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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Squirrel-Cage, by Dorothy Canfield
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Squirrel-Cage
+
+Author: Dorothy Canfield
+
+Illustrator: John Alanzo Williams
+
+Release Date: December 8, 2007 [EBook #23768]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SQUIRREL-CAGE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Paul stood by her, looking down into her eyes, bending
+over her, smiling, pressing, confident, masterful. (Page 96)]
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+                           THE SQUIRREL-CAGE
+
+                                   By
+                            DOROTHY CANFIELD
+
+                         With Illustrations By
+                          JOHN ALONZO WILLIAMS
+
+                                New York
+                         HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+                                  1912
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+                         Copyright, 1911, 1912,
+                                   By
+                          THE RIDGWAY COMPANY
+
+                            Copyright, 1912,
+                                   By
+                         HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+
+                         Published March, 1912
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+                                CONTENTS
+
+
+                                 BOOK I
+
+                           THE FAIRY PRINCESS
+
+ CHAPTER                                                            PAGE
+
+       I An American Family                                            3
+      II American Beauties                                            12
+     III Picking up the Threads                                       22
+      IV The Dawn                                                     32
+       V The Day Begins                                               42
+      VI Lydia's Godfather                                            55
+     VII Outside the Labyrinth                                        61
+    VIII The Shadow of the Coming Event                               78
+      IX Father and Daughter                                          88
+       X Casus Belli                                                  99
+
+
+                                BOOK II
+
+                         IN THE LOCOMOTIVE CAB
+
+      XI What is Best for Lydia                                      115
+     XII A Sop to the Wolves                                         122
+    XIII Lydia Decides in Perfect Freedom                            131
+     XIV Mid-Season Nerves                                           139
+      XV A Half-Hour's Liberty                                       154
+     XVI Engaged to be Married                                       165
+    XVII Card-Dealing and Patent Candles                             177
+
+
+                                BOOK III
+
+                          A SUITABLE MARRIAGE
+
+   XVIII Two Sides to the Question                                   193
+     XIX Lydia's New Motto                                           207
+      XX An Evening's Entertainment                                  215
+     XXI An Element of Solidity                                      226
+    XXII The Voices in the Wood                                      233
+   XXIII For Ariadne's Sake                                          244
+    XXIV "Through Pity and Terror Effecting a
+         Purification of the Heart"                                  261
+     XXV A Black Mile-stone                                          270
+    XXVI A Hint from Childhood                                       277
+   XXVII Lydia Reaches Her Goal and has Her Talk with Her Husband    289
+  XXVIII "The American Man"                                          307
+    XXIX ".........In Tragic Life, God Wot, No Villain Need be.
+         Passions Spin the Plot"                                     318
+     XXX Tribute to the Minotaur                                     328
+
+
+                                BOOK IV
+
+                   BUT IT IS NOT TOO LATE FOR ARIADNE
+
+    XXXI Protection from the Minotaur                                337
+   XXXII As Ariadne Saw It                                           342
+  XXXIII What is Best for the Children?                              351
+   XXXIV Through the Long Night                                      359
+    XXXV The Swaying Balance                                         365
+   XXXVI Another Day Begins                                          369
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+                             ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+Paul stood by her, looking down into her eyes,
+bending over her, smiling, pressing, confident,
+masterful (Page 96)                                         Frontispiece
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+"You say beautiful things!" he replied quietly. "My
+rough quarters are glorified for me"                                  69
+
+"No, no; I can't--see him--I can't stand any more--"                 137
+
+"I see everything now," she went on. "He could not stop."            272
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+                           THE SQUIRREL-CAGE
+
+                                 BOOK I
+
+                           THE FAIRY PRINCESS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+AN AMERICAN FAMILY
+
+
+The house of the Emery family was a singularly good example of the
+capacity of wood and plaster and brick to acquire personality. It was
+the physical symbol of its owners' position in life; it was the history
+of their career, written down for all to see, and as such they felt in
+it the most justifiable pride. When Mr. and Mrs. Emery, directly after
+their wedding in a small Central New York village, had gone West to Ohio
+they had spent their tiny capital in building a small story-and-a-half
+cottage, ornamented with the jig-saw work and fancy turning popular in
+1872, and this had been the nucleus of their present rambling,
+picturesque, many-roomed home. Every step in the long series of changes
+which had led from its first state to its last had a profound and
+gratifying significance for the Emerys, and its final condition,
+prosperous, modern, sophisticated, with the right kind of woodwork in
+every room that showed, with the latest, most unobtrusively artistic
+effects in decoration, represented their culminating well-earned
+position in the inner circle of the best society of Endbury.
+
+Moreover, they felt that just as the house had been attained with
+effort, self-denial and careful calculations, yet still without
+incurring debt, so their social position had been secured by unremitting
+diligence and care, but with no loss of self-respect or even of dignity.
+They were honestly proud both of their house and of their list of
+acquaintances and saw no reason to regard them as less worthy
+achievements of an industrious life than their four creditable grown-up
+children or Judge Emery's honorable reputation at the bar. In their
+youth they had conceived of certain things as worth attaining. They had
+worked hard for these things and their unabashed pleasure in possessing
+them had the vivid and substantial quality which comes from a keen
+memory of battles with a world none too ready to grant human desires.
+
+The two older children, George and Marietta, could remember those early
+struggling days with almost as fresh an emotion as that of their
+parents. Indeed, Marietta, now a competent, sharp-eyed matron of
+thirty-two, could not see the most innocuous colored lithograph without
+an uncontrollable wave of bitterness, so present to her mind was the
+period when they painfully groped their way out of chromos.
+
+The date of that epoch coincided with the date of their first
+acquaintance with the Hollisters. The Hollisters were Endbury's First
+Family; literally so, for they had come up from their farm in Kentucky
+to settle in Endbury when it was but a frontier post. It was a part of
+their superiority over other families that their traditions took
+cognizance of the time when great stumps from the primeval forest stood
+in what was now Endbury's public square, the hub of interurban trolley
+traffic, whence the big, noisy cars started for their infinitely
+radiating journeys over the flat, fertile country about the little city.
+The particular Mrs. Hollister who, at the time the Emerys began to
+pierce the upper crust, was the leader of Endbury society, had discarded
+chromos as much as five years before. Mrs. Emery and Marietta, newly
+admitted to the honor of her acquaintance, wondered to themselves at the
+cold monotony of her black and white engravings. The artlessness of this
+wonder struck shame to their hearts when they chanced to learn that the
+lady had repaid it with a worldly-wise amusement at their own
+highly-colored waterfalls and snow-capped mountain-peaks. Marietta
+could recall as piercingly as if it were yesterday, in how crestfallen a
+chagrin she and her mother had gazed at their parlor after this
+incident, their disillusioned eyes open for the first time to the
+futility of its claim to sophistication. As for the incident that had
+led to the permanent retiring from their table of the monumental
+salt-and-pepper "caster" which had been one of their most prized wedding
+presents, the Emerys refused to allow themselves to remember it, so
+intolerably did it spell humiliation.
+
+Even the oldest son, prosperous, well-established manufacturer that he
+was, could not recall without a shudder his first dinner-party. A branch
+of the Hollisters had moved next door to the Emerys and, to Mrs. Emery's
+great satisfaction, an easy neighborly acquaintance had sprung up
+between the two families. Secure in this familiarity, and not
+distinguishing the immense difference between a chance invitation to
+drop in to dinner and a formal invitation to dine, the young
+business-man had almost forgotten the date for which he had been bidden.
+Remembering it with a start, he had gone straight from his office to the
+house of his hosts, supposing that he would be able, as he had done many
+times before, to wash his face and hands in the bath-room and brush his
+hair in the room of the son of the house.
+
+The sight of a black man in evening dress, who opened the door to him
+instead of the usual maid, sent a vague apprehension through his
+preoccupied mind, but it was not until he found himself in the room set
+apart for the masculine guests and saw everyone arrayed in
+"swallow-tails," as he thought of them, that he realized what he had
+done. The emotion of the moment was one that made a mark on his life.
+
+He had an instant's wild notion of making some excuse to go home and
+dress, for his plight was by no means due to necessity. He had a correct
+outfit of evening clothes, bought at the urgent command of his mother,
+which he had worn several times at public dinners given by the city
+Board of Trade and once at a dancing party at the home of the head of
+his firm. However, the hard sense which made him successful in his
+business kept him from a final absurdity now. He had been seen, and he
+decided grimly that he would be, on the whole, a shade more laughable if
+he appeared later in a changed costume.
+
+He was twenty-one years old at that time; he considered himself a man
+grown. He had been in business for five years and his foot was already
+set firmly on the ladder of commercial success on which he was to mount
+high, but not for nothing had he felt about him all his life the
+inextinguishable desire of his family to outgrow rusticity. He chided
+himself for unmanly pettiness, but the fact remained that throughout the
+interminable evening the sight of his gray striped trousers or colored
+cuffs affected him to a chagrin that was like a wave of physical nausea.
+Four years later he had married a handsome young lady from among the
+Hollister connections, and, moving away to Cleveland, where no memory of
+his antecedents could handicap him, had begun a new social career as
+eminently successful as his rapid commercial expansion. He forced
+himself sometimes to think of that long-past evening as one presses on a
+scar to learn how much soreness is left in an old wound, and he smiled
+at the little tragedy of egotism it had been to him. But it was a wry
+smile.
+
+A brighter recollection to all the Emerys was the justly complacent and
+satisfied remembrance of the house grounds during the first really
+successful social event they had achieved. It was a lawn-fête, given for
+the benefit of St. Luke's church, which Mrs. Emery and Marietta had
+recently joined. Socially, it was the first fruits of their conversion
+from Congregationalism. The weather was fine, the roses were out, the
+very best people were there, the bazaar was profitable, and the dowager
+of the Hollister matrons had spoken warm words of admiration of the
+competent way in which the occasion had been managed to Mrs. Emery,
+smiling and flushed in an indomitably self-respecting pleasure. The
+older Emerys still sometimes spoke of that afternoon and evening as
+parents remember the hour when their baby first walked alone, with
+something of the same mixture of pride in the later achievements of the
+child and of tenderness for its early weakness.
+
+The youngest of the Emerys, many years the junior of her brothers and
+sister, knew nothing at all of the anxious bitter-sweet of these early
+endeavors for sophistication. By the time she came to conscious,
+individual life the summit had been virtually reached. It is not to be
+denied that Lydia had witnessed several abrupt changes in the family
+ideal of household decoration or of entertaining, but since they were
+exactly contemporaneous with similar changes on the part of the
+Hollisters and other people in their circle, these revolutions of taste
+brought with them no sense of humiliation. Such, for instance, was the
+substitution for carpets of hardwood floors and rugs as oriental as the
+purse would allow. Lydia could remember gorgeously flowered carpets on
+every Emery floor, but since they also covered all the prosperous floors
+in town at the same time, it was not more painful to have found them
+attractive than to have worn immensely large sleeves or preposterously
+blousing shirt waists, to have ridden bicycles, or read E. P. Roe, or
+anything else that everybody used to do and did no more. She could
+remember, also, when charades and book-parties were considered amusing
+pastimes for grown-ups, but in passing beyond these primitive tastes the
+Emerys had been well abreast of their contemporaries. The last charade
+party had not been held in _their_ parlors, they congratulated
+themselves.
+
+A philosophic observer who had known the history of Mrs. Emery's life
+might have found something pathetic in her pleasure at Lydia's
+light-hearted jesting at the funny old things people used to think
+pretty and the absurd pursuits they used to think entertaining. It was
+to her a symbol that her daughter had escaped what had caused her so
+much suffering, the uneasy, self-distrusting dread lest she might still
+be finding pretty things that up-to-date people thought grotesque; lest
+suddenly what she had toiled so painfully to obtain should somehow turn
+out to be not the "right thing" after all. Marietta did not recall more
+vividly than did her mother the trying period that had elapsed between
+their new enlightenment on the subject of chromos and the day when an
+unexpected large fee from a client of Mr. Emery (not yet Judge) enabled
+them to hang their Protestant walls with engravings of pagan gods and
+Roman Catholic saints. For their problem had never been the simple one
+of merely discovering the right thing. There had always been added to it
+the complication of securing the right thing out of an income by no
+means limitless. The head of the household had enjoyed the success that
+might have been predicted from his whole-souled absorption in his
+profession, but Judge Emery came of old-fashioned rural stock with
+inelastic ideas of honesty, and though he was more than willing to toil
+early and late to supply funds for his family and satisfy whatever form
+of ambition his women-folk might decree to be the best one, he was not
+willing to take advantage of the perquisites of his position, and never,
+as the phrase in the town ran, "made on the side." Of his temptations
+and of his stout resistance to them, his wife and children knew no more,
+naturally, than of any of the other details of his professional life,
+which, according to the custom of their circle, were as remote and
+hidden from them as if he had departed each morning after his hearty
+early breakfast into another planet; but his wife was proud of the
+integrity which she divined in her husband and, as she often declared
+roundly to Marietta, would not have exchanged his good name for a much
+larger income.
+
+Indeed, the acridity which for Marietta lingered about the recollection
+of their efforts to make themselves over did not exist in the more amply
+satisfied mind of her mother. The difference showed itself visibly in
+the contrast between the daughter's face, stamped with a certain tired,
+unflagging intensity of endeavor, and the freshness of the older woman.
+At thirty-two, Marietta looked, perhaps, no older than her age, but
+obviously more worn by the strain of life than her mother at fifty-six.
+Sometimes, as she noted in her mirror the sharp lines of a fatigue that
+was almost bitterness, she experienced a certain unnerving uncertainty,
+a total lack of zest for what she so eagerly struggled to attain, and
+she envied her mother's single-minded satisfaction in getting what she
+wanted.
+
+Mrs. Emery had enjoyed the warfare of her life heartily; the victories
+for their own sake, the defeats because they had spurred her on to fresh
+and finally successful efforts, and the remembrance of both was sweet to
+her. She loved her husband for himself and for what he had been able to
+give her, and she loved her children ardently, although she had been
+sorely vexed by her second son's unfortunate marriage. He had always
+been a discordant note in the family concert, the veiled, unconscious,
+uneasy skepticism of Marietta bursting out openly in Henry as a
+careless, laughing cynicism, excessively disconcerting to his mother.
+She sometimes thought he had married the grocer's daughter out of
+"contrariness." The irritation which surrounded that event, and the play
+of cross-purposes and discord which had filled the period until the
+misguided young people had voluntarily exiled themselves to the Far
+West, remained more of a sore spot in Mrs. Emery's mind than any blow
+given or taken in her lifelong campaign for distinction. She admitted
+frankly to herself that it was a relief that Harry was no longer near
+her, although her mother's heart ached for the Harry he had seemed to
+her before his rebellion. She fancied that she would enjoy him as of old
+if the litter of inconvenient persons and facts lying between them could
+but be cleared away; with a voluntary blindness not uncommon in parents,
+refusing to recognize that these superficial differences were only the
+outward expression of a fundamental alienation within. At all events, it
+was futile to speculate about the matter, since the width of the
+continent and her son's intense distaste for letter-writing separated
+them. She had come, therefore, to turn all her attention and proud
+affection on her youngest child.
+
+It seemed to her sometimes that Lydia had been granted her by a
+merciful Providence in order that she might make that "fresh start all
+over again" which is the never-realized ideal of erring humanity.
+Marietta had been a young lady fourteen years before, and fourteen years
+meant much--meant everything to people who progressed as fast as the
+Emerys. Uncertain of themselves, they had not ventured to launch
+Marietta boldly upon the waves of a society the chart of which was so
+new to them. She had no coming-out party. She simply put on long skirts,
+coiled her black hair on top of her head, and began going to evening
+parties with a few young men who were amused by the tart briskness of
+her tongue and attracted by the comeliness of her healthful youth. She
+had married the first man who proposed to her--a young insurance agent.
+Since then they had lived in a very comfortable, middling state of
+harmony, apparently on about the same social scale as Marietta's
+parents. That this feat was accomplished on a much smaller income was
+due to Marietta's unrivaled instinct and trained capacity for keeping up
+appearances.
