Mademoiselle shrugged her shoulders.
“A phase,” she said. She had got the word from old Anthony, who regarded any mental attitude that did not conform with his own as a condition that would pass. “A phase, only. Now that she is back among familiar things, she will become again a daughter of the house.”
“Then you think this talk about marrying beneath her—”
“She 'as had liberty,” said Mademoiselle, who sometimes lost an aspirate. “It is like wine to the young. It intoxicates. But it, too, passes. In my country—”
But Grace had, for a number of years, heard a great deal of Mademoiselle's country. She settled herself on her pillows.
“Call Castle, please,” she said. “And—do warn her not to voice those ideas of hers to her grandfather. In a country pharmacy, you say?”
“And lame, and not fond of women,” corroborated Mademoiselle. “Ca ne pourrait pas etre mieux, n'est-ce pas?”
CHAPTER II
Shortly after the Civil War Anthony Cardew had left Pittsburgh and spent a year in finding a location for the investment of his small capital. That was in the very beginning of the epoch of steel. The iron business had already laid the foundations of its future greatness, but steel was still in its infancy.