On a pleasant Monday, Lily motored out to the field with Pink Denslow.  It had touched her that he still wanted her, and it had offered an escape from her own worries.  She was fighting a sense of failure that day.  It seemed impossible to reconcile the warring elements at home.  Old Anthony and his son were quarreling over the strike, and Anthony was jibing constantly at Howard over the playground.  It was not so much her grandfather’s irritability that depressed her as his tyranny over the household, and his attitude toward her mother roused her to bitter resentment.

The night before she had left the table after one of his scourging speeches, only to have what amounted to a scene with her mother afterward.

“But I cannot sit by while he insults you, mother.”

“It is just his way.  I don’t mind, really.  Oh, Lily, don’t destroy what I have built up so carefully.  It hurts your father so.”

“Sometimes,” Lily said slowly, “he makes me think Aunt Elinor’s husband was right.  He believes a lot of things—­”

“What things?” Grace had asked, suspiciously.

Lily hesitated.

“Well, a sort of Socialism, for one thing, only it isn’t exactly that.  It’s individualism, really, or I think so; the sort of thing that this house stifles.”  Grace was too horrified for speech.  “I don’t want to hurt you, mother, but don’t you see?  He tyrannizes over all of us, and it’s bad for our souls.  Why should he bellow at the servants?  Or talk to you the way he did to-night?” She smiled faintly.  “We’re all drowning, and I want to swim, that’s all.  Mr. Doyle—­”

“You are talking nonsense,” said Grace sharply.  “You have got a lot of ideas from that wretched house, and now you think they are your own.  Lily, I warn you, if you insist on going back to the Doyles I shall take you abroad.”

Lily turned and walked out of the room, and there was something suggestive of old Anthony in the pitch of her shoulders.  Her anger did not last long, but her uneasiness persisted.  Already she knew that she was older in many ways than Grace; she had matured in the past year more than her mother in twenty, and she felt rather like a woman obeying the mandates of a child.

But on that pleasant Monday she was determined to be happy.

“Old world begins to look pretty, doesn’t it?” said Pink, breaking in on her thoughts.

“Lovely.”

“It’s not a bad place to live in, after all,” said Pink, trying to cheer his own rather unhappy humor.  “There is always spring to expect, when we get low in winter.  And there are horses and dogs, and—­and blossoms on the trees, and all that.”  What he meant was, “If there isn’t love.”

“You are perfectly satisfied with things just as they are, aren’t you?” Lily asked, half enviously.

“Well, I’d change some things.”  He stopped.  He wasn’t going to go round sighing like a furnace.  “But it’s a pretty good sort of place.  I’m for it.”