+
+All this history had been creditable, but nothing more; and Mrs. Emery
+often looked at her elder daughter with compunction for her own earlier
+ignorance and helplessness. She could have done so much more for
+Marietta if she had only known how. Mrs. Mortimer was, however, a rather
+prickly personality with whom to attempt to sympathize, and in general
+her mother felt the usual -in-law conclusion about her daughter's life:
+that Marietta could undoubtedly have done better than to marry her
+industrious, negligible husband, but that, on the whole, she might have
+done worse; and it was much to be hoped that her little boy would
+resemble the Emerys and not the Mortimers.
+
+No such philosophical calm restrained her emotions about Lydia. She was
+in positive beauty and charm all that poor Marietta had not been, and
+she was to have in the way of backing and management all that poor
+Marietta had lacked. It seemed to Mrs. Emery that her whole life had
+been devoted to learning what to do and what not to do for Lydia. As the
+time of action drew nearer she nerved herself for the campaign with a
+finely confident feeling that she knew every inch of the ground. Her
+expectancy grew more and more tense as her eagerness rose. During the
+long year that Lydia was in Europe, receiving a final gloss, even higher
+than that imparted by the expensive and exclusive girls' school where
+she had spent the years between fourteen and eighteen, Mrs. Emery laid
+her plans and arranged her life with a fervent devotion to one end--the
+success of Lydia's first season in society. Every room in the house
+seemed to her vision to stand in a bright vacancy awaiting the arrival
+of the débutante.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+AMERICAN BEAUTIES
+
+
+On the morning of Lydia's long-expected return, as Mrs. Emery moved
+restlessly about the large double parlors opening out on a veranda where
+the vines were already golden in the September sunlight, it seemed to
+her that the very walls were blank in hushed eagerness and that the
+chairs and tables turned faces like hers, tired with patience, toward
+the open door. She had not realized until the long separation was almost
+over how unendurably she had missed her baby girl, as she still thought
+of the tall girl of nineteen. She could not wait the few hours that were
+left. Her fortitude had given way just too soon. She must have the dear
+child now, now, in her arms.
+
+She moved absently a spray of goldenrod which hid a Fra Angelico angel
+over the mantel and noted with dramatic self-pity that her hand was
+trembling. She sat down suddenly, and lost herself in a vain attempt to
+recall the well-beloved sound of Lydia's fresh young voice. A knot came
+in her throat, and she covered her face with her large, white,
+carefully-manicured hands.
+
+Marietta came in briskly a few moments later, bringing a bouquet of
+asters from her own garden. She was dressed, as always, with a severe
+reticence in color and line which, though due to her extreme need for
+economy, nevertheless gave to the rather spare outlines of her tall
+figure a distinction, admired by Endbury under the name of stylishness.
+Her rapid step had carried her half-way across the wide room before she
+saw to her surprise that her mother, usually so self-contained, was
+giving way to an inexplicable emotion.
+
+"Good gracious, Mother!" she began in the energetic fashion which was
+apt to make her most neutral remarks sound combative.
+
+Mrs. Emery dried her eyes with a gesture of protest, adjusted her gray
+pompadour deftly, and cut off her daughter's remonstrance, "Oh, you
+needn't tell me I'm foolish, Marietta. I know it. I just suddenly got so
+impatient it didn't seem as though I could wait another minute!"
+
+The younger woman accepted this explanation of the tears with a murmured
+sound of somewhat enigmatic intonation. Her thin dark face settled into
+a repose that had a little grimness in it. She began putting the flowers
+into a vase that stood between the reproduction of a Giotto Madonna and
+a Japanese devil-hunt, both results of the study of art taken up during
+the past winter by her mother's favorite woman's club. Mrs. Emery
+watched the process in the contemplative relief which follows an
+emotional outbreak, and her eyes wandered to the objects on either side
+the vase. The sight stirred her to speech. "Oh, Marietta, how _do_ you
+suppose the house will seem to Lydia after she has seen so much? I hope
+she won't be disappointed. I've done so much to it this last year,
+perhaps she won't like it. And Oh, I _was_ so tried because we weren't
+able to get the new sideboard put up in the dining-room yesterday!"
+
+Mrs. Mortimer glanced without smiling at a miniature of her sister,
+blooming in a shrine-like arrangement on her mother's writing-desk. She
+shook her dark head with a gesture like her father's, and said with his
+blunt decisiveness, "Really, Mother, you must draw the line about Lydia.
+She's only human. I guess if the house is good enough for you and father
+it is good enough for her."
+
+She crossed the room toward the door with a brisk rattle of starched
+skirts, but as she passed her mother her hand was caught and held.
+"That's just it, Marietta--that's just what came over me! _Is_ what's
+good enough for us good enough for Lydia? Won't anything, even the best,
+in Endbury be a come-down for her?"
+
+The slightly irritated impatience with which Mrs. Mortimer had listened
+to the first words of this speech gave way to a shrewd amusement. "You
+mean that you've put Lydia up on such a high plane to begin with that
+whichever way she goes will be a step down," she asked.
+
+"Yes, yes; that's just it," breathed her mother, unconscious of any
+irony in her daughter's accent. She fixed her eyes, which, in spite of
+her having long since passed the half-century mark, were still very
+clear and blue, anxiously upon Marietta's opaque dark ones. She felt not
+only a need to be reassured in general by anyone, but a reluctant faith
+in the younger woman's judgment.
+
+Marietta released herself with a laugh that was like a light, mocking
+tap on her mother's shoulder. "Well, folks that haven't got real worries
+will certainly manufacture them! To worry about Lydia's future in
+Endbury! Aren't you afraid the sun won't rise some day? If ever there
+was any girl that had a smooth road in front of her--"
+
+The door-bell rang. "They've come! They've come!" cried Mrs. Emery
+wildly.
+
+"Lydia wouldn't ring the bell, and her train isn't due till ten," Mrs.
+Mortimer reminded her.
+
+"Oh, yes. Well, then, it's the new sideboard. I am so--"
+
+"It's a boy with a big pasteboard box," contradicted Mrs. Mortimer,
+looking down the hall to the open front door.
+
+Seeing someone there to receive it, the boy set the box inside the
+screen door and started down the steps.
+
+"Bring it here! Bring it here!" called Mrs. Mortimer, commandingly.
+
+"It's for Lydia," said Mrs. Emery, looking at the address. She spoke
+with an accent of dramatic intensity, and a flush rose to her fair
+cheeks.
+
+Her olive-skinned daughter looked at her and laughed. "What did you
+expect?"
+
+"But he didn't care enough about her coming home to be in town to-day!"
+Mrs. Emery's maternal vanity flared up hotly.
+
+Mrs. Mortimer laughed again and began taking the layers of crumpled
+wax-paper out of the box. "Oh, that was the trouble with you, was it?
+That's nothing. He had to be away to see about a new electrical plant in
+Dayton. Did you ever know Paul Hollister to let anything interfere with
+business?" This characterization was delivered with an intonation that
+made it the most manifest praise.
+
+Her mother seconded it with unquestioning acquiescence. "No, that's a
+fact; I never did."
+
+Mrs. Mortimer in her turn had an accent of dramatic intensity as she
+cried out, "Oh! they are American Beauties! The biggest I ever saw!"
+
+The two women looked at the flowers, almost awestruck at their size.
+
+"Have you a vase?" Mrs. Mortimer asked dubiously.
+
+Mrs. Emery rose to the occasion. "The Japanese umbrella stand."
+
+There was a pause as they reverently arranged the great sheaf of
+enormous flowers. Then Mrs. Emery began, "Marietta--" She hesitated.
+
+"Well," Mrs. Mortimer prompted her, a little impatiently.
+
+"Do you really think that he--that Lydia--?"
+
+Marietta accepted with a somewhat pinched smile her mother's boundary
+lines of reticence. "Of course. Did you ever know Paul Hollister to give
+up anything he wanted?"
+
+Her mother shook her head.
+
+Mrs. Mortimer rose with a "Well, then!" and the air of one who has said
+all there is to be said on a subject, and again crossed the room toward
+the door. Her mother drifted aimlessly in that direction also, as though
+swept along by the other's energy.
+
+"Well, it's a pity he is not here now, anyhow," she said, adding in a
+spirited answer to her daughter's expression, "Now, you needn't look
+that way, Marietta. You know yourself that Lydia is very romantic and
+fanciful. It would be a very different matter if she were like Madeleine
+Hollister. She wouldn't need any managing."
+
+Mrs. Mortimer smiled at the idea. "Yes, I'd like to see somebody try to
+manage Paul's sister," she commented.
+
+"They wouldn't _have_ to," her mother pointed out, "she's so
+levelheaded and sane. But Lydia's different. It's part of her
+loveliness, of course, only you do have to manage her. And she'll be in
+a very unsettled state for the first week or two after she gets home
+after such a long absence. The impressions she gets then--well, I wish
+he were here!"
+
+Mrs. Mortimer waved her hand toward the roses.
+
+"Of course, of course," assented her mother, subsiding peaceably down
+the scale from anxiety to confidence with the phrase. She looked at the
+monstrous flowers with the gaze of acquired admiration so usual in her
+eyes. "They don't look much like roses, do they?" she remarked
+irrelevantly.
+
+Mrs. Mortimer turned in the doorway, her face expressing an extreme
+surprise. "Good gracious, no," she cried. "Why, of course not. They cost
+a dollar and a half apiece."
+
+She did not stop to hear her mother's vaguely assenting reply. Mrs.
+Emery heard her firm, rapid tread go down the hall to the front door and
+then suddenly stop. Something indefinable about the pause that followed
+made the mother's heart beat thickly. "What is it, Marietta?" she
+called, but her voice was lost in Mrs. Mortimer's exclamation of
+surprise, "Why it can't be--why, _Lydia_!"
+
+As from a great distance, the mother heard a confused rush in the hall,
+and then, piercing through the dreamlike unreality of the moment, came
+the sweet, high note of a girl's voice, laughing, but with the liquid
+uncertainty of tears quivering through the mirth. "Oh, Marietta! Where's
+Mother? Aren't you all slow-pokes--not a soul to meet us at the
+train--where's Mother? Where's Mother? Where's--" The room swam around
+Mrs. Emery as she stood up looking toward the door, and the girl who
+came running in, her dark eyes shining with happy tears, was not more
+real than the many visions of her that had haunted her mother's
+imagination during the lonely year of separation. At the clasp of the
+young arms about her face took light as from an inner source, and
+breath came back to her in a sudden gasp. She tried to speak, but the
+only word that came was "Lydia! Lydia! Lydia!"
+
+The girl laughed, a half-sob breaking her voice as she answered
+whimsically, "Well, who did you expect to see?"
+
+Mrs. Mortimer performed her usual function of relieving emotional
+tension by putting a strong hand on Lydia's shoulder and spinning her
+about. "Come! I want to see if it _is_ you--and how you look."
+
+For a moment the ardent young creature stood still in a glowing quiet.
+She drank in the dazzled gaze of admiration of the two women with an
+innocent delight. The tears were still in Mrs. Emery's eyes, but she did
+not raise a hand to dry them, smitten motionless by the extremity of her
+proud satisfaction. Never again did Lydia look to her as she did at that
+moment, like something from another sphere, like some bright,
+unimaginably happy being, freed from the bonds that had always weighed
+so heavily on all the world about her mother.
+
+Before she could draw breath, Lydia moved and was changed. Her mother
+saw suddenly, with that emotion which only mothers know, reminiscences
+of little-girlhood, of babyhood, even of long-dead cousins and aunts, in
+the lovely face blooming under the wide hat. She felt the sweet
+momentary confusion of individuality, the satisfied sense of complete
+ownership which accompanies a strong belief in family ties. Lydia was
+not only altogether entrancing, but she was of the same stuff with those
+who loved her so dearly. It gave a deeper note to her mother's passion
+of affectionate pride.
+
+The girl turned with a pretty, defiant tilt of her head. "Well, and how
+_do_ I look?" she asked; and before she could be answered she flew at
+Mrs. Mortimer with a gentle roughness, clasping her arms around her
+waist until the matron gasped. "_You_ look too good to be true--both of
+you--if you are such lazybones that you wouldn't go to the station to
+meet the prodigal daughter!"
+
+"Well, if you will come on an earlier train than you telegraphed--"
+began Mrs. Mortimer, "Everybody's getting ready to meet you with a brass
+band. What did you do with Father?"
+
+The girl moved away, putting her hands up to her hat uncertainly as
+though about to take out the hat-pins. There was between the three a
+moment of that constraint which accompanies the transition from
+emotional intensity down to an everyday level. In Lydia's voice there
+was even a little flatness as she answered, "Oh, he put me in the hack
+and went off to see about business. I heard him 'phoning something to
+somebody about a suit. We got through the customs sooner than we thought
+we could, you see, and caught an earlier train."
+
+Mrs. Emery turned her adoring gaze from Lydia's slim beauty and looked
+inquiringly at her elder daughter. Mrs. Mortimer understood, and nodded.
+
+"What are you two making faces about?" Lydia turned in time to catch the
+interchange of glances.
+
+Mrs. Emery hesitated. Marietta spoke with a crisp straightforwardness
+which served as well in this case as nonchalance for keeping her remark
+without undue significance. "We were just wondering if now wasn't a good
+time to show you what Paul Hollister did for your welcome home. He
+couldn't be here himself, so he sent those." She nodded toward the
+bouquet.
+
+As Lydia turned toward the flowers her two elders fixed her with the
+unscrupulously scrutinizing gaze of blood-relations; but their
+microscopic survey showed them nothing in the girl's face, already
+flushed and excited by her home-coming, beyond a sudden amused surprise
+at the grotesque size of the tribute.
+
+"Why, for mercy's sake! Did you ever see such monsters! They are as big
+as my head! Look!" She whirled her hat from the pretty disorder of her
+brown hair and poised it on the topmost of the great flowers, stepping
+back to see the effect and laughing, "They don't look any more like
+roses, do they?" she added, turning to her mother. Mrs. Emery's answer
+rose so spontaneously to her lips that she was not aware that she was
+echoing Marietta. "Good gracious, no; of course not. They cost a dollar
+and a half apiece."
+
+Lydia neither assented to nor dissented from this apothegm. It started
+another train of thought in her mind. "As much as all that! Why, Paul
+oughtn't to be so extravagant! He can't afford it, and I should have
+liked something else just as--"
+
+Her sister broke in with an ample gesture of negation. "You don't know
+Paul. If he goes on the way he's started--he's district sales manager
+for southern Ohio already."
+
+Lydia paid to this information the passing tribute of a moment's
+uncomprehending surprise. "Think of that! The last time Paul told me
+about himself he was working day and night in Schenectady, learning the
+business, and getting--oh, I don't know--fifty cents an hour, or some
+such starvation wages."
+
+Mrs. Mortimer's bitterly acquired sense of values revolted at this.
+"What are you talking about, Lydia? Fifty cents an hour starvation
+wages!"
+
+"Well, perhaps it was five cents an hour. I don't remember. And he
+worked with his hands and was always in danger of getting shot through
+with a million volts of electricity or mashed with a breaking fly-wheel
+or something. He said electricians were the soldiers of modern
+civilization. I told that to a German woman we met on the boat when she
+said Americans have no courage because they don't fight duels. The
+idea!"
+
+She began pulling off her gloves, with a quick energetic gesture. Mrs.
+Mortimer went on, "Well, he certainly has a brilliant future before
+him. Everybody says that--" She stopped, struck by her rather heavy
+emphasis on the theme and by a curious look from Lydia. The girl did not
+blush, she did not seem embarrassed, but for a moment the childlike
+clarity of her look was clouded by an expression of consciousness.
+
+Mrs. Emery made a rush upon her, drawing her away toward the door with a
+displeased look at Marietta. "Never mind about Paul's prospects," she
+said. "With Lydia just this minute home, to begin gossiping about the
+neighbors! Come up to your room, darling, and see the little outdoor
+sitting-room we've had fixed over the porch."
+
+Mrs. Mortimer was not given to bearing chagrin, even a passing one, with
+undue self-restraint. She threw into the intonation of her next sentence
+her resentment at the rebuke from her mother. "I still live, you know,
+even if Lydia has come home!" As Mrs. Emery turned with a look of
+apology, she added, "Oh, I only wanted to make you turn around so that I
+could tell you that I am going to bring my two men-folks over here
+to-night, to the gathering of the clans, and that I must go home until
+then. Dr. Melton and Aunt Julia are coming, aren't they?"
