Sylvia was still called Lily's friend, although they had much less in common than had Lily and Dorothy, now that Lily was accounted grown up, while Sylvia had three more years of school before her.
Charlie and Ethel Hardinge gave tennis parties and small dances, and picnic parties, and talked as proudly and volubly of "the girls" as they had once talked of "the kiddies-widdies."
They included Lily and Kenneth in everything.
"We've got two boys coming to stay with us next week. It ought to be rather fun," Dorothy Hardinge proclaimed. "There are never enough men to go round, here."
"There are so few families with sons, and anyway the boys always seem to be years younger than the girls—like Kenneth," said Janet discontentedly.
It had been the fashion at Bridgecrap to deride as early Victorian any assumption of the desirability of masculine society under any conditions, but Dorothy Hardinge at least had candidly readjusted her point of view amongst her new surroundings.
"We shall try and give a dance, while they're here. One of them is father's ward, Colin Eastwood—he's eighteen and awfully nice. Sort of quiet, you know, but nice. And he's bringing a friend, someone we don't know. Father said he might. He's at some University or other, and he's about twenty-two, or something like that. He'll probably think himself as old as anything, compared to us," said Dorothy with a little laugh that betrayed excitement.
Lily felt excited, too. She had met very few boys indeed that were beyond the age of sailor suits, but she had indulged in as many romantic fancies of possible future conquests for herself, as were allowed her by the ineradicable memory of the convent theory that masculinity was ipso facto something to be, as far as possible, ignored by the modest feminine.
Much reading and an uncontrollable imagination had merely eradicated the recollection of conventual shibboleths, but Lily was still sufficiently bound by them to feel very much ashamed when she found herself wondering whether Colin Eastwood and his friend would think that she was pretty. Dorothy said that she was.
From time to time, when she had on a new hat or put on a summer frock for the first time, her father looked at her with an air of rather melancholy gratification, and then made some small, detached observation at the very end of the day, when it might be assumed to have no special significance to the immediate occasion: