Mademoiselle relaxed. She had been too long in old Anthony's house
to consider very seriously the plain people. Her world, like Anthony
Cardew's, consisted of the financial aristocracy, which invested money
in industries and drew out rich returns, while providing employment for
the many; and of the employees of the magnates, who had recently shown
strong tendencies toward upsetting the peace of the land, and had given
old Anthony one or two attacks of irritability when it was better to go
up a rear staircase if he were coming down the main one.
“Wait a moment,” said Lily, suddenly. “I have a picture of him
somewhere.”
She disappeared, and Mademoiselle heard her rummaging through the
drawers of her dressing table. She came back with a small photograph in
her hand.
It showed a young man, in a large apron over a Red Cross uniform,
bending over a low field range with a long-handled fork in his hand.
“Frying doughnuts,” Lily explained. “I was in this hut at first, and I
mixed them and cut them, and he fried them. We made thousands of them.
We used to talk about opening a shop somewhere, Cardew and Cameron. He
said my name would be fine for business. He'd fry them in the window,
and I'd sell them. And a coffee machine--coffee and doughnuts, you
know.”
“Not--seriously?”
At the expression on Mademoiselle's face Lily laughed joyously.
“Why not?” she demanded. “And you could be the cashier, like the ones in
France, and sit behind a high desk and count money all day. I'd rather
do that than come out,” she added.
“You are going to be a good girl, Lily, aren't you?”
“If that means letting grandfather use me for a doormat, I don't know.”
“Lily!”
“He's old, and I intend to be careful. But he doesn't own me, body and
soul. And it may be hard to make him understand that.”
Many times in the next few months Mademoiselle was to remember that
conversation, and turn it over in her shrewd, troubled mind. Was there
anything she could have done, outside of warning old Anthony himself?
Suppose she had gone to Mr. Howard Cardew?
“And how,” said Mademoiselle, trying to smile, “do you propose to assert
this new independence of spirit?”
“I am going to see Aunt Elinor,” observed Lily. “There, that's eleven
buttons on, and I feel I've earned my dinner. And I'm going to ask Willy
Cameron to come here to see me. To dinner. And as he is sure not to have
any evening clothes, for one night in their lives the Cardew men are
going to dine in mufti. Which is military, you dear old thing, for
the everyday clothing that the plain people eat in, without apparent
suffering!”
Mademoiselle got up. She felt that Grace should be warned at once. And
there was a look in Lily's face when she mentioned this Cameron creature
that made Mademoiselle nervous.
“I thought he lived in the country.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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