After a short silence: "Do you mind speaking about Aunt Elinor, father?"
"No, dear. Although it is rather a painful subject."
"But if she is happy, why is it painful?"
"Well, because Doyle is the sort of man he is."
"You mean--because he is unfaithful to her? Or was?"
He was very uncomfortable.
"That is one reason for it, of course. There are others."
"But if he is faithful to her now, father? Don't you think, whatever a man has been, if he really cares for a woman it makes him over?"
"Sometimes, not always." The subject was painful to him. He did not want his daughter to know the sordid things of life. But he added, gallantly: "Of course a good woman can do almost anything she wants with a man, if he cares for her."
She lay awake almost all night, thinking that over.
On the Sunday following Louis Akers' call Mademoiselle learned of it, by the devious route of the servants' hall, and she went to Lily at once, yearning and anxious, and in her best lace collar. She needed courage, and to be dressed in her best gave her moral strength.
"It is not," she said, "that they wish to curtail your liberty, Lily. But to have that man come here, when he knows he is not wanted, to force himself on you--"
"I need not have seen him. I wanted to see him."
Mademoiselle waved her hands despairingly.
"If they find it out!" she wailed.
"They will. I intend to tell them."
But Mademoiselle made her error there. She was fearful of Grace's attitude unless she forewarned her, and Grace, frightened, immediately made it a matter of a family conclave. She had not intended to include Anthony, but he came in on an excited speech from Howard, and heard it all.
The result was that instead of Lily going to them with her confession, she was summoned, to find her family a unit for once and combined against her. She was not to see Louis Akers again, or the Doyles.
They demanded a promise, but she refused. Yet even then, standing before them, forced to a defiance she did not feel, she was puzzled as well as angry. They were wrong, and yet in some strange way they were right, too. She was Cardew enough to get their point of view. But she was Cardew enough, too, to defy them.
She did it rather gently.
"You must understand," she said, her hands folded in front of her, "that it is not so much that I care to see the people you are talking about. It is that I feel I have the right to choose my own friends."