Mademoiselle carefully cut a thread.

“This—­you were speaking to Ellen of a young man.  Is he a—­what you term brutal?”

Suddenly Lily laughed.

“You poor dear!” she said.  “And mother, too, of course!  You’re afraid I’m in love with Willy Cameron.  Don’t you know that if I were, I’d probably never even mention his name?”

“But is he brutal?” persisted Mademoiselle.

“I’ll tell you about him.  He is a thin, blond young man, tall and a bit lame.  He has curly hair, and he puts pomade on it to take the curl out.  He is frightfully sensitive about not getting in the army, and he is perfectly sweet and kind, and as brutal as a June breeze.  You’d better tell mother.  And you can tell her he isn’t in love with me, or I with him.  You see, I represent what he would call the monied aristocracy of America, and he has the most fearful ideas about us.”

“An anarchist, then?” asked.  Mademoiselle, extremely comforted.

“Not at all.  He says he belongs to the plain people.  The people in between.  He is rather oratorical about them.  He calls them the backbone of the country.”

Mademoiselle relaxed.  She had been too long in old Anthony’s house to consider very seriously the plain people.  Her world, like Anthony Cardew’s, consisted of the financial aristocracy, which invested money in industries and drew out rich returns, while providing employment for the many; and of the employees of the magnates, who had recently shown strong tendencies toward upsetting the peace of the land, and had given old Anthony one or two attacks of irritability when it was better to go up a rear staircase if he were coming down the main one.

“Wait a moment,” said Lily, suddenly.  “I have a picture of him somewhere.”

She disappeared, and Mademoiselle heard her rummaging through the drawers of her dressing table.  She came back with a small photograph in her hand.

It showed a young man, in a large apron over a Red Cross uniform, bending over a low field range with a long-handled fork in his hand.

“Frying doughnuts,” Lily explained.  “I was in this hut at first, and I mixed them and cut them, and he fried them.  We made thousands of them.  We used to talk about opening a shop somewhere, Cardew and Cameron.  He said my name would be fine for business.  He’d fry them in the window, and I’d sell them.  And a coffee machine—­coffee and doughnuts, you know.”

“Not—­seriously?”

At the expression on Mademoiselle’s face Lily laughed joyously.

“Why not?” she demanded.  “And you could be the cashier, like the ones in France, and sit behind a high desk and count money all day.  I’d rather do that than come out,” she added.

“You are going to be a good girl, Lily, aren’t you?”

“If that means letting grandfather use me for a doormat, I don’t know.”

“Lily!”