her own judgments of either. Not only was there no disloyalty in differing from Aunt Clo, but she seemed positively to prefer argument to acquiescence. Certainly, to adduce an opposite point of view, generally led to a lucid and eloquent exposition, embellished by many polished French phrases, of Aunt Clo's opinions of the subject in question, but she always said—"Aha?" and "So!" very kindly indeed to Lily's diffident interpolations.