stances made it necessary. Women said this, not because they believed it, but because they hated Ellen and old Julia Shane.
In her sooty house among the Mills this grim old woman received the news, rather later than most (it was brought her by one of her negro servants) with a sort of wicked delight. This was a great-niece worthy of her blood, who took matters into her own hands and acted, quickly, sensationally! And before an hour had passed she seated herself with a quill pen and wrote the news triumphantly to Lily who, that morning, had started back to Paris. The letter finally overtook her daughter a month later when Lily, installed once more in her big house in the Rue Raynouard, sat awaiting the arrival of her friend the Baron. To him she read it aloud, creating for his pleasure a picture of the smoky Town, of the effect the news would have upon its residents. She described to him the fierce impetuous Ellen. She told him the Town was a town like Roubaix or Tourcoing or Lille, only more provincial.
Across the silver-laden tea table in her long drawing-room in Passy, she said, "You may see her one day yourself. I've told her to come here and live with me. She wants to be a great pianist. . . . A girl like that can accomplish anything she sets her mind to. . . . But I don't think you'll like her. . . . She's too powerful."
Nearer home, the news came to May Seton and her mother a little after midnight when Jimmy, sent a second time as messenger, brought back the suspicion of their elopement. In the beginning the situation was embarrassing, for May in her optimism had spread the story that the fiançailles of Clarence and herself had been accomplished. Once this had passed, she experienced a sort of inverted triumph, superior if possible even to that which might have arisen from the capture of a New York young man. She understood presently that people regarded her as a martyr, a virgin robbed of her lover, and once she got the full sense of this she played the rôle to perfection. Dressed in her most somber clothing, as if she mourned a lover worse than dead, she paid