+
+"Oh, yes!" cried Lydia. "It doesn't seem to me I can wait to see
+Godfather. I sort of half hoped he might be here now."
+
+"Well, _Lydia_!" her mother reproached her jealously.
+
+"Oh, you might as well give in, Mother, Lydia likes the little old
+doctor better than any of the rest of us."
+
+"He talks to me," said Lydia defensively.
+
+"_We_ never say a word," commented Mrs. Mortimer.
+
+Lydia broke away from her mother's close clasp and ran back to her
+sister. She was always running, as though to keep up with the rapidity
+of her swift impulses. She held her subtly-curved cheek up to the
+other's strongly-marked face. "You just kiss me, Etta dear," she pleaded
+softly, "and stop teasing."
+
+Mrs. Mortimer looked long into the clear dark eyes with an unmoved
+countenance. Then her face melted suddenly till she looked like her
+mother. She put her arms about the girl with a fervent gesture of
+tenderness. "Dear little Lydia," she murmured, with a quaver in her
+voice.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+PICKING UP THE THREADS
+
+
+After she was alone she looked again at the miniature of Lydia. The
+youthful radiance of the face had singularly the effect of a perfect
+flower. Mrs. Mortimer glanced at the hat still drooping its wide brim
+over the rose where Lydia had forgotten it, and stood still in a reverie
+that had, from her aspect, something of sadness in it. After a moment
+she sighed out, "Poor little Lydia!"
+
+"What's the matter with Lydia?" asked someone behind her.
+
+She turned and faced a dark, elderly personage, the robust dignity of
+whose bearing was now tempered with shamefacedness. Mrs. Mortimer's face
+sharpened in affectionate malice. "What are you doing here at this hour
+of the morning?" she asked with a humorously exaggerated air of
+amazement. "No self-respecting man is ever seen in his house during
+business hours!" She went on, "Oh, I know well enough. You let Mother
+have her first to make up for her being sick and not able to go to meet
+her ship; but you can't stay away."
+
+The Judge waved her raillery away with a smile. The physical resemblance
+between father and daughter was remarkable. "I asked you what was the
+matter with Lydia," he repeated.
+
+Mrs. Mortimer's face clouded. "Oh, it's a hateful, horrid sort of world
+we're all so eager to push her into. It's like a can full of angleworms,
+everlastingly squirming and wriggling to get to the top. I was just
+thinking that it would be better for her, maybe, if she could always
+stay a little girl and travel 'round to see things."
+
+"Why, Etta! I tell you _I'm_ glad to have Lydia get through with her
+traveling 'round. Maybe I can see something of her if I hurry up and do
+it now before your mother gets things going. I won't after that, of
+course. I never have."
+
+To this his daughter had one of her abrupt, disconcerting responses.
+"You'd better hurry and do it before you get so deep in some important
+trial that you wouldn't know Lydia from a plaster image. There are more
+reasons than just Mother and card parties why you don't see much of her,
+I guess."
+
+Judge Emery forbore to argue the point. "Where are they now?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, upstairs, out of my way. Mother's usual state of mind about Lydia
+is more so than ever, I warn you. She thought I wasn't refined enough
+company."
+
+"Now, Etta, you know your mother never thought any such thing."
+
+"Well, I know she was inconsistent, whatever she thought. While we were
+here alone she was speculating about Paul Hollister like anything. And
+yet, because I just happened to mention to Lydia that he is getting on
+in the world, I got put down as if I'd tried to make her marry him for
+his prospects."
+
+There was an edge in her voice which her father deprecated, rubbing his
+shaven chin mildly. He deplored the appearance of a flaw in the smooth
+surface of harmony he loved to see in his family.
+
+"Well, you know, Marietta, we aim to have everything about right for
+Lydia. She's all we've got left now the rest of you are settled."
+
+The deepening of the careworn lines in the woman's face seemed a
+justification for the undisguised bitterness of her answer. "I don't see
+why nobody must breathe a word to her about what everybody knows is so.
+What's the use of pretending that we'd be satisfied or she'd be
+comfortable a minute if Paul didn't promise to be a money-maker--or at
+least to have a good income?"
+
+She turned away and walked rapidly down the hall, followed by her
+father, half apologetic, half reproachful. "Why, Daughter, you don't
+grudge your sister! We couldn't do so much for you; but we're better off
+since you were a young lady and we want Lydia to have the benefit."
+
+Mrs. Mortimer paused on the veranda and stood looking in a troubled
+silence at the broad, well-kept lawn, stretching down to the asphalt
+street, shaded by vigorous young maples. Her father waited for her to
+speak, too good a lawyer to spoil by superfluous words the effect of a
+well-calculated appeal.
+
+Finally she turned to him contritely. "I'm hateful, Dad, and I'm sorry.
+Of course I don't grudge dear little Lydia anything. Only I have a
+pretty hard time of it scratching along, and when I'm awfully tired of
+contriving and calculating how to manage somehow and anyhow, it's hard
+to come up to the standard of saying everything's lovely that you and
+Mother want for Lydia."
+
+"Anything the trouble specially?" asked her father guardedly.
+
+"Oh, no; same old thing. Keeping up a two-maid and a man establishment
+on a one-maid income, and mostly not being able to hire the one maid.
+There aren't _any_ girls to be had lately. It means I have to be the
+other maid and the man all of the time, and all three, part of the
+time." She was starting down the step, but paused as though she could
+not resist the relief that came from expression. "And the cost of
+living--the necessities are bad enough, but the other things--the things
+you have to have not to be out of everything! I lie awake nights. I
+think of it in church. I can't think of anything else but the way the
+expenses mount up. Everybody's getting so reckless and extravagant and I
+_won't_ go into debt! I'll come to it, though. Everybody else does!
+We're the only people that haven't oriental rugs now. Why, the
+Gilberts--and everybody knows how much they still owe Dr. Melton for
+Ellen's appendicitis, and their grocer told Ralph they owe him several
+hundred dollars--well, they have just got an oriental rug that they paid
+a hundred and sixty dollars for. Mrs. Gilbert said they 'just _had_ to
+have it, and you can always have what you have to have.' It makes me
+sick! Our parlor looks so common! And the last dinner party we gave
+cost--" She detected a wavering in her father's attention, as though he
+were listening for sounds inside the house, and broke off abruptly with
+a hurt and impatient "Oh, well, no matter!" and ran down the steps.
+
+Judge Emery called after with a relieved belittling of her complaints,
+"Oh, if that's all you mean. Why, that's half the fun. I remember when
+you were a baby your mother did the washings so that we could have a
+nurse to take you out with the other children and their nurses."
+
+Mrs. Mortimer was palpably out of earshot before he finished his
+exhortation, so he wasted no more breath but turned back eagerly in
+response to a call from Lydia, who came skimming down the hall. "Oh,
+Daddy dearest, it's a jewel of a little sitting-room, the one you fixed
+up for me--and Mother says we can serve punch there the night of my
+coming-out party."
+
+Mrs. Emery was at her heels. Her husband laughed at his wife's
+expression, and drew her toward him. "Here, Mother, stop staring at
+Lydia long enough to welcome me home, too." He bent over her and rubbed
+his cheek against hers. "Come, tell me the news. Are you feeling
+better?" He gave her a little playful push toward the door of the
+parlor. "Here, let's go in and visit for a while. I'm an old fool! I
+can't do any work this morning. I kept Lydia from telling me a thing all
+the way from New York, so that we could hear it together."
+
+Lydia protested. "Tell you! After those monstrous great letters I've
+written! There's nothing you don't know. There's nothing much to tell,
+anyhow. I've been museumed and picture-galleried, and churched, and
+cultured generally, till I'm full--up to there!" She drew her hand
+across her slim white throat and added cheerfully, "But I forgot the
+most of that the last three months in Paris. Nearly every girl in the
+party was going home to come out in society, and of course we just
+concentrated on clothes. You don't mind, do you?"
+
+As she hesitated, with raised eyebrows of doubt, her mother, heedless of
+what she was saying, was suddenly overcome by her appealing look and
+drew her close with a rush of little incoherent tender cries choked with
+tears. It was as though she were seeing her for the first time. Judge
+Emery twice tried to speak before his husky voice was under control. He
+patted his wife on the shoulder. "There, there, Mother," he said
+vaguely. To Lydia he went on, "You've been gone quite a while, you know,
+and--well, till you have a baby-girl of your own I guess you won't have
+much notion of how we feel."
+
+Lydia's dark eyes filled, responsive to the emotion about her. "I'm just
+about distracted," she cried. "I love everybody and everything so, I
+can't stand it! I want to kiss you both and I can't make up my mind
+which to kiss first--and it's that way about everything! It's all so
+good I don't know what to begin on." She brought their faces together
+and achieved a simultaneous kiss with a shaky laugh. "Now, look here! If
+we stand here another minute we'll all cry. Come and show me the house.
+I want to see every single thing. All the old things, and all the new
+ones Mother's been writing about." She seized their hands and pulled
+them into the parlor. "I've been in this room already, but I didn't see
+it. I don't believe I even touched the floor when I walked, I was so
+excited. Oh, it's lovely--it's lovely!"
+
+She darted about the room like a humming-bird, recognizing what was
+familiar with fond little exclamations. "Oh, that darling little wicker
+chair!--the picture of the dog!--oh! oh! here's my china lamb!" and
+crying out in admiration over new acquisitions.
+
+"Oh, Mother, what a perfectly lovely couch--sofa--what do you call it?
+Why, it is so beautifully _different_! Wherever did you get that?"
+
+Mrs. Emery turned to her husband. "There, Nathaniel, what did I tell
+you?" she triumphed.
+
+"That's one of your mother's latest extravagances," explained Judge
+Emery. "There's a crazy fad in Endbury for special handmade furniture.
+Maybe it's all right, but I can't see it's so much better than what you
+buy in the department stores. Grand Rapids is good enough for me."
+
+"He doesn't like the man who made it," said Mrs. Emery accusingly.
+
+"What's the matter with him?" asked Lydia, rubbing her hand luxuriously
+over the satin-smooth, lusterless wood of the sofa's high back.
+
+Judge Emery replied, with his laugh of easy, indifferent tolerance for
+everything outside the profession of the law, "Oh, I never said I didn't
+like him; I only said he struck me as a crack-brained, self-willed,
+conceited--"
+
+Lydia laughed. She thought her father's dry, ironic turns very witty.
+
+"I never saw anything conceited about him," protested Mrs. Emery,
+admitting the rest of the indictment.
+
+Judge Emery sat down on the sofa in question and pulled his tie into
+shape. "Well, folks are always conceited who find the ordinary ways of
+doing things not good enough for them. Lydia, what do you think of this
+tie? Nobody pays a proper attention to my ties but you."
+
+"I've brought you some beauties from London," said Lydia. Then reverting
+with a momentary curiosity to the subject they had left, "Whatever does
+this man do that's so queer?"
+
+"Oh, he's just one of the back-to-all-fours faddists," said her father.
+
+"Back-to-all-fours?" Lydia was dim as to his meaning, but willing to be
+amused.
+
+"That's just your father's way," exclaimed Mrs. Emery, who had not her
+daughter's fondness for the Judge's tricks of speech.
+
+"He lives as no Dago ditch-digger with a particle of get-up-and-get in
+him would be willing to," said Judge Emery finally.
+
+Lydia turned to her mother.
+
+"Why, it's nothing that would interest you in the least, dear," said the
+matron, taking in admiringly Lydia's French dress. "Only for a little
+while everybody was talking about how strangely he acted. He was an
+insurance man, like Marietta's husband, and getting on finely, when all
+of a sudden, for no reason on earth, he threw it all up and went to live
+in the woods. Do you mean to say you only paid twenty dollars for that
+dress?"
+
+"In the woods!" repeated Lydia.
+
+"Yes; the real woods. His father was a farmer, and left him--why you
+know, you've been there ever so many times--the Black Rock woods, the
+picnic woods. He has built him a little hut there and makes his
+furniture out of the trees."
+
+Lydia's passing curiosity had faded. "Not quite twenty, even--only
+ninety-two francs," she at last answered her mother's question. "You
+never saw anything like the bargains there in summertime. Well, I should
+think your carpenter man _was_ crazy." She glanced down with
+satisfaction at the hang of her skirt.
+
+"Oh, not dangerous," her mother reassured her; "just socialistic, I
+suppose, and all that sort of thing."
+
+"Well, who's crazier than a socialist?" cried her father genially. He
+added, "Where are you going, Daughter?"
+
+Lydia stopped in the doorway, with a look of apology for her lack of
+interest in their talk. "I thought I'd just slip into the hall and see
+if there's anything new there. There's so much I want to see--all at
+once."
+
+Her fond impatience brought her parents forward with a start of
+pleasure, and the tour of inspection began. She led them from one room
+to another, swooping with swallow-like motions upon them for sudden
+caresses, dazzling them with her changing grace. She liked it
+all--all--she told them, a thousand times better than she remembered.
+She liked the new arrangement of the butler's pantry; she loved the
+library for being all done over new; she adored the hall for being left
+exactly the way it was. The dining-room was the best of all, she
+declared, with so much that was familiar and so much that was new. "Only
+no sideboard," she commented. "Have they gone out of fashion while I was
+away?"
+
+Mrs. Emery, whose delight at Lydia's approval had been mounting with
+every breath, looked vexed. "I knew you'd notice that!" she said. "We
+tried so hard to get the new one put in before you got back, but Mr.
+Rankin won't deliver a thing till it's just so!"
+
+"Rankin!" cried Lydia, stopping so short in one of her headlong rushes
+across the room that she gave the impression of having encountered an
+invisible obstacle, "Who's that?"
+
+"Oh, that's the crazy cabinet-maker we were talking about. The one
+who--"
+
+"Why, I've met a Mr. Rankin," said Lydia, with more emphasis than the
+statement seemed to warrant.
+
+"It's a common enough name," said her mother, struck oddly by her
+accent.
+
+"But here, in Endbury. Only it can't be the same person. He wasn't
+queer; he was awfully nice. I met him once when a crowd of us were out
+skating that last Christmas I was home from school; the time when you
+and Father were in Washington and left me at Dr. Melton's with Aunt
+Julia. I used to see him there a lot. He used to talk to the doctor by
+the hour, and Aunt Julia and I were doing that set of doilies in
+Hardanger work and we used to sit and sew and count threads and listen."
+
+"That's the one," said her father. "Melton has one of his flighty
+notions that the man is something wonderful."
+
+"But he wasn't queer or anything then!" protested Lydia. "He never
+talked to me any, of course, I was such a kid, but it was awfully
+interesting to hear him and Godfather go on about morals, and the
+universe, and the future of man, and such--I never heard such talk
+before or after--but it can't be that one!" Lydia broke off to marvel
+incredulously at the possibility. "He was--why, he was awfully nice!"
+she fell back on reiteration to help out her affirmation.
+
+"They say there's queer blood in the family, and I guess he's got his
+share," Judge Emery summed up and dismissed the case with a gesture of
+finality. He glanced up at a tall clock standing in the corner, compared
+its time with his watch, exclaimed impatiently, "Slow again!" and
+addressed himself with a householder's seriousness to setting it right.
+
+A new aspect of the matter they had been discussing struck Lydia. "But
+what does he--what do people do about him?" she asked.
+
+This misty inquiry was as intelligible to her mother as a cipher to the
+holders of a key. "Oh, he's very nice about that. He has dropped out of
+society completely and keeps out of everybody's way. Of course you see
+him when he comes to set up a piece of his furniture or to take an
+order, but that's all. And he used to be so popular!" The regret in the
+last clause was that of a thrifty person before waste of any kind. "I
+understand he still goes to Dr. Melton's a good deal, but that just
+counts him in as one of the doctor's collection of freaks; it doesn't
+mean anything. You know how your godfather goes on about--" She broke
+off to look out the window. "Oh, Lydia! your trunks are here. Quick!
+where are your keys? It seems as though I couldn't wait to see your
+dresses!" She hurried to the door and vanished.
+
+Lydia did not stir for a moment. She was looking down at the table,
+absorbed in watching the dim reflections of her pink finger-tips as she
+pressed them one after another upon the dark polished wood. Her father
+opened the door of the clock with a little click, but she did not heed
+it. She drew her hand away from the table and inspected her finger-tips
+intently, as though to detect some change in them. When her father
+closed the clock-door and turned away she started, as though she had
+forgotten his presence. Her gaze upon him gave him an odd feeling of
+wonder, which he took to be apologetic realization that he had spent a
+longer time oblivious of her than he had meant. His explanation had a
+little compunction in it. "I have a time with that pendulum always. I
+can't seem to get it the right length!"
