Her thoughts went back over the years.  To Lily as a child, with Mademoiselle always at her elbow, and life painted as a thing of beauty.  Love, marriage and birth were divine accidents.  Death was a quiet sleep, with heaven just beyond, a sleep which came only to age, which had wearied and would rest.  Then she remembered the day when Elinor Cardew, poor unhappy Elinor, had fled back to Anthony’s roof to have a baby, and after a few rapturous weeks for Lily the baby had died.

“But the baby isn’t old,” Lily had persisted, standing in front of her mother with angry, accusing eyes.

Grace was not an imaginative woman, but she turned it rather neatly, as she told Howard later.

“It was such a nice baby,” she said, feeling for an idea.  “I think probably God was lonely without it, and sent an angel for it again.”

“But it is still upstairs,” Lily had insisted.  She had had a curious instinct for truth, even then.  But there Grace’s imagination had failed her, and she sent for Mademoiselle.  Mademoiselle was a good Catholic, and very clear in her own mind, but what she left in Lily’s brain was a confused conviction that every person was two persons, a body and a soul.  Death was simply a split-up, then.  One part of you, the part that bathed every morning and had its toe-nails cut, and went to dancing school in a white frock and thin black silk stockings and carriage boots over pumps, that part was buried and would only came up again at the Resurrection.  But the other part was all the time very happy, and mostly singing.

Lily did not like to sing.

Then there was the matter of tears.  People only cried when they hurt themselves.  She had been told that again and again when she threatened tears over her music lesson.  But when Aunt Elinor had gone away she had found Mademoiselle, the deadly antagonist of tears, weeping.  And here again Grace remembered the child’s wide, insistent eyes.

“Why?”

“She is sorry for Aunt Elinor.”

“Because her baby’s gone to God?  She ought to be glad, oughtn’t she?”

“Not that;” said Grace, and had brought a box of chocolates and given her one, although they were not permitted save one after each meal.

Then Lily had gone away to school.  How carefully the school had been selected!  When she came back, however, there had been no more questions, and Grace had sighed with relief.  That bad time was over, anyhow.  But Lily was rather difficult those days.  She seemed, in some vague way, resentful.  Her mother found her, now and then, in a frowning, half-defiant mood.  And once, when Mademoiselle had ventured some jesting remark about young Alston Denslow, she was stupefied to see the girl march out of the room, her chin high, not to be seen again for hours.

Grace’s mind was sub-consciously remembering those things even when she spoke.

“I didn’t know you were having to learn about that side of life,” she said, after a brief silence.