Yet even then, standing
before them, forced to a defiance she did not feel, she was puzzled
as well as angry. They were wrong, and yet in some strange way
they were right, too. She was Cardew enough to get their point of
view. But she was Cardew enough, too, to defy them.
She did it rather gently.
"You must understand," she said, her hands folded in front of her,
"that it is not so much that I care to see the people you are talking
about. It is that I feel I have the right to choose my own friends."
"Friends!" sneered old Anthony. "A third-rate lawyer, a--"
"That is not the point, grandfather. I went away to school when I
was a little girl. I have been away for five years. You cannot
seem to realize that I am a woman now, not a child. You bring me
in here like a bad child."
In the end old Anthony had slammed out of the room. There were
arguments after that, tears on Grace's part, persuasion on Howard's;
but Lily had frozen against what she considered their tyranny, and
Howard found in her a sort of passive resistance, that drove him
frantic.
"Very well," he said finally. "You have the arrogance of youth,
and its cruelty, Lily.
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