“Not the ghost of a notion. Perhaps she is going to adopt a dozen young Belgians and wants me to draw up the papers.”
“Mercy! I hope not a whole dozen, if I am to stay at Clover Hill with her. Half a dozen would be enough.”
“Want you at Clover Hill?” said Aunt Elinor, when the first greetings were over and she had heard the news. “Why, you dear child, of course I do! Or rather I should, if I were to be there myself. But I’m going to France, too.”
“To France!”
“Red Cross,” with an enthusiastic nod of the perfectly dressed head. “Lou Emery and I are going over. That’s what I stopped off to tell you people. Ran down to New York to see about my papers. It’s all settled. We sail next week. Now I’m hurrying back to shut up Clover Hill. Then for something worth while! Do you know,” the fine eyes turned from contemplation of a great mass of pink roses on the table, “I feel as though I were on the point of beginning to live at last. All my days I have spent dashing about madly in search of a good time. Now—well, now I shall go where I’m sent, live for weeks, maybe, without a bath, sleep in my clothes in any old place, when I sleep at all; but I’m crazy, simply crazy to get over there and begin.”
It was then that Elliott began dimly to sense a predicament. Even then she didn’t recognize it for an impasse. Such things didn’t happen to Elliott Cameron. 14 But she did wish that Quincy had selected another time for isolating her Uncle James’s house. Not that she particularly desired to spend a year, or a fraction of a year, with the James Camerons, but they were preferable to her Uncle Robert’s family, on the principle that ills you know and understand make a safer venture than a jump in the dark. Nothing radical was wrong with the Robert Camerons except that they were dark horses. They lived farther away than the other Camerons, which wouldn’t have mattered—geography seldom bothered a Cameron—if they hadn’t chosen to let it. On second thoughts, perhaps that, however, was exactly what did matter. Elliott understood that the Robert Camerons were poor. More than once she had heard her father say he feared “Bob was hard up.” But Bob was as proud as he was hard up; Elliott knew that Father had never succeeded in lending him any money.
She let these things pass through her mind as she reviewed the situation. Proud and independent and poor—those were worthy qualities, but they did not make any family interesting. They were more apt, Elliott thought, to make it uninteresting. No, the Robert Camerons were out of the question, kindly though they might be. If she must spend a year outside her own home, away from her father-comrade, she preferred to spend it with her own sort.
There is this to be said for Elliott Cameron; she had no mother, had had no mother since she could remember. The mother Elliott could not remember had been a very lovely person, and as broad-minded as she was charming. Elliott had her mother’s charm, a personal magnetism that twined people around her little finger, but she was essentially narrow-minded. With Elliott it was a matter of upbringing, of coming-up rather, since within somewhat wide limits her upbringing had, after 16 all, been largely in her own hands. Henry Cameron had had neither the heart nor the will to thwart his only child.