“I’m not going to marry to please him, mother.”

“But you are fond of Alston.”

“I want to marry a man, mother.  Pink is a boy.  He will always be a boy.  He doesn’t think; he just feels.  He is fine and loyal and honest, but I would loathe him in a month.”

“I wish,” said Grace Cardew unhappily, “I wish you had never gone to that camp.”

All afternoon Lily and Grace shopped.  Lily was fitted into shining evening gowns, into bright little afternoon frocks, into Paris wraps.  The Cardew name was whispered through the shops, and great piles of exotic things were brought in for Grace’s critical eye.  Lily’s own attitude was joyously carefree.  Long lines of models walked by, draped in furs, in satins and velvet and chiffon, tall girls, most of them, with hair carefully dressed, faces delicately tinted and that curious forward thrust at the waist and slight advancement of one shoulder that gave them an air of languorous indifference.

“The only way I could get that twist,” Lily confided to her mother, “would be to stand that way and be done up in plaster of paris.  It is the most abandoned thing I ever saw.”

Grace was shocked, and said so.

Sometimes, during the few hours since her arrival, Lily had wondered if her year’s experiences had coarsened her.  There were so many times when her mother raised her eyebrows.  She knew that she had changed, that the granddaughter of old Anthony Cardew who had come back from the war was not the girl who had gone away.  She had gone away amazingly ignorant; what little she had known of life she had learned away at school.  But even there she had not realized the possibility of wickedness and vice in the world.  One of the girls had run away with a music master who was married, and her name was forbidden to be mentioned.  That was wickedness, like blasphemy, and a crime against the Holy Ghost.

She had never heard of prostitution.  Near the camp there was a district with a bad name, and the girls of her organization were forbidden to so much as walk in that direction.  It took her a long time to understand, and she suffered horribly when she did.  There were depths of wickedness, then, and of abasement like that in the world.  It was a bad world, a cruel, sordid world.  She did not want to live in it.

She had had to reorganize all her ideas of life after that.  At first she was flamingly indignant.  God had made His world clean and beautiful, and covered it with flowers and trees that grew, cleanly begotten, from the earth.  Why had He not stopped there?  Why had He soiled it with passion and lust?

It was a little Red Cross nurse who helped her, finally.

“Very well,” she said.  “I see what you mean.  But trees and flowers are not God’s most beautiful gift to the world.”

“I think they are.”

“No.  It is love.”

“I am not talking about love,” said Lily, flushing.