cab, and reaching the house somewhat breathless and excited. She was
driven by an impulse toward the old familiar things; she was homesick
for them all, for her mother, for Mademoiselle, for her own rooms, for
her little toilet table, for her bed and her reading lamp. For the old
house itself.
She was still an alien where she was. Elinor Doyle was a perpetual
enigma to her; now and then she thought she had penetrated behind the
gentle mask that was Elinor's face, only to find beyond it something
inscrutable. There was a dead line in Elinor's life across which Lily
never stepped. Whatever Elinor's battles were, she fought them alone,
and Lily had begun to realize that there were battles.
The atmosphere of the little house had changed. Sometimes, after she
had gone to bed, she heard Doyle's voice from the room across the hall,
raised angrily. He was nervous and impatient; at times he dropped the
unctuousness of his manner toward her, and she found herself looking
into a pair of cold blue eyes which terrified her.
The brilliant little dinners had entirely ceased, with her coming. A
sort of early summer lethargy had apparently settled on the house.
Doyle wrote for hours, shut in the room with the desk; the group of
intellectuals, as he had dubbed them, had dispersed on summer vacations.
But she discovered that there were other conferences being held in the
house, generally late at night.
She learned to know the nights when those meetings were to occur. On
those evenings Elinor always made an early move toward bed, and Lily
would repair to her hot low-ceiled room, to sit in the darkness by the
window and think long, painful thoughts.
That was how she learned of the conferences. She had no curiosity about
them at first. They had something to do with the strike, she considered,
and with that her interest died. Strikes were a symptom, and ultimately,
through great thinkers like Mr. Doyle, they would discover the cure for
the disease that caused them. She was quite content to wait for that
time.
Then, one night, she went downstairs for a glass of ice water, and found
the lower floor dark, and subdued voices coming from the study. The
kitchen door was standing open, and she closed and locked it, placing
the key, as was Elinor's custom, in a table drawer. The door was partly
glass, and Elinor had a fear of the glass being broken and thus the key
turned in the lock by some intruder.
On toward morning there came a vio
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