Because things had always been like that, should they always be so? Wasn't Mr. Doyle right, after all? Only he went very far. You couldn't, for instance, take from a man the thing he had earned. What about the people who did not try to earn?
She rather thought she would be clearer about it if she talked to Willy Cameron.
She went to bed at last, a troubled young thing in a soft white night-gown, passionately in revolt against the injustice which gave to her so much and to others so little. And against that quiet domestic tyranny which was forcing her to her first deceit.
Yet the visit to the gallery was innocuous enough. Louis Akers met her there, and carefully made the rounds with her. Then he suggested tea, and chose a quiet tea-room, and a corner.
"I'll tell you something, now it's over," he said, his bold eyes fixed on hers. "I loathe galleries and pictures. I wanted to see you again. That's all. You see, I am starting in by being honest with you."
She was rather uncomfortable.
"Why don't you like pictures?"
"Because they are only imitations of life. I like life." He pushed his teacup away. "I don't want tea either. Tea was an excuse, too." He smiled at her. "Perhaps you don't like honesty," he said. "If you don't you won't care for me."
She was too inexperienced to recognize the gulf between frankness and effrontery, but he made her vaguely uneasy. He knew so many things, and yet he was so obviously not quite a gentleman, in her family's sense of the word. He had a curious effect on her, too, one that she resented. He made her insistently conscious of her sex.
And of his. His very deference had something of restraint about it. She thought, trying to drink her tea quietly, that he might be very terrible if he loved any one. There was a sort of repressed fierceness behind his suavity.
But he interested her, and he was undeniably handsome, not in her father's way but with high-colored, almost dramatic good looks. There could be no doubt, too, that he was interested in her. He rarely took his eyes off hers. Afterwards she was to know well that bold possessive look of his.
It was just before they left that he said: "I am going to see you again, you know. May I come in some afternoon?"
Lily had been foreseeing that for some moments, and she raised frank eyes to his.