+
+Lydia continued to look at him blankly for a moment. Then she drew a
+long breath and took an aimless step away from the table. "Well, if that
+isn't too queer for anything!" she exclaimed.
+
+Judge Emery stared. "Why, no; it's quite common in pendulum clocks," he
+told her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE DAWN
+
+
+The morning after her return from Europe, Lydia awoke with a start, as
+though in answer to a call. The confusion of the last days had been such
+that she had for a moment the not uncommon experience of an entire
+blankness as to her whereabouts and identity. Realization of where and
+who she was came back to her with much more than the usual neutral
+relief at slipping into one's own personality as into the first
+protection available against the vague horror of nihility. After an
+instant's uncomfortable wandering in chaos, Lydia found herself with a
+thrill of exultation. She was not negatively relieved that she was
+somebody; she rejoiced to find herself Lydia Emery. She pounced on her
+own personality with a positive joy which for a moment moved her to a
+devout thanksgiving.
+
+It all seemed, as she said to herself, too good to be true--certainly
+more than she deserved. Among her unmerited blessings she quaintly
+placed being herself, but this was the less naïve in that she placed
+among her blessings nearly everything of which she was conscious in her
+world. Her world at this time was not a large one, and every element in
+it seemed to her ideal. Her loving, indulgent father, who always had a
+smile for her as he looked up over his newspaper at the table, and who,
+though she knew he was too good to be wealthy, always managed somehow to
+pay for dresses just a little prettier than other girls' clothes; her
+devoted, idolizing mother, whose one thought was for her daughter's
+pleasure; her rich big Brother George in Cleveland, whom she saw so
+seldom, but whose handsome presents testified to an affection that was
+to be numbered among the objects of her gratitude; good, sharp-tongued
+Sister Etta, who said such quick, bright things and ran her house so
+wonderfully; Aunt Julia, dear, dear Aunt Julia, whose warm heart was one
+of Lydia's happiest homes, and Aunt Julia's brother, Dr. Melton--ah, how
+could anyone be grateful enough for such an all-comprehending,
+quick-helping, ever-ready ally, teacher, mentor, playmate, friend and
+comrade as her godfather!
+
+As she lay in her soft white bed and looked about her pretty room with
+an ineffable sense of well-being, it seemed to her that everything that
+had happened to her was lovely and that the prospect of her future could
+contain only a crescendo of good-fortune. It was not that she imagined
+for herself a future remarkably different in detail from what was the
+past of the people about her. Even now at what she felt was the
+beginning of the first chapter, she knew the general events of the story
+before her; but this morning she was penetrated with the keenest sense
+of the unfathomable difference it made in those events in that they were
+about to happen to her. She had been passively watching the excited
+faces of people hurling themselves down-hill on toboggans, but now she
+was herself poised on the crest of the slope, tense with an excitement
+not only more real, but somehow more vital to the scheme of things, than
+that felt by other people who had made the thrilling trip before her.
+
+She lay still for a few moments, luxuriating in the innocent egotism of
+this view of her future, which was none the less absorbing for being so
+entirely unterrifying, and then sprang up, impatient to begin it. No one
+else in the house was awake. She saw with surprise that it was barely
+five o'clock. She wondered that she felt so little sleepy, since she had
+been up late the night before. All the family and connections had
+gathered, and she had talked with an eager breathlessness and had
+listened as eagerly to pick up all those details of home news which do
+not go into letters; those insignificant changes and events that make up
+the physiognomy of an existence, without which one cannot again become
+an integral part of a life once familiar. It had been a fatiguing,
+illuminating evening.
+
+A change of mood had come in the night. As she dressed she felt that, in
+some way, neither the fatigue nor the illumination had lasted on through
+the blankness of her sound young sleep. She felt restlessly fresh and
+vigorous, like a creature born anew with the morning light, and she did
+not feel herself as yet an integral part of the busy, absorbing life to
+which she had returned. The countless tendrils of Endbury feelings,
+standards, activities, brushed against her, but had not as yet laid hold
+on her. Europe had never been more real to her young-lady eyes than an
+immense World's Exposition, rather overwhelmingly full of objects to be
+inspected, and now, here in Ohio, even that impression was dim and
+remote. But so, also, was Endbury; she had left the one, she had not yet
+arrived at the other. She felt herself for the moment in a neutral
+territory that was scarcely terrestrial.
+
+The silent house was a kingdom of delight to be rediscovered. She
+wandered about it, enchanted with the impressions which her solitude
+gave her leisure to savor and digest. She threw open a window, and was
+struck with the sweet freshness of the morning air, as though it were a
+joy new in the history of the world. She looked out on the lawn, with
+its dew-studded cobwebs, and felt her heart contract with pleasure. When
+she stepped out on the veranda, the look of the trees, the breath of the
+light wind across her cheek, the odor of dawn, all the indefinable
+personality of that early hour was like an enchantment about her.
+
+She ran out to her favorite arbor and plucked one of the heavy clusters
+of purple grapes, finding their cool acidity an exquisite surprise. She
+raised her face to the sky with wonder. She had never, it seemed to her,
+seen so pure yet colorful a sky. The horizon was still faintly flushed
+with the promise of a dawn already fulfilled in the fresh splendor of
+the sunbeams slanting across the fresh splendor of her own youth.
+
+Never again did Lydia see the things she saw that morning. Never again
+did she have so unquestioningly the happy child's conception of the
+whole world as magically centered in indulgent kindness about herself.
+As she looked up the clean, empty street stretching away under the shade
+of its thrifty young trees, it seemed made only to lead her forward into
+the life for which she had been so long preparing herself. Endbury, with
+its shops, its bustle of factories so unmeaning to her, the great bulk
+of its inexplicable "business," existed only as the theater upon the
+stage of which she was to play the leading rôle in the drama of
+life--she almost consciously thought of it in those terms--which, after
+some exciting and pleasurable incidents and a few thrilling situations,
+was to have a happy ending, none the less actual to her mind because
+lost in so vague a golden shimmer. Her father's house, as familiar to
+her as her hand, took on a new and rich dignity as the background for
+the unfolding of that wonderful creature, herself; that unknown, future,
+grown-up self, which was to be all that everyone who loved her expected,
+and more than she in her inexperience knew how to expect.
+
+She was in a little heaven, made up of the most ingenuous aspirations,
+the innocence of which seemed to her a guarantee of their certain
+fulfillment. Her fervent desire to be good was equal to and of the same
+quality as her desire to be a successful débutante. It would make her
+family so happy to have her both. These somewhat widely diverging aims
+were all a part of the current of her life, the impulse to be what those
+she loved would like to have her. It was not that she was willing to
+give up her own individuality to gratify the impulse, but rather that
+she did not for an instant conceive of the necessity for such a
+sacrifice. It was part of her immense happiness that she had always
+loved to be what it pleased everyone to have her, and that, apparently,
+people wished to have her only what she wished to be. She was like a
+child guarded by her elders from any knowledge of forbidden food. All
+the goodies of which she had ever heard were hers for the asking. In
+such a carefully arranged nursery it would be perversity to doubt the
+everlasting quality of the coincidence between one's desires and one's
+obedience. It was no more remarkable a coincidence than that both dew
+and sunshine were good for the grass over which she now ran lightly to
+another corner of the grounds about her parents' house. Here, just
+outside the circle of deep shade cast by an exuberantly leaved maple,
+she stood for a moment, her hands full of grapes, her eyes wandering
+about the green, well-kept double acres called diversely in the family
+"the grounds" (Mrs. Emery's name) and "the yard." Lydia always clung to
+her father's name; she had very little inborn feeling for the finer
+shades of her mother's vocabulary. Mrs. Emery rejoiced in the careless
+unconsciousness of the importance of such details, but she felt that
+Lydia should be cautioned against going too far. It was one of the
+girl's odd ways to be fond of the few phrases left over in the Emery
+dictionary from their simpler earlier days. She always called the two
+servants "the girls" or "the help" instead of "the maids," spoke of the
+"washwoman" instead of the "laundress," and, as did her father, called
+the man who took care of the grounds, ran the furnace, and drove the
+Emery's comfortable surrey, the "hired man" instead of the "gardener" or
+the "coachman," or, in Mrs. Emery's elegantly indefinite phrase, "our
+man."
+
+Lydia explained this whimsical reaction rather incoherently by saying
+that those nice old words were so much more fun than the others, and in
+spite of remonstrance she clung to her fancy with so lightly laughing an
+obstinacy that neither she nor anyone suspected it of being a surface
+indication of a significant tendency.
+
+She had occasionally other droll little ways of differing from the
+family, which were called indulgently "Lydia's notions." Her mother
+would certainly have thus named this flight out into the early morning.
+She would have found extravagant, and a little disconcerting, the
+completeness of Lydia's content in so simple a thing as standing in the
+first sunshine of an early morning in September, and she would have
+been unquestionably disturbed, perhaps even a little alarmed, by the
+beatific expression of Lydia's face as she gazed fixedly up into the
+sky, the tempered radiance of which was as yet not too bright for her
+clear gaze.
+
+All the restless joy of a few minutes before, which had driven her about
+from one delight to another, fused under the sun's first warmth into a
+trance-like quiet. She stood still in the sunshine, a slow flush, like a
+reflection of dawn, rising to her cheeks, her lips parted, her eyes
+bright and vacant. An old person coming upon her at this moment would
+have been painfully moved by that tragic pity which age feels for the
+unreasoning joy of youth. She looked a child, open-eyed and breathless
+before the fleeting beauties of a bubble, most iridescent when about to
+disappear.
+
+It was a man by no means old who swung suddenly into sight around the
+corner, walking swiftly and noiselessly upon the close-cut grass, and
+the startled expression with which he found himself close to Lydia was
+by no means one of pity. He fell back a step, and in the instant before
+the girl was aware of his presence his gaze upon her was that of a man
+dazzled by an incredible vision.
+
+She brought her eyes down to him, and for the space of a breath the
+expression was hers as well. The sunlight glowing about them seemed the
+reflection of their faces. Then, for a moment longer, though mutual
+recognition flashed into their eyes, they did not speak, looking at each
+other long and seriously.
+
+Finally, with a nymph-like stir of all her slender body, Lydia roused
+herself. "Well, I can speak--can you?" she asked whimsically. "Don't you
+remember me?"
+
+The man drew a long breath and took off his cap, showing close-cropped
+auburn hair gleaming, like his beard, red in the sun. "You took my
+breath away!" he exclaimed.
+
+"What was the matter with me?" asked Lydia, prettily confident of a
+compliment to follow.
+
+It came in so much less direct a form than she had expected that before
+she recognized it she had returned it with naïve impulsiveness.
+
+"I didn't think you could be real," said the man, "you looked so exactly
+the way this glorious morning made me feel."
+
+"Why, that's just how you looked to me!" she cried, and flushed at the
+significance of her words.
+
+Before her confusion the other turned away his quiet gray eyes, and said
+lightly, "Well, that's because we are the only people in all the world
+with sense enough to get up so early on a morning like this. I've been
+out tramping since dawn."
+
+Lydia explained herself also. "I just couldn't sleep, it seemed so
+lovely. It's my first morning home, you know."
+
+"Is it?" responded the man, with a vagueness he made no effort to
+conceal.
+
+It came over Lydia with a shock that he did not know she had been away.
+She felt hurt. It seemed ungracious for anyone in Endbury not to have
+missed her, not to share in the joyful excitement of her final return.
+"I've been in Europe for a year," she told him, with a dignity that was
+a reproach.
+
+"Oh, yes, yes; I remember now hearing Dr. Melton speak of it," he
+answered, with no shade of apology for his forgetfulness. He looked at
+her speculatively, as if wondering what note to strike for the
+continuation of their talk. Apparently he decided on the note of
+lightness. "Well, you're the most important person there is for me
+to-day," he told her unexpectedly.
+
+Lydia arched her dark eyebrows inquiringly. She was always sensitively
+responsive, and now had forgotten, like a sweet-tempered child, her
+momentary pique.
+
+He smiled suddenly, moved, as people often were, to an apparently
+irrelevant tenderness for her. His voice softened into a playfulness
+like that of a person speaking to an imaginative little girl. "Why,
+didn't you learn in school that all wise old nations have the belief
+that the first person you meet after you go out in the morning decides
+the fortune of the day for you? Now, what kind of a day are you going
+to give me?"
+
+Lydia laughed. "Oh, you must tell first! You forget you're the first
+person I've seen this morning. I'll see what I can do for you after I've
+seen what you are going to do for me." She added, with a solemnity only
+half jocular, "But it's ever so much more important in my case, for
+you're the first person I meet as I begin my life in Endbury. Think what
+a responsibility for you! You ought to give me something extra nice
+beside, for not remembering me any better and never noticing that I had
+been away." She broke into a sunny mitigation of her own severity, "But
+you can have some grapes, even if you are not very flattering."
+
+The man took the cluster she held out to him, but only eyed them as he
+answered, "Oh, I remember you very well. You're a niece of Mrs.
+Sandworth's, or of her husband's, and Mrs. Sandworth is Dr. Melton's
+sister. You're the big-eyed little girl who used to sit in a corner and
+sew while the doctor and I talked, and now," he brought it out rotundly,
+"you've been to Europe for a year, and you're grown-up."
+
+Lydia hung her head laughingly at his good-natured caricature. "Well,
+but I _have_, really and truly," she protested, "all of that. And I just
+guess you haven't had two such interesting things happen to you in such
+a short time as--" She stopped short, struck dumb by a sudden
+recollection. "Oh, I beg your pardon," she murmured; "I forgot about
+what they said you had--"
+
+Her expression was so altered, she looked at him with so curious a
+change from familiarity to strangeness, that his steady eyes wavered a
+moment in startled surprise. "What's that?" he asked sharply; "I didn't
+catch what you said."
+
+"Why, nothing--nothing--only they were telling me yesterday about how
+you--why, it just came over me that you _had_ had a great deal happen to
+you this last year, as well as I."
+
+He looked a relieved and slightly annoyed comprehension of the case.
+"Oh, that!" he summed it up for her with a grave brevity. "I have lost
+my father, and I have started life on a new footing during the past
+year."
+
+Lydia fumbled for words that would be applicable and not wounding. "I
+was so sorry to hear that--about your father, I mean. And about the
+other--it must be very--_interesting_, I'm sure."
+
+His silence and enigmatic gaze upon her moved her to a fluttered fear
+lest she seem ungracious. She added, with a droll little air of letting
+him see that she was not of the enemy, "I do hope some day you'll tell
+me all about it; it sounds so romantic."
+
+The young man gave an inarticulate sound, and stroked his ruddy beard to
+conceal a smile. "It's not," he said briefly. He put his cap back on his
+head and looked down the street as though his thoughts were already
+away.
+
+His lack of responsiveness came, Lydia thought, from her having wounded
+his feelings. "Oh, I'm sure you must have some good reason for doing
+such a _queer_ thing," she said hurriedly. Then, appalled by the words
+on which the haste of her good intentions had carried her, "Oh, I mean
+that it's very brave, heroic, of you to have the courage--perhaps
+something very sad happened to you, and to forget it you--"
+
+The other broke into the laugh he had been trying to suppress. His gray
+eyes lighted up brilliantly with his mirth. "You're very kind," he said,
+"you're very kind, but rather imaginative. It doesn't take any courage;
+quite the reverse. And it's not a picturesque way of doing a retreat
+from active life. I hope and pray that it's to be a way of getting into
+it."
+
+The girl's face of bewilderment at his tone moved him to add, a ripple
+of amusement still in his voice, "Ah, don't try to make me out. I don't
+belong in your world, you know; I'm real."
+
+Lydia continued to look at him blankly. The obscurity of his remarks was
+in no way lessened by this last addition, but he vouchsafed no further
+explanation. "You've given me my breakfast," he said, holding up the
+grapes; "I mustn't keep you any longer from yours."
