“We can have some luncheons, of course. Just informal ones. And there
will be small dinners. You'll have to get some clothes. I saw Suzette
yesterday. She has some adorable things.”
“I'd love them. Mother, why doesn't he want father to go into politics?”
Grace hesitated.
“He doesn't like change, for one thing. But I don't know anything about
politics. Suzette says--”
“Will he try to keep him from being elected?”
“He won't support him. Of course I hardly think he would oppose him. I
really don't understand about those things.”
“You mean you don't understand him. Well, I do, mother. He has run
everything, including father, for so long--”
“Lily!”
“I must, mother. Why, out at the camp--” She checked herself. “All the
papers say the city is badly governed, and that he is responsible. And
now he is going to fight his own son! The more I think about it, the
more I understand about Aunt Elinor. Mother, where do they live?”
Grace looked apprehensively toward the door. “You are not allowed to
visit her.”
“You do.”
“That's different. And I only go once or twice a year.”
“Just because she married a poor man, a man whose father--”
“Not at all. That is all dead and buried. He is a very dangerous man. He
is running a Socialist newspaper, and now he is inciting the mill men
to strike. He is preaching terrible things. I haven't been there for
months.”
“What do you mean by terrible things, mother?”
“Your father says it amounts to a revolution. I believe he calls it a
general strike. I don't really know much about it.”
Lily pondered that.
“Socialism isn't revolution, mother, is it? But even then--is all this
because grandfather drove his father to--”
“I wish you wouldn't, Lily. Of course it is not that. I daresay he
believes what he preaches. He ought to be put into jail. Why the country
lets such men go around, preaching sedition, I don't understand.”
Lily remembered something else Willy Cameron had said, and promptly
repeated it.
“We had a muzzled press during the war,” she said, “and now we've got
free speech. And one's as bad as the other. She must love him terribly,
mother,” she added.
But Grace harked back to Suzette, and the last of the Cardews harked
with her. Later on people dropped in, and Lily made a real attempt to
get back into her old groove, but that night, when she went upstairs
to her bedroom, with its bright fire, its bed neatly turned down, her
dressing gown and slippers laid out, the shaded lamps shining on the
gold and ivory of her dressing table, she was conscious of a sudden
homesickness. Homesickness for her bare little room in the camp
barracks, for other young lives, noisy, chattering, often rather silly,
occasionally unpleasant, but young. Radiantly, vitally young. The great
house, with its stillness and decorum, oppressed her. There was no youth
in it, save hers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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