She was uneasy rather than defiant. She meant to keep the peace. She
had been brought up to the theory that no price was too great to pay for
peace. But she wondered, as she stood there, if that were entirely true.
She remembered something Willy Cameron had said about that very thing.
“What's wrong with your grandfather,” he had said, truculently, and
waving his pipe, “is that everybody gets down and lets him walk on them.
If everybody lets a man use them as doormats, you can't blame him for
wiping his feet on them. Tell him that sometime, and see what happens.”
“Tell him yourself!” said Lily.
He had smiled cheerfully. He had an engaging sort of smile.
“Maybe I will,” he said. “I am a rising young man, and my voice may some
day be heard in the land. Sometimes I feel the elements of greatness in
me, sweet child. You haven't happened to notice it yourself, have you?”
He had gazed at her with solemn anxiety through the smoke of his pipe,
and had grinned when she remained silent.
Lily drew a long breath. All that delightful fooling was over; the hard
work was over. The nights were gone when they would wander like children
across the parade grounds, or past the bayonet school, with its rows of
tripods upholding imitation enemies made of sacks stuffed with hay, and
showing signs of mortal injury with their greasy entrails protruding.
Gone, too, were the hours when Willy sank into the lowest abyss of
depression over his failure to be a fighting man.
“But you are doing your best for your country,” she would say.
“I'm not fighting for it, or getting smashed up for it. I don't want
to be a hero, but I'd like to have had one good bang at them before I
quit.”
Once she had found him in the hut, with his head on a table. He said he
had a toothache.
Well, that was all over. She was back in her grandfather's house, and--
“He'll get me too, probably,” she reflected, as she went down the
stairs, “just as he's got all the others.”
Mademoiselle was in Lily's small sitting room, while Castle was
unpacking under her supervision. The sight of her uniforms made Lily
suddenly restless.
“How you could wear these things!” cried Mademoiselle. “You, who have
always dressed like a princess!”
“I liked them,” said Lily, briefly. “Mademoiselle, what am I going to do
with myself, now?”
“Do?” Mademoiselle smiled. “Play, as you deserve, Cherie. Dance, and
meet nice young men. You are to make your debut this fall. Then a very
charming young man, and marriage.”
“Oh!” said Lily, rather blankly. “I've got to come out, have I? I'd
forgotten people did such things. Please run along and do something
else, Castle. I'll unpack.”
“That is very bad for discipline,” Mademoiselle objected when the
maid had gone. “And it is not necessary for Mr. Anthony Cardew's
granddaughter.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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