A Poor Wise Man | Page 7

and cheerful self again. Inside the
doorway the girl was standing, her eyes traveling over her little domain
ecstatically.
"How lovely of you not to change a thing, mother!" she said. "I was so
afraid - I know how you hate my stuff. But I might have known you

wouldn't. All the time I've been away, sleeping in a dormitory, and
taking turns at the bath, I have thought of my own little place." She
wandered around, touching her familiar possessions with caressing
hands. "I've a good notion," she declared, "to go to bed immediately,
just for the pleasure of lying in linen sheets again." Suddenly she turned
to her mother. "I'm afraid you'll find I've made some queer friends,
mother."
"What do you mean by 'queer'?"
"People no proper Cardew would care to know." She smiled. "Where's
Ellen? I want to tell her I met somebody she knows out there, the nicest
sort of a boy." She went to the doorway and called lustily: "Ellen!
Ellen!" The rustling of starched skirts answered her from down the
corridor.
"I wish you wouldn't call, dear." Grace looked anxious. "You know
how your grandfather - there's a bell for Ellen."
"What we need around here," said Lily, cheerfully, "is a little more
calling. And if grandfather thinks it is unbefitting the family dignity he
can put cotton in his ears. Come in, Ellen. Ellen, do you know that I
met Willy Cameron in the camp?"
"Willy!" squealed Ellen. "You met Willy? Isn't he a fine boy, Miss
Lily?"
"He's wonderful," said Lily. "I went to the movies with him every
Friday night." She turned to her mother. "You would like him, mother.
He couldn't get into the army. He is a little bit lame. And - " she
surveyed Grace with amused eyes, "you needn't think what you are
thinking. He is tall and thin and not at all good-looking. Is he, Ellen?"
"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