“Yes?”
“You don’t know Miss Lily, mebbe.”
“No.... I’ve seen her years ago riding through the Town.”
“Then you don’t know what she’s like.... The old Missie can die now that Miss Lily’s come home. She jus’ couldn’t die without seein’ Miss Lily.”
Philip scarcely heard him. He was thinking about his own troubles, and Lily Shane was a creature who belonged to another world whose borders would never touch his own. Even as a boy, looking after her as she rode in the mulberry victoria up Park Avenue, it never occurred to him that he would ever come nearer to her. There was something magnificent about her that set her apart from all the others in the Town. And there was always the wicked glamour that enveloped one who, it was whispered, had had a child out of wedlock and then declined to marry its father.
How could Lily Shane ever touch the world of Uncle Elmer and Naomi and Emma and Mabelle? No, she did not exist for him. She was like one of the actresses he had followed furtively along Main Street as a boy, because a mysterious, worldly glamour clung to those ladies who appeared in town one night and disappeared the next into the great world. No creature could have been more remote than these coryphées from the slate-colored house and the prayer-meetings of the Reverend Castor.
6
It was the Reverend Castor himself who greeted Philip on the doorstep when he reached home at last. Philip would have avoided him, but the clergyman was coming down the path as he turned into it and so there was no escape.
He greeted Philip with a smile, saying, “Well, it’s good to see you about again, my boy. We had a bad time over you ... thought you weren’t going to make the grade.”
Philip grinned. “I’m not so easy to be rid of.” He felt a sudden refreshing sense of superiority over the preacher, strange in all his experience. It was simply that he had no longer any awe of him as a man of God.