+
+He waited for a moment for Lydia to respond to this speech, struck by a
+sudden realization that it might sound like an unceremonious hint to her
+to retire, rather than the dismissal of himself he intended. When she
+made no answer, he turned away with a somewhat awkward gesture of
+leave-taking. Lydia looked after him in silence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE DAY BEGINS
+
+
+She watched him until he was out of sight, and although the vigorous,
+rhythmic swing of his broad shoulders was like another manifestation of
+the morning's joyous, buoyant spirit, it did not move her to a
+responsive alertness. After he had turned a corner, she lowered her eyes
+to the cluster of grapes she still held; a moment after, without any
+change in expression, she relaxed her grasp on them and let them fall,
+turning away and walking soberly back to the house. The dew had already
+disappeared from the grass. There was now no hint of the dawn's
+coolness; the day had begun.
+
+Her father met her at the door with an exclamation about her early
+hours. He would really see something of her, he said, if she kept up
+this sort of thing. It would be too good to be true if he could
+breakfast with her every morning. Whereupon he rang for the coffee and
+unfolded his newspaper. Lydia did not notice his absorption in the news
+of the day, partly because she was trained from childhood up to consider
+reading the newspaper as the main occupation of a man at home, but more
+because on this occasion she was herself preoccupied. When Mrs. Mortimer
+came in on an errand and was prevailed upon to sit down for some
+breakfast with her father and sister, there was a little more
+conversation.
+
+Mrs. Emery had not come down stairs. A slight indisposition which she
+had felt for several days seemed to have been augmented by the
+excitement of Lydia's return. She had slept badly, and was quite
+uncomfortable, she told her husband, and thought she would stay in bed
+and send for Dr. Melton. It seemed foolish, she apologized, but now
+that Lydia was back, she wanted to be on the safe side and lose no time.
+After these facts had been communicated to her older daughter, Mrs.
+Mortimer asked, "How in the world does it happen that you're up at this
+hour?"
+
+Lydia answered that she had been inspecting the yard, which she had not
+seen the day before. She described quite elaborately her tour of
+investigation, without any mention of her encounter with her early
+caller, and only after a pause added carelessly, "Who do you suppose
+came along but that Mr. Rankin you were all talking about yesterday?"
+
+Judge Emery laid down his paper. "What under the sun was he prowling
+about for at that hour?"
+
+"He wasn't prowling," said Lydia. "He was fairly tearing along past the
+house so fast that he 'most ran over me before I saw him. I'd forgotten
+he is so handsome."
+
+"Handsome!" Mrs. Mortimer cried out at the idea. "With that beard!"
+
+"I like beards, sometimes," said Lydia.
+
+"It makes a man look like a barbarian. I'd as soon wear a nose-ring as
+have Ralph wear a beard."
+
+"Why, everybody who is anybody in Europe wears a beard, or a mustache,
+anyhow," opposed Lydia. "I got to liking to see them."
+
+"Oh, of course if they do it in Europe, we provincial stay-at-homes
+haven't a word to say." Mrs. Mortimer had invented a peculiar tone which
+she reserved for speeches like this, the neutrality of which gave a
+sharper edge to the words.
+
+"Now, Marietta, that's mean!" Lydia defended herself very energetically;
+"you know I didn't say it for that." There was a moment's pause, of
+which Marietta did not avail herself for a retraction, and then Lydia
+went on pensively, "Well, he may be handsome or not, but he's certainly
+not very polite."
+
+"He didn't say anything to you, did he?" asked her father in surprise,
+laying down the paper he had raised again during the passage between the
+sisters.
+
+Lydia hastily proffered an explanation. "He couldn't help speaking; he
+almost ran into me, you know. I was standing under the maple tree in the
+corner as he came around from Garfield Avenue. He just took off his cap
+and said good morning, and what a fine day it was, and a few words like
+that."
+
+"I don't see anything so impolite in that. Perhaps he wasn't European in
+his manners," suggested Mrs. Mortimer dryly. She had evidently arisen in
+the grasp of a mood, not uncommon with her, when an apparently causeless
+irritability drove her to say things for which she afterward suffered an
+honest but fruitless remorse. Dr. Melton had recently evolved for this
+characteristic of hers one of the explanations which the Emerys found so
+enigmatic. "Marietta," he said critically, "is in a perpetual state of
+nervous irritation from eye-strain. She has naturally excellent and
+normal eyesight, but she has always been trained to wear other people's
+spectacles. It puts her out of focus all the time, and that makes her
+snappy."
+
+She had answered explicitly to this vague diagnosis, "Nonsense! The
+thing that makes me snappy is the lack of an oriental rug in our
+parlor."
+
+"You're looking at that through Mrs. Gilbert's magnifying glasses,"
+suggested the doctor.
+
+"I'm not looking at it at all, and that's the trouble," Marietta had
+assured him.
+
+"Absence makes the heart--" the doctor had the last word.
+
+Lydia tried this morning at breakfast to obtain the same advantage over
+her sister. She flushed with a mixture of emotions and tried in a
+resentful silence to think of some definable cause for her accusation
+against Rankin's manners. Finally, "Well, I gave him a bunch of grapes,
+and he never so much as said thank you. He just took them and marched
+off."
+
+"Perhaps he doesn't like grapes," suggested Mrs. Mortimer, grim to the
+last.
+
+After breakfast, when Mrs. Mortimer and her father disappeared, Lydia
+found herself with a long morning before her. The doctor telephoned that
+he could not come before noon. Judge Emery, after his proprietary
+good-by kiss, advised her to be quiet and rest. She looked a little
+pale, he thought, and he was afraid that, after her cool ocean voyage,
+she would find the heat of an Ohio September rather trying. Indeed, as
+Lydia idled for a moment over the dismantled breakfast table she was by
+no means moved to activity. Dark shades were everywhere drawn down and
+the house was like a dimly-lighted cave, but through this attempt at
+protection the sun was making itself felt in a slowly rising,
+breathless, moist heat.
+
+Lydia climbed the stairs to her mother's room. She was looking forward
+to a long visit, but finding the invalid asleep she turned away from the
+door rather blankly. She was as yet too much a stranger in her own home
+to have at hand the universal trivial half-dozen unfinished tasks that
+save idle women from the perils of uninterrupted thought. The ribbons
+were all run in her pretty underwear; she owed no notes to anyone,
+because she had been at home too short a time to have received any
+letters; her hair had been washed the last day on the steamer, and her
+new dresses needed no mending. Her trunks had been unpacked the day
+before by her mother's competent hands, which had also arranged every
+detail of her tasteful room until to touch it would disturb the effect.
+
+Lydia began to experience that uneasy, unsettling discomfort that comes
+to modern people in ordinary modern life if some unusual circumstance
+throws them temporarily on their own resources. She lingered aimlessly
+for some time at the head of the stairs, and then, leaning heavily
+against the rail, began to descend slowly, one step at a time, to
+prolong the transit. Where the stairs turned she noticed a stain on the
+crisp sleeve of her white dress. It came, evidently, from one of the
+grapes she had eaten that morning under the maple tree. A current of
+cool air blew past her. It was the first relief from the stagnation of
+the sultry day and, sitting down on the landing, she lost herself in
+prolonged meditation.
+
+In the obscurity of the darkened hall she was scarcely visible save as a
+spot of light showing dimly through the balustrade, and she sat so still
+that the maid, stepping about below, did not see her. On her part, Lydia
+noticed but absently this slight stir of domestic activity, nor, after a
+time, louder but muffled noises from the dining-room. Even when the door
+to the dining-room opened and quick, light steps came to the foot of the
+stairs, she did not heed them. A confused, hushed sound of someone busy
+about various small operations did not rouse her, and it was not until
+the fall of a large object, clattering noisily on the floor, that she
+became conscious that someone beside the maid was in the hall. She
+leaned forward, and saw that the object which had fallen was the
+newel-post of the stairs. It had evidently been detached from its
+fastenings by the workman who, with his back to her, now knelt over a
+tool-box, fumbling among the tools with resultant little metallic clicks.
+
+Lydia ran down the stairs, finger on lip. "Hush! Don't make any more
+noise than you can help. Mother's still asleep." At his gaze of
+stupefaction she broke into her charming light laugh, "Why, I always
+seem to strike you speechless. What's the matter with me now?"
+
+The other emerged from his surprise with a ready, smiling acceptance of
+her tone, "I was wondering if I oughtn't to apologize to you--if I
+should ever see you again--for being so curt this morning. And then you
+spring up out of the ground before me. Well, so I will apologize. I do.
+I'm very sorry."
+
+They adopted, as in the first part of their earlier talk, the
+half-humorous familiarity of people surprised in an unconventional
+situation, but, in spite of this, the young man's apology was not
+without the accent of serious sincerity.
+
+Lydia responded heartily in kind. "Oh, it was I who was horrid.
+And--wasn't it funny--I was just thinking--wondering if I should ever
+have a chance to try to make you see that I didn't mean to be so--" she
+hesitated, and fell back on iteration again--"so horrid."
+
+The fashionable Endbury boarding-school had not provided its graduate
+with any embarrassment of riches in the way of expression for various
+shades of meaning. He answered, lowering his voice as she did, "Oh, you
+were all right, but I was most objectionable with my impertinent laugh.
+I'm sorry."
+
+She challenged his sincerity, "Are you really, really?"
+
+"Oh, really, really," he assured her.
+
+"And you want to do something nice to make it up to me?"
+
+"Anything," he promised, smiling at her as at a child.
+
+"You've promised! You've promised!" She indulged herself in a noiseless
+hand-clasp. "Well, then, the forfeit is to tell me all about it."
+
+"All about what?"
+
+"Goodness gracious! Don't you remember? That's what we were both horrid
+about. I asked you to tell me about it, and you--"
+
+He remembered, evidently with an amusement not entirely free from
+annoyance. "Oh, I'm safe. I'll never see you to tell you."
+
+She sat down on the bottom step and drew her white skirts about her.
+"What's the matter with right now?" she asked, smiling.
+
+"I've got to earn my living right now," he objected, beginning with a
+swift deftness to bore a tiny hole.
+
+She was diverted for an instant. "What are you doing to our nice old
+newel-post?" she asked. "I thought they said you were going to set up
+the new sideboard."
+
+"Oh, that's no job at all; it's done. Didn't you hear me pushing and
+banging things around? Now I've the job before me of fitting the very
+latest thing in newel-posts in place of your old one."
+
+The girl returned to her first attack. "Well, anyhow, if it's a long
+job, it's all the better. Go ahead and talk at the same time. You won't
+feel you're wasting time."
+
+Their low-toned talk and the glimmering light of the hall made them seem
+oddly intimate. Lydia expressed this feeling while Rankin stood looking
+doubtfully at her, a little daunted by the pretty relentlessness of her
+insistence. "You see, you're not nearly so much a stranger to me as I am
+to you. Remember how I sewed and listened. I'm a grown-up little
+pitcher, and my ears are still large. I was remembering just now, before
+you came in, how strangely you used to talk to Dr. Melton, and I thought
+it wasn't so surprising, after all, your doing 'most anything queer."
+
+Rankin laughed as he bent over his tools. "Little pitchers have tongues,
+too, I see."
+
+Either Lydia felt herself more familiar with her interlocutor than
+before, or one result of her meditation had been the loss of her
+excessive fear of wounding his feelings. She spoke now quite
+confidently, "But, honestly, what in the world did you do it for?"
+
+"It?" He made her define herself.
+
+"Oh, you know! Give up everything--lose your chance in society, and poke
+off into the woods to be a common--" In spite of her new boldness she
+faltered here.
+
+He supplied the word, with a flash of mirth. "Don't be afraid to say it
+right out--even such an awful term as workman, or carpenter. I can bear
+it."
+
+"I knew it!" Lydia exclaimed. "As I was thinking it over on the stairs
+just now, I said to myself that probably you weren't a bit apologetic
+about it; probably you had some queer reason for being proud of yourself
+for doing it."
+
+He cast a startled look at her. "You're the only person in Endbury with
+imagination enough to guess that."
+
+"But why? why? why?" she urged him, her flexible eyebrows raised in the
+eagerness of her inquiry. "I feel just as though I were going to hear
+the answer to a perfectly maddeningly unanswerable riddle."
+
+He had another turn in his attempt at evasion. "It wouldn't be polite to
+tell you the answer, for what I'm trying to do is to get out of being
+what everybody you know thinks is the only way to be--except Dr. Melton,
+of course."
+
+"What's the matter with 'all the people I know,'" she challenged him
+explicitly.
+
+He laughed and shook his head. "Oh, I've nothing new to say about them.
+Everybody has said it, from Ecclesiastes to Tolstoi."
+
+"They never say anything about just ordinary folks in Endbury that I
+know."
+
+Rankin looked at her whimsically. "Oh, _don't_ they?"
+
+"_Do_ they?" Lydia wondered at the possibility. Presently she brought
+out, as a patently absurd supposition, "You don't mean to say that
+Endbury people are wicked?"
+
+"Do you think that none but wicked people are written about in serious
+books? No; Lord, no! I don't think they are wicked--just mistaken."
+
+"What about? Now we're getting warm. I'll guess in a minute."
+
+He looked a little sadly down at her bright, eager face. "I'm afraid you
+would never guess. It's all gone into your blood. You breathe it in and
+out as you live, every minute."
+
+"What? what? what? You can't say it, you see, when it comes right down
+to the matter."
+
+"Oh, yes, I can; I can ask you if it wouldn't be a tragedy if they
+should all be killing themselves to get what they really don't want and
+don't need, and starving for things they could easily have by just
+putting out their hands."
+
+Lydia's blankness was immense.
+
+He said, with ironic triumph: "You see, when I do say it you can't make
+anything out of it." After this he turned for a time all his attention
+to his work.
+
+He had evidently reached a critical point in his undertaking. Lydia
+watched in silence the deft manipulations of his strong, brown fingers,
+wondering at the eager, almost sparkling, alertness with which he went
+from one step to another of the process that seemed unaccountably
+complicated to her. After he had finally lifted the heavy piece of wood
+into place, handling its great weight with assurance, and had submitted
+the joint to the closest inspection, he gave a low whistle of
+satisfaction with himself, and stepped back to get the general effect.
+As he did so he happened to glance at the girl, drooping rather
+listlessly on the stair. He paused instantly, with an exclamation of
+dismay.
+
+"No; I'm not going to cry," Lydia told him with a very small smile, "but
+it would serve you right if I did."
+
+The workman wiped his forehead and surveyed her in perplexity. "What,
+can I do for you?" he asked.
+
+"If you're really serious in asking that," said Lydia with dignity,
+"I'll tell you. You can take for granted that I am not an idiot or a
+child and talk to me sensibly. Dr. Melton does. And you can tell me what
+you started out to--the real reason why you are a common carpenter
+instead of in the insurance business. Of course if you think it is none
+of my concern, that's another matter. But you said you would."
+
+Rankin looked a little abashed by the grave seriousness of this appeal,
+although he smiled at its form. "You speak as though I had my reason
+tied up in a package about me, ready to hand, out."
+
+Lydia said nothing, but did not drop her earnest eyes.
+
+He thrust his hands into his pockets and returned this intent gaze, a
+new expression on his face. Then picking up a tool, and drawing a long
+breath, he said, with the accent of a man who takes an unexpected
+resolution: "Well, I _will_ tell you."
+
+He returned to his work, tightening various small screws under the
+railing, speaking, as he did so, in a reasonable, quiet tone, with none
+of the touch of badinage which had thus far underlain his manner to the
+girl. "It's very simple--nothing romantic or sudden about it all. I did
+not like the insurance business as I saw it from the inside, and the
+more I saw of it, the less I liked it. I couldn't see how I could earn
+my living at it and arrive at the age of forty with an honest scruple
+left. Not that the insurance business is, probably, any worse than any
+other--only I knew about it from the inside. So far as I could guess
+the businesses my friends were in weren't very different. At least, I
+didn't think I could improve things by changing to them. Also, it was
+going to grow more and more absorbing--or, at least, that was the way it
+affected the older men I knew--so that at forty I shouldn't have any
+other interests than getting ahead of other people in the line of
+insurance.
+
+"Now, what was I to do about it? I can't make speeches, and nobody but
+crack-brained soreheads like me would listen to them if I did. I'm not a
+great philosopher, with a cure for things. But I didn't want to fight so
+hard to get unnecessary things for myself that I kept other people from
+having the necessaries, and didn't give myself time to enjoy things that
+are best worth enjoying. What could I do? I bothered the life out of Dr.
