“Do be a little lady,” Mademoiselle would say.

She had got, somehow, to feel that impulse was wrong.  It ranked with disobedience.  It partook of the nature of sin.  People who did wicked things did them on impulse, and were sorry ever after; but then it was too late.

As she grew older, she added something to that.  Impulses of the mind led to impulses of the body, and impulse was wrong.  Passion was an impulse of the body.  Therefore it was sin.  It was the one sin one could not talk about, so one was never quite clear about it.  However, one thing seemed beyond dispute; it was predominatingly a masculine wickedness.  Good women were beyond and above it, its victims sometimes, like those girls at the camp, or its toys, like the sodden creatures in the segregated district who hung, smiling their tragic smiles, around their doorways in the late afternoons.

But good women were not like that.  If they were, then they were not good.  They did not lie awake remembering the savage clasp of a man’s arms, knowing all the time that this was not love, but something quite different.  Or if it was love, that it was painful and certainly not beautiful.

Sometimes she thought about Willy Cameron.  He had had very exalted ideas about love.  He used to be rather oratorical about it.

“It’s the fundamental principle of the universe,” he would say, waving his pipe wildly.  “But it means suffering, dear child.  It feeds on martyrdom and fattens on sacrifice.  And as the h.c. of l. doesn’t affect either commodity, it lives forever.”

“What does it do, Willy, if it hasn’t any martyrdom and sacrifice to feed on?  Do you mean to say that when it is returned and everybody is happy, it dies?”

“Practically,” he had said.  “It then becomes domestic contentment, and expresses itself in the shape of butcher’s bills and roast chicken on Sundays.”

But that had been in the old care-free days, before Willy had thought he loved her, and before she had met Louis.

She made a desperate effort one day to talk to her mother.  She wanted, somehow, to be set right in her own eyes.  But Grace could not meet her even half way; she did not know anything about different sorts of love, but she did know that love was beautiful, if you met the right man and married him.  But it had to be some one who was your sort, because in the end marriage was only a sort of glorified companionship.

The moral in that, so obviously pointed at Louis Akers, invalidated the rest of it for Lily.

She was in a state of constant emotional excitement by that time, and it was only a night or two after that she quarreled with her grandfather.  There had been a dinner party, a heavy, pompous affair, largely attended, for although spring was well advanced, the usual May hegira to the country or the coast had not yet commenced.  Industrial conditions in and around the city were too disturbed for the large employers to get away, and following Lent there had been a sort of sporadic gayety, covering a vast uneasiness.  There was to be no polo after all.