"Friends!" sneered old Anthony. "A third-rate lawyer, a--"
"That is not the point, grandfather. I went away to school when I was a little girl. I have been away for five years. You cannot seem to realize that I am a woman now, not a child. You bring me in here like a bad child."
In the end old Anthony had slammed out of the room. There were arguments after that, tears on Grace's part, persuasion on Howard's; but Lily had frozen against what she considered their tyranny, and Howard found in her a sort of passive resistance, that drove him frantic.
"Very well," he said finally. "You have the arrogance of youth, and its cruelty, Lily. And you are making us all suffer without reason."
"Don't you think I might say that too, father?"
"Are you in love with this man?"
"I have only seen him four times. If you would give me some reasons for all this fuss--"
"There are things I cannot explain to you. You wouldn't understand."
"About his moral character?"
Howard was rather shocked. He hesitated: "Yes."
"Will you tell me what they are?"
"Good heavens, no!" he exploded. "The man's a radical, too. That in itself ought to be enough."
"You can't condemn a man for his political opinions."
"Political opinions!"
"Besides," she said, looking at him with her direct gaze, "isn't there some reason in what the radicals believe, father? Maybe it is a dream that can't come true, but it is rather a fine dream, isn't it?"
It was then that Howard followed his father's example, and flung out of the room.
After that Lily went, very deliberately and without secrecy, to the house on Cardew Way. She found a welcome there, not so marked on her Aunt Elinor's part as on Doyle's, but a welcome. She found approval, too, where at home she had only suspicion and a solicitude based on anxiety. She found a clever little circle there, and sometimes a cultured one; underpaid, disgruntled, but brilliant professors from the college, a journalist or two, a city councilman, even prosperous merchants, and now and then strange bearded foreigners who were passing through the city and who talked brilliantly of the vision of Lenine and the future of Russia.
She learned that the true League of Nations was not a political alliance, but a union of all the leveled peoples of the world. She had no curiosity as to how this leveling was to be brought about. All she knew was that these brilliant dreamers made her welcome, and that instead of the dinner chat at home, small personalities, old Anthony's comments on his food, her father's heavy silence, here was world talk, vast in its scope, idealistic, intoxicating.