"He is a very fine young man," Ellen said rather stiffly. "He's very highly thought of in the town I come from. His father was a doctor, and his buggy used to go around day, and night. When he found they wouldn't take him as a soldier he was like to break his heart."
"Lame?" Grace repeated, ignoring Ellen.
"Just a little. You forget all about it when you know him. Don't you, Ellen?"
But at Grace's tone Ellen had remembered. She stiffened, and became again a housemaid in the Anthony Cardew house, a self-effacing, rubber-heeled, pink-uniformed lower servant. She glanced at Mrs. Cardew, whose eyebrows were slightly raised.
"Thank you, miss," she said. And went out, leaving Lily rather chilled and openly perplexed.
"Well!" she said. Then she glanced at her mother. "I do believe you are a little shocked, mother, because Ellen and I have a mutual friend in Mr. William Wallace Cameron! Well, if you want the exact truth, he hadn't an atom of use for me until he heard about Ellen." She put an arm around Grace's shoulders. "Brace up, dear," she said, smilingly. "Don't you cry. I'll be a Cardew bye-and-bye."
"Did you really go to the moving pictures with him?" Grace asked, rather unhappily. She had never been inside a moving picture theater. To her they meant something a step above the corner saloon, and a degree below the burlesque houses. They were constituted of bad air and unchaperoned young women accompanied by youths who dangled cigarettes from a lower lip, all obviously of the lower class, including the cigarette; and of other women, sometimes drab, dragged of breast and carrying children who should have been in bed hours before; or still others, wandering in pairs, young, painted and predatory. She was not imaginative, or she could not have lived so long in Anthony Cardew's house. She never saw, in the long line waiting outside even the meanest of the little theaters that had invaded the once sacred vicinity of the Cardew house, the cry of every human heart for escape from the sordid, the lure of romance, the call of adventure and the open road.
"I can't believe it," she added.
Lily made a little gesture of half-amused despair.
"Dearest," she said, "I did. And I liked it. Mother, things have changed a lot in twenty years. Sometimes I think that here, in this house, you don't realize that--" she struggled for a phrase--"that things have changed," she ended, lamely. "The social order, and that sort of thing. You know. Caste." She hesitated. She was young and inarticulate, and when she saw Grace's face, somewhat frightened. But she was not old Anthony's granddaughter for nothing. "This idea of being a Cardew," she went on, "that's ridiculous, you know. I'm only half Cardew, anyhow. The rest is you, dear, and it's got being a Cardew beaten by quite a lot."