he pipe organ which filled the space behind the staircase,
and played a little, but she had never been very proficient, and her
own awkwardness annoyed her. In the dining room she could hear the men
talking, Howard quietly, his father in short staccato barks. She left
the organ and wandered into her mother's morning room, behind the
drawing room, where Grace sat with the coffee tray before her.

"I'm afraid I'm going to be terribly on your hands, mother," she said,
"I don't know what to do with myself, so how can you know what to do
with me?"

"It is going to be rather stupid for you at first, of course," Grace
said. "Lent, and then so many of the men are not at home. Would you like
to go South?"

"Why, I've just come home!"

"We can have some luncheons, of course. Just informal ones. And there
will be small dinners. You'll have to get some clothes. I saw Suzette
yesterday. She has some adorable things."

"I'd love them. Mother, why doesn't he want father to go into politics?"

Grace hesitated.

"He doesn't like change, for one thing. But I don't know anything about
politics. Suzette says--"

"Will he try to keep him from being elected?"

"He won't support him. Of course I hardly think he would oppose him. I
really don't understand about those things."

"You mean you don't understand him. Well, I do, mother. He has run
everything, including father, for so long--"

"Lily!"

"I must, mother. Why, out at the camp--" She checked herself. "All the
papers say the city is badly governed, and that he is responsible. And
now he is going to fight his own son! The more I think about it, the
more I understand about Aunt Elinor. Mother, where do they live?"

Grace looked apprehensively toward the door. "You are not allowed to
visit her."

"You do."

"That's different. And I only go once or twice a year."

"Just because she married a poor man, a man whose father--"

"Not at all. That is all dead and buried. He is a very dangerous man. He
is running a Socialist newspaper, and now he is inciting the mill men
to strike. He is preaching terrible things. I haven't been there for
months."

"What do you mean by terrible things, mother?"

"Your father says it amounts to a revolution. I believe he calls it a
general strike. I don't really know much about it."

Lily pondered that.

"Socialism isn't revolution, mother, is it? But even then--is all this
because grandfather drove his father to--"

"I wish you wouldn'