+Melton and myself for ages before it occurred to me that the thing to
+do, if I didn't like the life I was in, was to get out of it and do
+something harmless, at least, if I didn't have gumption enough to think
+of something worth while, that might make things better.
+
+"I like the cabinet-maker's trade, and I couldn't see that practicing it
+would interfere with my growing all the honest scruples that were in me.
+Oh, I know that it's the easiest thing in the world for a carpenter to
+turn out bad work for the sake of making a little more money every day;
+I haven't any illusions about the sanctity of the hand-crafts. But,
+anyhow, I saw that as a maverick cabinet-maker I could be pretty much my
+own master. If I had strength of mind enough I could be honest without
+endless friction with partners, employers, banks, creditors, employés,
+and all the rest of the spider web of business life. At any rate, it
+looked as though there were a chance for me to lead the life I wanted,
+and I had an idea that if I started myself in square and straight, maybe
+after a little while I could see clearer about how to help other people
+to occupations that would let them live a little as well as make money,
+and let them grow a few scruples into the bargain.
+
+"You see, there's nothing mysterious about it--nor interesting. Just
+ordinary. I'm living the way I do because I'm not smart enough to think
+of a better way. But one advantage of it is that I have a good deal of
+time to think about things. Maybe I'll think of a way to help, later.
+And, anyway, just to look at me is proof that you don't _have_ to get
+ground up in the hopper like everybody else or shut the door of the
+industrial squirrel-cage on yourself in order not to starve. Perhaps
+that'll give some cleverer person the courage to start out on his own
+tangent."
+
+Lydia drew a long breath at the conclusion of this statement. "Well--"
+she said, inconclusively; "_well!_" After a pause she advanced, "My
+sister's husband is in the insurance business."
+
+"You see," said the workman, drilling a hole with great rapidity, "you
+see I ought not to talk to you. I can't without being impolite."
+
+Lydia seemed in no haste to assure him that he had not been. She pulled
+absently a loose lock of hair--a little-girl trick that came back to her
+in moments of abstraction--and looked down at her feet. When she looked
+up, it was to say with a bewildered air, "But a man has to earn his
+living."
+
+Rankin made a gesture of impatience, and stopped working to answer this
+remark. "A living isn't hard to earn. Any healthy man can do that. It's
+earning food for his vanity, or his wife's, that kills the average man.
+It's coddling his moral cowardice that takes the heart out of him. Don't
+you remember what Emerson says--Melton's always quoting it--'Most of our
+expense is for conformity to other men's ideas? It's for cake that the
+average man runs in debt.' He must have everything that anyone else has,
+whether he wants it or not. A house ever so much bigger and finer than
+he needs, with ever so many more things in it than belong there. He must
+keep his wife idle and card-playing because other men's wives are. He
+must have his children do what everyone else's children do, whether it's
+bad for their characters or not. Ah! the children! That's the worst of
+it all! To bring them up so that these futile complications will be
+essentials of life to them! To teach them that health and peace of mind
+are not too high a price for a woman to pay for what is called social
+distinction, and that a man must--if he can get it in no other way--pay
+his self-respect and the life of his individuality for what is called
+success--"
+
+Lydia broke in with a sophisticated amusement at his heat. "Why, you're
+talking about Newport, or the Four Hundred of New York--if there is any
+such thing! The rest of America--why, any European would say we're as
+primitive as Aztecs! They do say so! Endbury's not complicated. Good
+gracious! A little, plain, middle-western town, where everybody that is
+anybody knows everybody else!"
+
+"No; it's not complicated compared with European standards, but it's
+more so than it was. Why, in Heaven's name, should it strain every nerve
+to make itself as complicated as possible as fast as it can? We're free
+yet--we're not Europeans so shaken down into a social rut that only a
+red revolution can get us out of it. Why can't we decide on a
+rational--" He broke off to say, gloomily: "The devil of it is that we
+don't decide anything. We just slide along thinking of something else.
+If people would only give, just once in their lives, the same amount of
+serious reflection to what they want to get out of life that they give
+to the question of what they want to get out of a two-weeks' vacation,
+there aren't many folks--yes, even here in Endbury that seems so
+harmless to you because it's so familiar--who wouldn't be horrified at
+the aimless procession of their busy days and the trivial false
+standards they subscribe to with their blood and sweat."
+
+"My goodness!" broke in Lydia.
+
+The exclamation came from her extreme surprise, not only at the
+extraordinary doctrine enunciated, but at the experience, new to her, of
+hearing convictions spoken of in ordinary conversation. The workman took
+it, however, for a mocking comment on his sudden fluency. He gave a
+whimsical grimace, and said, as he began picking up his tools, "Ah, I
+shouldn't have given in to you. When I get started I never can stop."
+His expression altered darkly. "But I hate all that sort of thing so! I
+_hate_ it!"
+
+Lydia shrank back from him, startled, but aroused. "Well, I hate hate!"
+she cried with energy. "It's horrid to hate anything at all, but most of
+all what's wrong and doesn't know it's wrong. That needs help, not
+hate."
+
+He had slung his tool-box on his shoulder before she began speaking, and
+now stood, ready for departure, looking at her intently. Even in the dim
+light of the hall she was aware of a wonderful change in his face. She
+was startled and thrilled by the expression of his eyes in the moment of
+silence that followed.
+
+Finally, "You've given me something to remember," he said, his voice
+vibrating, and turned away.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+LYDIA'S GODFATHER
+
+
+Lydia stood where he left her, listening to the sound of his footsteps
+die down the walk outside. She was still standing there when, some time
+later, the door to the dining-room behind her opened and a tiny elderly
+man trotted across the hall to the stairs. Lydia recognized him before
+he saw that she was there, so that he exclaimed in surprise and pleasure
+as she came running toward him, her face quivering like a child's about
+to weep.
+
+"Oh, dear Godfather!" she cried, as she flung herself on him; "I'm so
+glad you've come! I never wanted so much to see you!"
+
+He was startled to feel that she was trembling and that her cheek
+against his forehead, for she was taller than he, was burning hot. "Good
+gracious, my dear!" he said, in the shrill voice his size indicated,
+"anybody'd think you were the patient I came to see."
+
+His voice, though high, was very sweet--a quality that made it always
+sound odd, almost foreign, in the midst of the neutral, colorless
+middle-western tones about him. He spoke with a Southern accent,
+dropping his _r's_, clipping some vowels and broadening others, but
+there was no Southern drawl in the clicking, telegraphic speed of his
+speech. He now looked up at his tall godchild and said without a smile:
+"If you'll kindly come down here where I can get at you, I'll shake you
+for being so foolish. You needn't be alarmed about your mother."
+
+Lydia recoiled from the little man as impulsively as she had rushed upon
+him. "Why, how _awful_!" she accused herself, horrified. "I'd
+_forgotten_ Mother!"
+
+Dr. Melton took off his hat and laid it on the hall shelf. "I will
+climb up on a chair to shake you," he continued cheerfully, "if already,
+in less than twenty-four hours, you're indulging in nerves, as these
+broken and meaningless ejaculations seem to indicate."
+
+He picked up a palm-leaf fan, lost himself in a big hall-chair, and
+began to fan himself vigorously. He looked very hot and breathless, but
+he flowed steadily on.
+
+"I can't diagnose you yet, you know, without looking at you, the way I
+do your mother, so you'll have to give me some notion of what's the
+occasion of these alternate seizures and releases of a defenseless
+Lilliputian godfather." He made a confident gesture toward the upper
+part of the house with his fan. "About your mother--I know without going
+upstairs that she is floored with one or another manifestation of the
+great disease of social-ambitionitis. But calm yourself. It's not so bad
+as it seems when you've got the right doctor. I've practiced for thirty
+years among Endbury ladies. They can't spring anything new on me. I've
+taken your mother through doily fever induced by the change from
+table-cloths to bare tops, through portière inflammation, through
+afternoon tea distemper, through _art-nouveau_ prostration and mission
+furniture palsy, not to speak of a horrible attack of acute insanity
+over the necessity for having her maids wear caps. I think you can trust
+me, whatever dodge the old malady is working on her."
+
+He had run on volubly, to give Lydia time to recover herself, his keen
+blue eyes fixing her, and now, as she wavered into something like a
+smile at his chatter, he shot a question at her with a complete change
+of manner: "But what's the matter with _you_?"
+
+Lydia started as though he had suddenly clapped her on the shoulder.
+"I--why, I--just--" she hesitated, "why, I don't know what _is_ the
+matter with me." She brought it out with the most honest surprise in the
+world.
+
+Dr. Melton's approval of this answer was immense. "Why, Lydia, I'm proud
+of you! You're one in a thousand. You'll break the hearts of everyone
+who knows you by turning out a sensible woman if you don't look out. I
+don't believe there's another girl in Endbury who would have had the
+nerve to tell the truth and not fake up a headache, or a broken heart,
+or _Weltschmerz_, or some such trifle, for a reason." He pulled himself
+up to his feet. "Of course, you don't know what's the matter with you,
+my dear. _I_ do. _I_ know everything, and can't do a thing. That's me!
+Physically, you're upset by Endbury heat after an ocean voyage, and
+mentally it's the reaction caused by your subsidence into private life
+after being the central figure of the returned traveler. Last evening,
+now, with that mob of friends and the family pawing at you and trying to
+cram-jam you back into the Endbury box and shut the lid down--_that_ was
+enough to kill anybody with a nerve in her body. What's the history of
+the morning? I hope you slept late."
+
+Lydia shook her head. "No; I was up ever so early.--Marietta came over
+to borrow the frames for drying curtains, and stayed to breakfast."
+
+Something about her accent struck oddly on the trained sensitiveness of
+the physician's ear. Her tone rang empty, as with something kept back.
+
+"Marietta's been snapping at you," he diagnosed rapidly.
+
+"Well, a little," Lydia admitted.
+
+The doctor laid the palm-leaf fan aside and took Lydia's slim fingers in
+both his firm, sinewy hands. "My dear, I'm going to do as I have always
+done with you, and talk with you as though you were a grown-up person
+and could take your share in understanding and bearing family problems.
+Your sister Marietta is not a very happy woman. She has too many of your
+father's brains for the life she's been shunted into. She might be
+damming up a big river with a finely constructed concrete dam, and what
+she is giving all her strength to is trying to hold back a muddy little
+trickle with her bare hands. The achievement of her life is to give on a
+two-thousand-a-year income the appearance of having five thousand like
+your father. She does it; she's a remarkably forceful woman, but it
+frets her. She ought to be in better business, and she knows it, though
+she won't admit it. So, don't you mind if she's sharp-tongued once in a
+while. It's when she feels the muddy water oozing through her fingers."
+
+He fancied that Lydia's eyes on his were a little blank, perhaps absent,
+and broke off with a short laugh. He was quite hardened to the fact that
+people never understood his fanciful metaphors, but Lydia, as a child,
+had used to have a curious intuitive divination of his meaning. After
+his laugh he sighed and turned the talk.
+
+"Well, and has Flora Burgess been after you to get your impression of
+Endbury as compared with Europe? Your mother said she wanted an
+interview with you for next Sunday's _Society Notes_."
+
+Lydia smiled. The subject was an old joke with them. "No; she hasn't
+appeared yet. I haven't seen her--not since my birthday a year ago, the
+time she described the supper-table as a 'glittering, scintillating mass
+of cut-glass and silver, and yet without what could really be called
+ostentation.' Isn't she delicious! How is the little old thing, anyway?"
+
+"Still trotting industriously about Endbury back yards sowing the
+dragon's teeth of her idiotic ideas and standards."
+
+"Oh, I remember, you don't like her," said Lydia. "She always seems just
+funny to me--funny and pathetic. She's so dowdy, and reverential to
+folks with money, and enjoys other people's good times so terrifically."
+
+"She's like some political bosses--admirable in private life, but a
+menace to the community just the same."
+
+Lydia laughed involuntarily, in spite of her preoccupation. "Flora
+Burgess a menace to the community!"
+
+The doctor turned away and began to mount the stairs. "Me and
+Cassandra!" he called over his shoulder in his high, sweet treble. "Just
+you wait and see!"
+
+He disappeared down the upper hall, finding his way about the darkened
+house with a familiarity that betokened long practice.
+
+Lydia sat down on the bottom step to wait for his return. The clock in
+the dining-room struck twelve. It came over her with a clap that but
+half a day had passed since she had run out into the dawn. For an
+instant she had the naïve, melodramatic instinct of youth to deck out
+its little events in the guise of crises. She began to tell herself with
+gusto that she had passed some important turning-point in her life;
+when, as was not infrequent with her, she lost the thread of her thought
+in a sudden mental confusion which, like a curtain of fog, shut her off
+from definite reflection. Complicated things that moved rapidly always
+tired Lydia. She had an enormous capacity for quiet and tranquillity.
+To-day she felt that more complicated things were moving rapidly inside
+her head than ever before--as though she had tried to keep track of the
+revolutions of a wheel and had lost her count and could now only stare
+stupidly at the spokes, whirling till they blended into one blur. What
+was this Endbury life she had come back to? What in the world had that
+man been talking about? What a strange person he was! How very bright
+his eyes were when he looked at you--as though he were, somehow, seeing
+you more than most people did. What did the doctor mean by all that
+about Marietta? It had never occurred to her that the life of anyone
+about her might have been different from what it was. What else was
+there for people to do but what everybody else did? It was all very
+unsettling and, in this heat and loneliness, daunting.
+
+Through this vague discomfort there presently pierced a positive
+apprehension of definite unpleasantness. She would have to tell her
+mother that she had spent the whole morning talking to Mr. Rankin, and
+her mother would be cross, and would say such--Lydia remembered as in a
+distant dream her supreme content with life of only a few hours earlier.
+It seemed a very bewildering matter to her now.
+
+Ought she so certainly to tell her mother? She lingered for a moment
+over this possibility. Then, "Oh, of course!" she said aloud, flushing
+with an angry shame at her moment's parley with deceit.
+
+She heard her mother's door open and turned to see the doctor running
+down the stairs, his wrinkled little face very grave. "You were right,
+Lydia, to be anxious about your mother, and I am an old fool! There is
+no fool like a fluent fool! I'm afraid she's in for quite a siege.
+There's no danger, thank Heaven! but I don't believe she can be about
+for a month or more. I'm going to 'phone for a trained nurse. Just see
+that nobody disturbs her, will you?"
+
+He darted away, leaving Lydia leaning against the newel-post, gasping.
+The clock in the dining-room chimed the quarter-hour. She cried out to
+herself, as she climbed the stairs heavily, that she could not stand it
+to have things happen to her so fast. If all Endbury days were going to
+be like this one--
+
+She was for a moment brought to a standstill by a realization of depths
+within herself that she had not dreamed of. She realized, horrified,
+that on hearing the doctor's verdict her first thought--gone before it
+was formulated, but still her first thought--had been one of relief that
+now she need not tell her mother.
+
+It had not occurred to her at all, nor did it now, that she either
+should or should not tell her father.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+OUTSIDE THE LABYRINTH
+
+
+The Black Rock woods lay glowing under the cloudy autumn sky like a heap
+of live coals, the maples still quivering in scarlet, the chestnuts sunk
+into a clear yellow flame, the oaks, parched by the September heat,
+burnt out into rusty browns. Above them, the opalescent haze of October
+rose like a faint blue smoke, but within the woods the subdued light was
+richly colored, like that which passes through the stained glass of a
+great cathedral. The first of the fallen leaves lay in pools of gold in
+the hollows of the brown earth, where the light breezes had drifted
+them.
+
+It was, for the moment, singularly quiet, so, that, as Lydia walked
+quickly along the footpath, the pleasant rustle of her progress was the
+only sound she heard. Under a large chestnut she paused, gathering her
+amber-colored draperies about her and glancing uncertainly ahead to
+where the path forked. She looked a yellow leaf blown by some current of
+the air unfelt by the rest of the forest and caught against the rough
+bark of the tree. After hesitating for a moment, she drifted slowly
+along the right-hand path, looking about her with dreamy, dazzled eyes.
+From time to time, she stopped and lifted her face to the light and
+color above her, and once she stood a long time leaning against a tree,
+stirring with the tip of her parasol a heap of burning maple leaves.
+Under her drooping hat her face was almost vacant in a wide beatitude of
+harmony with the spirit of day. When she walked on again it was with a
+lighter and lighter step, as though the silence had come to have a
+lovely meaning for her which she feared to disturb.
