“Lily!” her mother shouted. “Stop it! Stop that nonsense this instant. Good heavens! your father and I both thought you were getting over it. We thought you’d begun to see the truth about Price Gleason for yourself. What on earth has started you all up again?”
This was a singular question for Mrs. Dodge to be asking, since she herself was the origin of the renewal she thus lamented. Lily had indeed begun to question her own feeling for the romantic Gleason, as she had confessed to Ada within that very hour. Moreover, there had crept upon her lately some faint and secret little shadows of doubt in regard to the tale of Mexican slaughter and other tremendous narratives included by this new Othello as elements of his wooing. Left to herself, Lily might have found her doubt increasing; but her mother had changed all that in a few minutes.
Mrs. Dodge believed she had been accurately describing an unpleasantly absurd and erratic young egoist who had trespassed upon her time, her patience, and her credulity until she at last thought of a fortunate device to get rid of him; but this was not the picture she had painted upon her daughter’s mind. What Mrs. Dodge really made Lily see was a darkly handsome poet adventurer, eloquently telling the story of his life, not to a stirred Desdemona such as she herself had been, but to a cynical matron who sat in frosty judgment, disbelieving him, and then put humiliation upon him. Lily’s pale doubts of him vanished; Mrs. Dodge had made her his champion, with all ardours renewed.
Moreover, no one in the throes of a championing emotion likes to be asked, “What on earth has started you all up again?” Perhaps Lily resented this most of all, for the expression taken by her resentment was the one best calculated to dismay the questioner. “I’m not precisely ‘started up’ again, if you please, Mamma,” she said, suddenly icy, as she turned from the photograph. “It is time you and Papa both understood clearly. I have never stopped caring for Price. I have never cared for any one else.” And, having heard herself say it, she straightway believed it.
Mrs. Dodge uttered a dismal cry. “Oh, murder!” she said. “We’ve got it all to go through again!”
“You cannot change me,” Lily informed her. “Nothing you could possibly say will ever change me.”
“But you know what he is!” Mrs. Dodge wailed, despairingly. “Your own father says there isn’t a word of truth in his whole body, and besides that, didn’t he inherit four thousand dollars from his great-aunt and spend almost every cent of it the day after he got it on an automobile, and then smash the automobile to pieces after a very wild party? You know he did, Lily! He’s irresponsible and he’s dissipated, too; everybody knows he is; and that’s why Mr. Corey didn’t want him to come to their house any more than your father wants him to come to ours. He was interested in Ada Corey before he began to come to see you, Lily.”
“I know all about it,” Lily said with dignity. “He told me, of course, that he’d had a friendship with Ada; and so did she. But Mr. Corey behaved so outrageously to him, they both thought it would be better to give it up.”
“Ada’s father and mother saw what that young man is, Lily,” Mrs. Dodge said, gravely. “They told Ada it was their wish that she shouldn’t receive him or encourage him in any way; and she listened to them and saw that they were right, and she obeyed them, Lily.”
“Yes,” said Lily;—“she’s that sort of a girl. I’m not, Mamma.”