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.
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