+
+The path turned sharply after passing through a thicket of ruddy
+brambles, and she found herself in a little clearing which the haze of
+the upper air descended to fill. The yellow chestnuts stood in a ring
+about the sunburnt grass. It was like a golden cup filled with some
+magic, impalpable draught.
+
+Through this she now saw a rough little house, brown as an oak leaf,
+with a wide veranda, under which, before a work-bench, sat Daniel
+Rankin. His tanned arms moved rhythmically backward and forward, but his
+ruddy head was high, and his eyes, roving about the leafy walls of the
+clearing, caught sight of Lydia as soon as she had turned the corner.
+She stopped short, with a startled gesture, on the edge of the woods,
+but remained standing quietly while Rankin sprang up from his seat and
+walked toward her smiling.
+
+"Oh, Miss Emery," he called welcomingly. "I didn't recognize you for a
+minute. Every once in a while a young lady or a child loses her way from
+a picnic in the woods and stumbles into my settlement. I always have to
+hurry to show them there's no danger of the wild man who lives in that
+house eating them up." He came up to her now, and put out his hand with
+a frank pleasure.
+
+"I wasn't afraid," said Lydia; "I was startled for a minute, but I knew
+right away it must be your house. You described it to me, you know."
+
+"It's very much flattered that you remember its portrait," said the
+owner. "Won't you honor it some more by sitting down in its veranda for
+a while? Or must I take you back to your picnic party at once?"
+
+Lydia moved on, looking about her at the piles of boards, half hidden by
+vines, at the pool of clear water welling up through white sand in front
+of the house, and at the low rough building, partly covered with
+woodbine ruby-red against the weather-beaten wood.
+
+"My picnic party's gone home," she explained. "It was only Marietta and
+her little boy, anyhow. My sister thought it was going to rain, and took
+the quickest way home. I told Marietta I'd walk across and take the
+Garfield Avenue trolley line. I must have taken a wrong turn in the
+path."
+
+They had reached the veranda now, and Lydia sank into the chair which
+Rankin offered her. She smiled her thanks silently, her face still
+steeped in quiet ecstasy, and for a long time she said nothing. The
+quick responsiveness that was at all times her most marked
+characteristic answered this rare mood of Nature with an intensity
+almost frightening in its visible joy.
+
+Rankin also said nothing, looking at her reflectively and stroking his
+close-clipped red beard. Above the faded brown of his work-shirt, his
+face glowed with color. In the silent interval of the girl's slow
+emergence from her reverie, his gaze upon her was so steady that when
+Lydia finally glanced up at him he could not for a moment look away. The
+limpid unconsciousness of her eyes changed into a startled look of
+inquiry, as though he had spoken and she had not understood. Then a
+flush rose to her cheeks, she looked down and away in a momentary
+confusion, moved in her chair, and began to talk at random.
+
+"So this is where you live. It's lovely. It looks like a fairy
+story--the little house in the wood, you know--nothing seems real
+to-day--the woods--it makes me want to cry, they are so beautiful. I've
+been wondering and wondering what outdoors was looking like. You know
+poor Mother is sick, and though she's not so awfully sick, and of course
+we've a trained nurse for her, still I've had to be housekeeper and I
+haven't had time to breathe. The second girl left right off because of
+the extra work she thought sickness would make, but it seems to me we've
+had a million new second girls in the three weeks. It's been awful! I
+haven't had time to get out at all or to see anybody."
+
+She was quite herself now, and confided her troubles with a naïve
+astonishment, as though they were new to humanity.
+
+"Yes; I've heard ladies say before that it's quite awful," agreed her
+companion gravely. He swung himself up to sit on his work-bench, his
+long legs stretched before him, just reaching the ground. "Envy me," he
+went on, smiling; "I don't have to have a second girl, or a first one,
+either."
+
+"What _do_ you do?" asked Lydia, not waiting, however, for an answer,
+but continuing her relieved outpouring of her own perplexities. "It's
+perfectly desperate at home. I haven't had a minute's peace. This
+afternoon I just got wild, and said I _would_ get away from it for a
+minute, and just ran away. Father's nice about it, but he does look
+something fierce when he comes home and finds another one left. He says
+that Mother doesn't have to change more than two or three times a year!"
+She presented this as the superlative of stability.
+
+Rankin laughed again. Lydia felt more and more at her ease. He was
+evidently thinking of her pretty looks and ways rather than of what she
+was saying, and, like all of her sisterhood, this was treatment which
+she thoroughly understood. For the moment she forgot that he was the man
+who had startled and almost shocked her by his unabashed presentation,
+in a conversation with a young lady, of ideas and convictions. She
+leaned back in her chair and put on some of the gracefully imperious
+airs of regnant American young-ladyhood. "You must show me all about how
+you live, and everything," she commanded prettily. "I've been so curious
+about it--and now here I am."
+
+She was enchantingly unconscious of the possibility of her having seemed
+to seek him out. "What a perfectly beautiful piece of wood you have in
+that chair-back." She laid her ungloved, rosy finger-tips on a dark
+piece of oak. "And so this is where you work?"
+
+"I work everywhere," he told her. "I do all that's done, you see."
+
+"You must have to walk quite a ways to get your meals, don't you?" Lydia
+turned her white neck to glance inside the house.
+
+Rankin's mouth twitched humorously. "You'll never understand me," he
+said lightly. "I get my meals myself, here."
+
+Lydia turned on him sharply. "You don't _cook_!" she cried out.
+
+"And wash dishes, and make my bed, and sweep my floor, and, once in a
+great while, dust."
+
+The romantic curiosity died out of the girl's eyes into a shocked
+wonder. She glanced at his large brown hands, and seemed about to speak.
+Nothing came from her lips finally, however, beyond the pregnant "Well!"
+which seemed the only expression in her vocabulary for extreme surprise.
+Rankin threw back his head, showing a triangle of very white throat
+above his loose collar, and laughed aloud. The sound of his mirth was so
+infectious that Lydia laughed with him, though half uneasily.
+
+"It's so funny," he explained, "to see the picture of myself I gather
+from your shocked and candid eyes. I'm so used to my queer ideas
+nowadays that I forget that what seems perfectly natural to me still
+seems perfectly crazy to others."
+
+"Well, not _crazy_." Lydia proffered this negation in so halting an
+accent that Rankin burst into another peal of laughter. "But it must be
+horrid for you to wash dishes and cook!" protested Lydia, feeling
+resentful that her inculcated horror of a man's "lowering himself" to
+woman's work should be taken with so little seriousness. She tried to
+rearrange a mental picture which the other was continually destroying.
+"But I suppose it's very picturesque. You cook over an open fire, I
+imagine."
+
+There was a humorous glint in his eye, "I cook over the best brand of
+oil-stove that money can buy," he told her, relentlessly, watching her
+wince from the sordid image. "I have all the conveniences I can think
+of. All I'm trying to do is to get myself fed with the least expenditure
+of gray matter and time on my part, and as things are now arranged in
+this particular corner of the country I find I can do it best this way.
+It's more work trying to persuade somebody who doesn't want to wait on
+me than to jump up and do it myself. Also, having brains, I can
+certainly cook like a house afire."
+
+At this, Lydia was overcome by that openness to conviction from
+unexpected sources which gave her mother one of her great anxieties for
+her. "Well, honestly, do you know," she said unexpectedly, "there is a
+lot in that. I've thought ever so many times in the last two weeks that
+if Father would let me wait on the table, for instance, I could get on
+ever so much easier."
+
+"And I'll just warrant," the man went on, "that I've had more time to
+myself lately than you have, for all I've my living to earn as well as
+the housework."
+
+"My goodness!" cried Lydia, repudiating the comparison. "That needn't be
+saying much for you, for I haven't had a minute--not even to sit with
+Mother as much as I ought."
+
+"What did you have to do that kept you from that?"
+
+"Oh, you're no housekeeper, that's evident, or you wouldn't ask. A man
+_never_ has any idea about the amount of work there is to do in a house.
+Why, set the table, and sweep the parlors, and change the flower vases,
+and dust, and pick up, and dust--I don't know what makes things get so
+dusty. We've got an awfully big house, you know, and of course I want to
+keep everything as nice as if Mother were up. Everybody expects me to do
+that!"
+
+"I had a great-aunt," began Rankin with willful irrelevancy, "a very
+wonderful old woman who taught me most of what I value. She was
+considered cracked, so maybe that's why I am a freak, and she was as
+wise as wise! And she had stories that fitted every occasion. One that
+she used to tell was about a farmer cousin of hers, who had a team of
+spirited young horses that he was breaking. Everybody warned him that if
+they ever ran away they'd be spoiled for life, and he got carefuller and
+carefuller of them. One day he and his father were haying beside a
+river, and the father, who couldn't swim a stroke, fell in. The horses
+were frightened by the splash and began to prance, and the son ran to
+their heads, beside himself with fear. The old man came to the top and
+screamed, 'Help! help!' and the son answered, fairly jumping up and down
+in his anguish of mind over his poor old father's fate, 'Oh, help,
+somebody! Somebody come and help! I can't leave my horses!'"
+
+He stopped. Lydia slid helplessly into the naïve question, "Well, did
+his father drown?" before the meaning of the little parable struck her.
+She began to laugh, with her gay, sweet inability to resent a joke made
+at her own expense. "Don't you think you are a good hand at
+sermon-making!" she mocked him. "It's all very well to preach, but just
+you tell me what you would have done in my place."
+
+"I should have left those big rooms, filled with things to dust, and let
+the dust lie on them--even such an awful thing as that!"
+
+Lydia considered this with honest surprise. "Why, do you know, it never
+occurred to me I could do that!"
+
+Rankin nodded. "It's a common hallucination," he explained. "I've had
+it. I have to struggle against it still."
+
+"Hallucination?"
+
+"The notion that you belong to the things that belong to you."
+
+Lydia looked at him sidewise out of her clear dark eyes. She was
+beginning to feel more at home in his odd repertory of ideas. "I
+wonder," she mused, "if that's why I always feel so much freer and
+happier in old clothes--that I don't forget that they're for me and I'm
+not for them. But really, you know, dressmakers and mothers and folks
+get you to thinking that you are for clothes--you're made to show them
+off." Rankin vouchsafed no opinion as to this problem of young-ladyhood.
+"Here's your sister's rain," he said instead, pointing across the
+clearing, where against the dark tree-trunks fine, clear lines slanted
+down to the dry grass. Lydia rose in some agitation. "Why, I didn't
+really think it would rain! I thought it was just Marietta's--" She
+glanced down in dismay at her thin low shoes and the amber-colored silk
+of her ruffled skirt.
+
+Rankin stood up eagerly. "Ah, I've a chance to do you a service. Just
+step in, won't you, a moment and let me skirmish around and see what a
+bachelor's establishment can offer to a beautiful young lady who mustn't
+get wet."
+
+Lydia moved into the wide, low room, saying deprecatingly, "It wouldn't
+hurt _me_ to get wet, you know. But this dress just came from Paris, and
+I haven't had a chance to show it to anybody yet."
+
+Rankin laughed, hastening to draw up a chair before the hearth, where a
+few embers still glowed, their presence explained by the autumnal chill
+which now struck sharply across the room from the open door as the rain
+began to patter on the roof. The girl looked about her in silence,
+apparently with surprise.
+
+"Well, how do you like it?" asked the master of the house, throwing some
+dry twigs on the fire so that the flame, leaping up, lighted the
+corners, already dusky with the approach of evening. "It's not very
+tidy, is it?" He began rummaging in a recess in the wall, tumbling out
+coats and shoes and hats in his haste. Finally, "There!" he cried in
+triumph, shaking out a rain-coat, "That will keep your pretty French
+finery dry."
+
+He turned back to the girl, who was sitting very straight in her chair,
+peering about her with wide eyes and a strange expression on her face.
+"Why, what's the matter?" he asked.
+
+[Illustration: "You say beautiful things!" he replied quietly. "My
+rough quarters are glorified for me."]
+
+Lydia stood up, with a quick indrawn breath. "I don't know," she said,
+"what it is. It seems as though I'd been here before. It looks so
+familiar to me--so good--" She went closer to where, still holding out
+the rain-coat, he stood on the other side of a table strewn with papers.
+She leaned on this, fingering a pen and looking at him with a shy
+eagerness. She was struggling, as so often, with an indefinable feeling
+which she had no words to express. "Don't you know," she went on, "every
+once in a while you see somebody--an old man or woman, perhaps, on the
+street cars, in the street--and somehow the face goes home to you. It
+seems as though you'd been waiting to see that face again. Well, it's
+just so with this room. It has a face. I like it very--" She broke off,
+helplessly inarticulate before the confusion of her thoughts, and looked
+timidly at the man. She was used to kindly, amused laughter when she
+tried, stumblingly, to phrase some of the quickly varying impressions
+which made her life so full of invisible incidents.
+
+But Rankin did not laugh, even kindly. His clear eyes were more than
+serious. They seemed to show him moved to an answering emotion. "You say
+beautiful things!" he replied quietly. "My rough quarters are glorified
+for me. I've been fond of them before--they're the background to a good
+many inward struggles and a considerable amount of inward peace, but
+now--" He looked about him with new eyes, noting the dull gleam of gold
+with which the chestnut ceiling answered the searching flicker of the
+fire, the brighter sparkles which were struck out from the gilded
+lettering on the books which lined the walls, and the diamond-like
+flashes from the polished steel of the tools on the work-bench at the
+other end of the room. There was a pause in which the silence within the
+house brought out the different themes composing the rich harmony of the
+rain, the steady, resonant downpour on the roof, the sweet whispers of
+the dried grass under the torrent, the muted thuddings of the big drops
+on the beaten earth of the veranda floor, and the hurried liquid
+overflow of the eaves. It was still light enough to see the fine color
+of the leather that covered the armchairs, and the glossy black of a
+piano, heaped with a litter of music. Near the piano, leaning against
+the wall, a violoncello curved its brown crook-neck over the shapeless
+bag that sheltered it.
+
+Lydia pointed to it. "You're musical!" she said, as if she had made an
+important discovery.
+
+Rankin roused himself, followed the direction of her gaze, and shook
+his head. "No; I can't play a note," he said cheerfully, laying the
+rain-coat down and going to look over the pile of overshoes in a box;
+"but I like it. My queer old great-aunt left me that 'cello. It had
+belonged to her grandfather. I believe being so old makes it quite
+valuable. The piano belongs to an old German friend of mine who has seen
+better days and has now no place to keep it. Two or three times a week
+he comes out here with an old crony who plays the 'cello, and they make
+music till they get to crying on each other's necks."
+
+"Do you cry, too?" Lydia smiled at the picture.
+
+Rankin came back to the fire with a pair of rubbers in his hand. "No;
+I'm an American. I only blow my nose hard," he said gravely.
+
+"Well, it must be lovely!" She sighed this out ardently, sinking back in
+her chair. "I love music so it 'most kills me, but I don't get very much
+of it. I took piano lessons when I was little, but there were always so
+many other things to do I never got time to practice as much as I wanted
+to, and so I didn't get very far. Anyhow, after I heard a good orchestra
+play, my little tinklings were worse than nothing. I wish I could hear
+more. But perhaps it's just as well, Mother says. It always gets me so
+excited. I'm sure I should cry, along with the Germans."
+
+"They would like that," observed her host, "above everything."
+
+"Father keeps talking about getting one of those player-pianos, but
+Mother says they are so new you can't tell what they are going to be.
+She says they may get to be too common."
+
+Rankin looked at her hard. "Would you like one?" He asked this trivial
+question with a singular emphasis.
+
+"Why, I haven't really thought," said Lydia, considering the matter.
+
+The man looked oddly anxious for her answer.
+
+Finally, "Why, it depends on how much music you can make with them. If
+they are really good, I should want one, of course."
+
+Rankin smiled, drew a long breath, and fell sober again as if at a
+sudden thought.
+
+"I don't see any oil-stove," said the girl, skeptically, looking about
+her.
+
+"Oh, I have a regular kitchen. It's there," he nodded back of him; "and
+two rooms beside for me and for Dr. Melton or my Germans, or some of my
+other freak friends when they stay too long and miss the last trolley in
+to town. Oh, I have lots of room."
