"I just--Lily, don't see too much of Louis Akers. Don't let him carry you off your feet. He is good-looking, but if you marry him, you will be terribly unhappy."
"That isn't enough to say, Aunt Nellie," she said gravely. "You must have a reason."
Elinor hesitated.
"I don't like him. He is a man of very impure life."
"That's because he has never known any good women." Lily rose valiantly to his defense, but the words hurt her. "Suppose a good woman came into his life? Couldn't she change him?"
"I don't know," Elinor said helplessly. "But there is something else. It will cut you off from your family."
"You did that. You couldn't stand it, either. You know what it's like."
"There must be some other way. That is no reason for marriage."
"But--suppose I care for him?" Lily said, shyly.
"You wouldn't live with him a year. There are different ways of caring, Lily. There is such a thing as being carried away by a man's violent devotion, but it isn't the violent love that lasts."
Lily considered that carefully, and she felt that there was some truth in it. When Louis Akers came to take her home that night he found her unresponsive and thoughtful.
"Mrs. Doyle's been talking to you," he said at last. "She hates me, you know."
"Why should she hate you?"
"Because, with all her vicissitudes, she's still a snob," he said roughly. "My family was nothing, so I'm nothing."
"She wants me to be happy, Louis."
"And she thinks you won't be with me."
"I am not at all sure that I would be." She made an effort then to throw off the strange bond that held her to him. "I should like to have three months, Louis, to get a--well, a sort of perspective. I can't think clearly when you're around, and--"
"And I'm always around? Thanks." But she had alarmed him. "You're hurting me awfully, little girl," he said, in a different tone. "I can't live without seeing you, and you know it. You're all I have in life. You have everything, wealth, friends, position. You could play for three months and never miss me. But you are all I have."
In the end she capitulated Jim Doyle was very content those days. There had been a time when Jim Doyle was the honest advocate of labor, a flaming partizan of those who worked with their hands. But he had traveled a long road since then, from dreamer to conspirator. Once he had planned to build up; now he plotted to tear down.