didn't go through life smoothing things for them?"

Grace looked rather stiffly ahead. This young daughter of hers, with her
directness and her smiling ignoring of the small subterfuges of life,
rather frightened her. The terrible honesty of youth! All these years of
ironing the wrinkles out of life, of smoothing the difficulties between
old Anthony and Howard, and now a third generation to contend with. A
pitilessly frank and unconsciously cruel generation. She turned and eyed
Lily uneasily.

"You look tired," she said, "and you need attention. I wish you had let
me send Castle to you."

But she thought that lily was even lovelier than she had remembered her.
Lovely rather than beautiful, perhaps. Her face was less childish than
when she had gone away; there was, in certain of her expressions, an
almost alarming maturity. But perhaps that was fatigue.

"I couldn't have had Castle, mother. I didn't need anything. I've been
very happy, really, and very busy."

"You have been very vague lately about your work."

Lily faced her mother squarely.

"I didn't think you'd much like having me do it, and I thought it would
drive grandfather crazy."

"I thought you were in a canteen."

"Not lately. I've been looking after girls who had followed soldiers to
camps. Some of them were going to have babies, too. It was rather awful.
We married quite a lot of them, however."

The curious reserve that so often exists between mother and daughter
held Grace Cardew dumb. She nodded, but her eyes had slightly hardened.
So this was what war had done to her. She had had no son, and had
thanked God for it during the war, although old Anthony had hated
her all her married life for it. But she had given her daughter, her
clear-eyed daughter, and they had shown her the dregs of life.

Her thoughts went back over the years. To Lily as a child, with
Mademoiselle always at her elbow, and life painted as a thing of beauty.
Love, marriage and birth were divine accidents. Death was a quiet sleep,
with heaven just beyond, a sleep which came only to age, which had
wearied and would rest. Then she remembered the day when Elinor Cardew,
poor unhappy Elinor, had fled back to Anthony's roof to have a baby, and
after a few rapturous weeks for Lily the baby had died.

"But the baby isn't old," Lily had persisted, standing in front of her
mother with angry, accusing eyes.

Grace was not an imaginative woman, but she turned it rather neatly, as