Lily did not mind the laughter of good-natured Cousin Charlie and his wife.
She wondered with shy, delicious tremors whether Colin really was in love with her, and whether some day he would come back again and ask her to marry him, and take her away to some nebulous dream world in which all true lovers had their being.
Her dreams and fancies were nearly as unsubstantial as those that she had woven round imaginary adventures, and told herself from day to day, at school. She was still only pretending to be like other people. Really Lily knew that it was all pretence to say that she was now grown up.
Philip said it from time to time, even while himself still treating her as a child, with no slightest claim to either judgment or individuality of her own.
But when he one day found her, more or less surreptitiously, childishly devouring toffee in the garden, he reminded her seriously and with displeasure, of her years.
"You don't want to eat unwholesome sweetstuff, between meals, like a little schoolboy. That's all very well for the nursery," said Philip, disregarding the fact, resentfully remembered by Lily, that no such practice had ever been allowed prevalence in the Stellenthorpe nursery.
"I don't like to see you behaving so babyishly, Lily. It's—it's undignified, and unsuitable. I don't like to see it."
He saw it no more.
Lily, although regarding detection as shameful, was either not sufficiently convinced of the heinousness of eating toffee at nineteen years old, or else lacked sufficient self-control to refrain from surreptitiously indulging her desire for sweet things.
She made inconspicuous expeditions to the village sweet-shop, and returned with her purchases in her pocket, thoroughly despising herself the while.