She went to the pipe organ which filled the space behind the staircase, and played a little, but she had never been very proficient, and her own awkwardness annoyed her.  In the dining room she could hear the men talking, Howard quietly, his father in short staccato barks.  She left the organ and wandered into her mother’s morning room, behind the drawing room, where Grace sat with the coffee tray before her.

“I’m afraid I’m going to be terribly on your hands, mother,” she said, “I don’t know what to do with myself, so how can you know what to do with me?”

“It is going to be rather stupid for you at first, of course,” Grace said.  “Lent, and then so many of the men are not at home.  Would you like to go South?”

“Why, I’ve just come home!”

“We can have some luncheons, of course.  Just informal ones.  And there will be small dinners.  You’ll have to get some clothes.  I saw Suzette yesterday.  She has some adorable things.”

“I’d love them.  Mother, why doesn’t he want father to go into politics?”

Grace hesitated.

“He doesn’t like change, for one thing.  But I don’t know anything about politics.  Suzette says—­”

“Will he try to keep him from being elected?”

“He won’t support him.  Of course I hardly think he would oppose him.  I really don’t understand about those things.”

“You mean you don’t understand him.  Well, I do, mother.  He has run everything, including father, for so long—­”

“Lily!”

“I must, mother.  Why, out at the camp—­” She checked herself.  “All the papers say the city is badly governed, and that he is responsible.  And now he is going to fight his own son!  The more I think about it, the more I understand about Aunt Elinor.  Mother, where do they live?”

Grace looked apprehensively toward the door.  “You are not allowed to visit her.”

“You do.”

“That’s different.  And I only go once or twice a year.”

“Just because she married a poor man, a man whose father—­”

“Not at all.  That is all dead and buried.  He is a very dangerous man.  He is running a Socialist newspaper, and now he is inciting the mill men to strike.  He is preaching terrible things.  I haven’t been there for months.”

“What do you mean by terrible things, mother?”

“Your father says it amounts to a revolution.  I believe he calls it a general strike.  I don’t really know much about it.”

Lily pondered that.

“Socialism isn’t revolution, mother, is it?  But even then—­is all this because grandfather drove his father to—­”

“I wish you wouldn’t, Lily.  Of course it is not that.  I daresay he believes what he preaches.  He ought to be put into jail.  Why the country lets such men go around, preaching sedition, I don’t understand.”

Lily remembered something else Willy Cameron had said, and promptly repeated it.