Resentment was rising fast in Lily, but she kept it down. “I'll tell you about that later,” she said, and slowly got to her feet. “Is that all, mother? You won't see him? I can't bring him here? Isn't there any compromise? Won't you meet me half-way?”
“When you say half-way, you mean all the way, Lily.”
“I wanted you so,” Lily said, drearily, “I need you so just now. I am going to be married, and I have no one to go to. Aunt Elinor doesn't understand, either. Every way I look I find—I suppose I can't come back at all, then.”
“Your grandfather's condition was that you never see this Louis Akers again.”
Lily's resentment left her. Anger was a thing for small matters, trivial affairs. This that was happening, an irrevocable break with her family, was as far beyond anger as it was beyond tears. She wondered dully if any man were worth all this. Perhaps she knew, sub-consciously, that Louis Akers was not. All her exaltation was gone, and in its stead was a sort of dogged determination to see the thing through now, at any cost; to re-make Louis into the man he could be, to build her own house of life, and having built it, to live in it as best she could.
“That is a condition I cannot fulfill, mother. I am engaged to him.”
“Then you love him more than you do any of us, or all of us.”
“I don't know. It is different,” she said vaguely.
She kissed her mother very tenderly when she went away, but there was a feeling of finality in them both. Mademoiselle, waiting at the top of the stairs, heard the door close and could not believe her ears. Grace went upstairs, her face a blank before the servants, and shut herself in her room. And in Lily's boudoir the roses spread a heavy, funereal sweetness over the empty room.