But Lily did not now feel that any amount of subtle "niceness" on her part could possibly stave off a declaration which had got so far as to receive the sanction of her father.
Staring into the fire, she thought that she was making up her mind when she told herself resolutely: "Now, I must decide once and for all whether I'm in love with him or not."
Aunt Clo's words—almost the only ones that had remained with her out of the many so lavishly scattered for her benefit—returned to Lily with a sense of uneasiness.
"If you can ask yourself for a moment, Do I love? then it is certain that you do not...."
Lily did not want to think that it was certain that she did not love Nicholas Aubray.
There were times when she did love him, she felt convinced. She was less certain whether she was "in love" with him.
Oddly enough, the memory of the boy Colin Eastwood recurred to her again and again, not by value of his own personality, but as the object round which certain infinitely vague and delicate emotions had centred.
"But they were such little things," Lily murmured to herself, frowning.
It had mattered whether or no Colin had the place next to hers at the picnics—whether, in exchanging good-nights at the end of a moonlight walk, his last "good-night" had been for her—whether they were partners in the tennis tournament or not—whether they danced the last waltz of the evening together. If he was in the garden while the rest of them were clustered round Lily at the piano, she acknowledged a slight feeling of restlessness that consciously vanished at his footstep—which she could always distinguish—on the threshold of the French window.
It had, somehow, been an incident in the day, if he touched her hand in helping her up some steep bank, or in handing her a tennis ball. Philip's unspecified, but thoroughly understood, condemnation of the whole slight episode had relegated it to the extreme background of Lily's consciousness. It had become foolish, something to be slightly despised—on account, she supposed of Colin's youthfulness and the negative property described by her father as "leading to nothing."