"Nonsense, parson!" he expostulated jauntily now. "Look on the lips while they are red! She's young!"
"Youth doesn't excuse folly," said grandfather severely.
"It exudes it, however," the other argued.
I turned away, resolutely, from their bickering. I had enough to contend with besides them—for suddenly I had begun wondering what on earth mother would say, after she'd said: "Grace, you amaze me!"
CHAPTER IX
MAITLAND TAIT
The only difference between the houses in West Clydemont Place and museums was that there was no admission fee at the front door. Otherwise they were identical, for the "auld lang syne" flavor greeted you the moment you put foot into that corner of the town. You knew instinctively that every family there owned its own lawn-mower and received crested invitations in the morning mail.
Yet it was certainly not fashionable! Indeed, from a butler-and-porte-cochère standpoint it was shabby. The business of owning your own lawn-mower arises from a state of mind, rather than from a condition of finances, anyway. We were poor, but aloof—and strung high with the past-tension. The admiral, the ambassador and the artist rubbed our aristocracy in on any stray caller who lingered in the hall, if they had failed to be pricked by it on the point of grandfather's jeweled sword in the library.
I saw 1919 through a new vista as I came up to it in the late dusk, following the Flag Day reception, and I wondered what the effect of all this antiquity would be on the mind of a man who so clearly disregarded the grandfather clause in one's book of life. I hoped that he would be amused by it, as he had been by the long-tailed D. A. R. badge on my coat.
"You'd better have a little fire kindled up in the library, Grace," mother observed chillingly just after lunch that next afternoon. "It's true it's June, but—"
"But the day is bleak and raw," I answered, with a sudden cordial sense of relief that she was on speaking terms with me again. "Certainly I'll tell Cicely to make a fire."