To picture Lily as willfully going her own gait at that period would be most unfair. She was suffering cruelly; the impulse that led her to meet Louis Akers against her family's wishes was irresistible, but there was a new angle to her visits to the Doyle house. She was going there now, not so much because she wished to go, as because she began to feel that her Aunt Elinor needed her.
There was something mysterious about her Aunt Elinor, mysterious and very sad. Even her smile had pathos in it, and she was smiling less and less. She sat in those bright little gatherings, in them but not of them, unbrilliant and very quiet. Sometimes she gave Lily the sense that like Lily herself she was waiting. Waiting for what?
Lily had a queer feeling too, once or twice, that Elinor was afraid. But again, afraid of what? Sometimes she wondered if Elinor Doyle was afraid of her husband; certainly there were times, when they were alone, when he dropped his unctuous mask and held Elinor up to smiling contempt.
"You can see what a clever wife I have," he said once. "Sometimes I wonder, Elinor, how you have lived with me so long and absorbed so little of what really counts."
"Perhaps the difficulty," Elinor had said quietly, "is because we differ as to what really counts."
Lily brought Elinor something she needed, of youth and irresponsible chatter, and in the end the girl found the older woman depending on her. To cut her off from that small solace was unthinkable. And then too she formed Elinor's sole link with her former world, a world of dinners and receptions, of clothes and horses and men who habitually dressed for dinner, of the wealth and panoply of life. A world in which her interest strangely persisted.
"What did you wear at the country club dance last night?" she would ask.
"A rose-colored chiffon over yellow. It gives the oddest effect, like an Ophelia rose."
Or: "At the Mainwarings? George or Albert?"
"The Alberts."
"Did they ever have any children?"
One day she told her about not going to Newport, and was surprised to see Elinor troubled.
"Why won't you go? It is a wonderful house."
"I don't care to go away, Aunt Nellie." She called her that sometimes.
Elinor had knitted silently for a little. Then: "Do you mind if I say something to you?"
"Say anything you like, of course."