+
+"It looks really rather nice, now I'm here and all," Lydia vaguely
+approved; "though I don't see why you couldn't have gone on more like
+other folks and just changed some things--not been so _awfully_ queer!"
+
+Rankin was kneeling before her, holding out a pair of rubbers. At this
+remark he sat back on his heels, and began: "My great-aunt said that
+there was a man in her town who had such a terrible temper that his wife
+was in perfect terror of him, and finally actually died of fear.
+Everybody was paralyzed with astonishment when, two or three years
+after, one of the nicest girls in town married him. People told her she
+was crazy, but she just smiled and said she guessed she could get along
+with him all right. Everything went well for a week or two, and then one
+day he said the tea was cold and not fit for a pig to drink, and threw
+the cup on the floor. She threw hers down and broke it all to smash. He
+stared and glared, and threw his plate down. She set her lips and banged
+her own plate on the hearth. He threw his knife and fork through the
+window. She threw hers after, and added the water-pitcher for good
+measure."
+
+Lydia's astonishment at this point was so heartfelt that the raconteur
+broke off, laughed, and ended hastily, "I spare you the rest of the
+dinner-service. The upshot of it was that every dish in the house was
+smashed and not a word spoken. Then the man called for his carriage (he
+was a rich man--that sort usually is), drove to the nearest china-store,
+bought a new set, better than the old, took it back, and lived in peace
+and harmony with his wife ever after. And here is the smallest pair of
+rubbers I can find, and I shall have to tie these on!"
+
+Lydia watched the operation in silence. As he finished it and rose to
+his feet again, "What was that all about?" she inquired simply.
+
+"Compromise," he answered. "There are occasions when it doesn't do any
+good."
+
+"Does it do such a lot of good to go off in the woods by yourself and do
+your own cooking?" asked Lydia with something of her father's shrewd
+home-thrusting accent. "What would happen if everybody did that?"
+
+Rankin laughed. "Everybody'd have a good time, for one thing," he
+answered, adding, more seriously, "The house of Rimmon may be all right
+for some people, but _my_ head isn't clear enough."
+
+Lydia looked frankly at a loss. She did not belong to the alert, quickly
+"bluffing" type of young lady. "Rimmon?" she asked.
+
+"He's in the Bible."
+
+"That's a good reason why I've never heard of him," she said ruefully.
+
+"All I meant by him was that people who conform outwardly to a standard
+they don't really believe in, are in danger of getting most awfully
+mixed up. And certainly they don't stand any chance of convincing
+anybody else that there's anything the matter with the standard. What's
+needed isn't to upset everything in a heap, but to call people's
+attention to the fact that things could be a lot better than they are.
+And that's hard to do. And who ever called more people's attention to
+that fact than an impractical, unbalanced nobleman who took to cobbling
+shoes for the peace of his soul? There wasn't a particle of sense to
+what Tolstoi _did_, but--" He stopped, hesitating in an uncertainty that
+Lydia understood with a touching humility.
+
+"Oh, you needn't explain who Tolstoi is. I've heard of him."
+
+"Well, you mustn't imagine I'm anything like Tolstoi!" cried the young
+man, laughing aloud at the idea, "for I don't take a bit of stock in
+his deification of working with your muscles. That was an exaggeration
+he fell into in his old age because he'd been denied his fair share of
+manual work when he was young. If he'd had to split kindlings and tote
+ashes and hoe corn when he was a boy, I bet he wouldn't have thought
+there was anything so sanctifying about callouses on your hands!"
+
+"Oh, dear! You're awfully confusing to me," complained Lydia. "You
+always seem to be making fun of something I thought just the minute
+before you believed in."
+
+Rankin looked intensely serious. "There isn't an impression I'd be
+sorrier to give you," he said earnestly. "Perhaps the trouble is that
+you don't as yet know much about the life I've got out of."
+
+"I've lived in Endbury all my life," protested Lydia.
+
+"There may still be something for you to learn about the lives of its
+men," suggested her companion.
+
+"If you think it's so wrong, why don't you reform it?" Lydia launched
+this challenge suddenly at him with the directness characteristic of her
+nation.
+
+"I have to begin with reforming myself," he said, "and that's job enough
+to last me a long while. I have to learn not to care about being
+considered a failure by all the men of my own age who are passing me by;
+and I don't mind confessing to you that that is not always easy--though
+you mustn't tell Dr. Melton I'm so weak. I have to train myself to see
+that they are not really getting _up_ so fast, but only _scrambling_
+fast over slipping, sliding stones; and then I have to try to find some
+firm ground where I can make a path of my own, up which I can plod in my
+own way."
+
+The tone of the young people, as they talked with their innocent
+grandiloquence of these high matters, might have been taken for that of
+a couple deep in some intimate discussion, so honestly serious and moved
+was it. There was a silence now, also like the pause in a profoundly
+personal talk, in which they looked long into each other's eyes.
+
+The clock struck five. Lydia sprang to her feet. "Oh, I must hurry on!
+I told Marietta to telephone home that I'd be there at six."
+
+She still preserved her charming unconsciousness of the
+unconventionality of her situation. A European girl, brought up in the
+strictest ignorance of the world, would still have had intuitions to
+make her either painfully embarrassed or secretly delighted with this
+impromptu visit to a young bachelor; but Lydia, who had been allowed to
+read "everything" and the only compromise to whose youth had been fitful
+attempts of the family to remember "not to talk too much about things
+before Lydia," was clad in that unearthly innocence which the advancing
+tide of sophistication has still left in some parts of the United
+States--that sweet, proud, pathetic conviction of the American girl that
+evil is not a vital force in any world that she knows. The young man
+before her smiled at her in as artless an unconsciousness as her own.
+They might have been a pair of children.
+
+"You've plenty of time," he assured her. "Though I live so far out of
+the world, the Garfield Avenue trolley line is only five minutes' walk
+away. Oh, I'm prosaic and commonplace, with my oil-stove and trolley
+cars. There's nothing of the romantic reactionary about me, I'm afraid."
+He wrapped the rain-coat about her and took an umbrella.
+
+"Don't you lock up your house when you go away?" asked Lydia.
+
+"The poor man laughs in the presence of thieves," quoted Rankin.
+
+They stood on the veranda now, looking out into the blue twilight. The
+rain drummed noisily on the roof and the soft swish of its descent into
+the grass rose to a clear, sibilant note. The wind had died down
+completely, and the raindrops fell in long, straight lines like an
+opaque, glistening wall, which shut them off from the rest of the world.
+Back of them, the fire lighted up the empty chair that Lydia had left.
+She glanced in, and, moved by one of her sudden impulses, ran back for
+a moment to cast a rapid glance about the quiet room.
+
+When she returned to take Rankin's arm as he held the open umbrella, she
+looked up at him with shining eyes. "I have made friends with it--your
+living-room," she said.
+
+As they made their way along the footpath, she went on, "When I get into
+the trolley car I shall think I have dreamed it--the little house in the
+clearing--so peaceful, so--just look at it now. It looks like a little
+house in a child's fairy-tale." They paused on the edge of the clearing
+and looked back at the pleasant glow shimmering through the windows,
+then plunged into the strip of forest that separated the clearing from
+the open farming country and the main road to Endbury.
+
+Neither of them spoke during this walk. The rain pattered swiftly,
+varying its monotonous refrain as it struck the umbrella, the leaves,
+the little brook that ran beside them, or the stony path. Lydia clung to
+Rankin's arm, peering about her into the dim caves of twilight with a
+happy, secure excitement. After her confinement to the house for the
+last fortnight, merely to be out of doors was an intoxication for her,
+and ever since she had left her sister and begun her wanderings in the
+painted woods she had felt the heroine of an impalpable adventure. The
+silent flight through the dripping trees was a fitting end. Except for
+breaking in upon the music of the rain, she would have liked to sing
+aloud.
+
+She thought, flittingly, how Marietta would laugh at her manufacturing
+anything romantic out of the commonplace facts of the insignificant
+episode, but even as she turned away from her sister's imagined mocking
+smile, she felt an odd certainty that to Rankin there was also a glamour
+about their doings. It was as though the occasional contact of their
+bodies as they moved along the narrow path were a wordless
+communication.
+
+He said nothing, but as they emerged upon the long treeless road,
+stretching away over the flat country to where the lights of Endbury
+glowed tremulously through the rain, he looked at his companion with a
+quick intensity, as though it were the first time he had really seen
+her.
+
+It was that man's look which makes a woman's heart beat faster, even if
+she is as inexperienced as Lydia. She was already tingling with an
+undefined emotion, and the shock of their meeting eyes made her face
+glow. It shone through the half-light as though a lamp had been lighted
+within.
+
+They stood silently waiting for the car which flashed a headlight toward
+them far down the track. As it drew near, bounding over the rails,
+humming like a great insect, and bringing visibly nearer and nearer the
+end of their time together, Lydia was aware that Rankin was in the grasp
+of an emotion that threatened to become articulate. The steady advance
+of the car was forcing him to a speech against which he struggled in
+vain. Lydia began to quiver. She felt an expectancy of something lovely,
+moving, new to her, which grew tenser and tenser, as though her nerves
+were the strings of an instrument being pulled into tune for a melody.
+Standing there in the cold, rainy twilight, she had a moment of the
+exultation she had thought was to be so common in her Endbury career.
+She felt warmed through with the consciousness of being lovely, admired,
+secure, supremely fortunate, just as she had thought she would feel; but
+she had not been able to imagine the extraordinary happiness that this,
+or some unrecognized element of the moment, gave to her.
+
+The car was almost upon them; the blinding glare of the headlight showed
+their faces with startling suddenness. She saw in Rankin's eyes a
+tenderness that went to her heart. She leaned to him from the steps of
+the car to which he swung her--she leaned to him with a sweet,
+unconscious eagerness. In the instant before the car moved forward, as
+he stood gazing up at her, he spoke at last.
+
+The words hummed meaningless in Lydia's ears, and it was not until some
+time after, in the garish white brilliance of the car, that she
+convinced herself that she had heard aright. Even then, though she still
+saw his face raised to hers, the raindrops glistening on his hair and
+beard, even though she still heard the fervor of his voice, she remained
+incredulous before the enigma of his totally unexpected words. He had
+said, with a solemn note of pity in his voice: "Ah, my poor child, I am
+so horribly, horribly sorry for you!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE SHADOW OF THE COMING EVENT
+
+
+Judge Emery looked tired and old as he sat down heavily at his
+dinner-table opposite his pretty daughter. The discomfort and
+irregularity of the household for the last two weeks had worn on the
+nerves of a very busy man who needed all of his strength for his work.
+It seemed an evil fate of his, he reflected as he took his napkin out of
+its ring, that whenever he was particularly hard-pressed in his
+profession, domestic turmoil was sure to set in. He was now presiding
+over a suit between the city and the electric railway company, involving
+many intricate details of electrical engineering and accounting methods.
+Until that suit was settled, he felt that it was unreasonable for his
+family to expect him to give time or attention to anything else.
+
+In the absence of other vital interests in his life, he had come to
+focus all his faculties on his profession. On the adroitness of clever
+attorneys he expended the capacity for admiration which, as his life was
+arranged, found no other outlet; and, belonging to the generation before
+golf and bridge and tennis had brought games within the range of
+serious-minded adults, he had the same intent curiosity about the
+outcome of a legal contest that another man might have felt in the
+outcome of a Newport tournament. His wife had long ago learned, so she
+said, that any attempt to catch his mental eye while an interesting
+trial was in progress was as unavailing as to try to call a street gamin
+away from a knot-hole in a fence around a baseball field.
+
+She knew him and all his capabilities very well, his wife told herself,
+and so used was she to the crystallized form in which she had for so
+many years beheld him, that she dismissed, as typically chimerical
+"notions," the speculations of her doctor--also a lifelong friend of
+her husband's--as to what Judge Emery might have become if--the doctor
+spoke in his usual highly figurative and fantastic jargon--"he had not
+had to hurry so with that wheel in his cage." "When I first knew Nat
+Emery," he once said, "he was sitting up till all hours reading _Les
+Miserables_, and would knock you down if you didn't bow your head at the
+mention of Thackeray. He might have liked music, too. An American isn't
+inherently incapable of that, I suppose." At which he had turned on
+sixteen-year-old Lydia with, "Which would you rather have, Lyddy; a
+husband with a taste for Beethoven or one that'd make you five thousand
+a year?" Lydia had shudderingly made the answer of sixteen years, that
+she never intended to have a husband of any kind whatever, and Mrs.
+Emery had rebuked the doctor later for "putting ideas in girls' heads."
+It was an objection at which he had laughed long and loud.
+
+Mrs. Emery liked her doctor in spite of not understanding him; but she
+loved her husband because she knew him through and through. In his turn,
+Judge Emery bestowed on his wife an esteem the warmth of which was not
+tempered by his occasional amusement at her--an amusement which Mrs.
+Emery was far from suspecting. He did heartily and unreservedly admire
+her competence; though he never did justice to her single-handed battle
+against the forces of ignorance and irresponsibility in the kitchen
+until an illness of hers showed that the combat must be continuous,
+though his wisdom in selecting an ambitious wife had shielded him, as a
+rule, from the uproar of the engagement.
+
+This evening, as he looked across the white table-cloth at his daughter,
+he had a sudden qualm of doubt, not unusual in parents, as to the
+capacity of the younger generation to carry on the work begun by the
+older. Of course, he reassured himself, this had scarcely been a fair
+trial. The child had been plunged into the business the day after her
+return, with the added complication of her mother's illness; but, even
+making all allowances, he had been dismayed by the thorough-going
+domestic anarchy that had ensued. He was partly aware that what alarmed
+him most was Lydia's lack of zest in the battle, an unwillingness to
+recognize its inevitability and face it; a strange, apparently willful,
+blindness to the value of victory. Her father was disturbed by this
+failure to acquiesce in the normal, usual standard of values. He
+recalled with apprehension the revolutionary sayings and doings of his
+second son, which had been the more disconcerting because they flowed
+from the young reactionary in such a gay flood of high spirits. Harry
+had no more shared the reverent attitude of his family toward household
+æsthetics than toward social values. A house was a place to keep the
+weather from you, he had said laughingly. If you could have it pretty
+and well-ordered without too much bother, well and good; but might the
+Lord protect him from everlastingly making omelets to look at and not to
+eat.
+
+Lydia, to be sure, had ventured no irreverent jokes, and, so far as her
+father could see, had never conceived them; but a few days before she
+had suggested seriously, "Why can't we shut up all of the house we don't
+really use, and not have to take care of those big parlors and the
+library when you and I are always in the dining-room or upstairs with
+Mother, now she's sick?"
+
+Judge Emery had thought of the grade of society which keeps its "best
+room" darkened and closed, of the struggles with which his wife had
+dragged the family up out of that grade, and was appalled at Lydia's
+unconscious reversion to type. "Your mother would feel dreadfully to
+have you do that; you know she thinks it very bad form--very green."
+
+Lydia had not insisted; it ran counter to every instinct in Lydia to
+insist on anything. She had succumbed at the first of his shocked tones
+of surprise; but the suggestion had shown him a glimpse of workings in
+her mind which made him uneasy.
+
+However, to-night there were several cheering circumstances. The doctor
+had left word that, in all probability, Mrs. Emery would be quite
+herself in ten days--a shorter time than he had feared. Lydia was really
+charming in a rose-colored dress that matched the dewy flush in her
+cheeks; the roast looked cooked as he liked it, and he had heard some
+warm words that day about the brilliancy of young Paul Hollister's
+prospects. He took a drink of ice-water, tucked his napkin in the top of
+his vest--a compromise allowed him by his wife at family dinners, and
+smiled at his daughter. "Your mother tells me that you've had a letter
+from Paul, saying that he'll be back shortly," he said with a jocosely
+significant emphasis. "I suppose we shall hardly be able to get a
+glimpse of you after he's in town again."
+
+At this point, beginning to carve the roast, he had a sinking
+premonition that it was going to be very tough, and though he heroically
+resisted the ejaculation of embittered protest that rose to his lips,
+this magnanimity cost him so dear that he did not think of Lydia again
+till after he had served her automatically, dashing the mashed potato on
+her plate with the gesture of an angry mason slapping down a trowelful
+of mortar. It seemed to him at the moment that the past three weeks had
+been one succession of tough roasts. He took another drink of ice-water
+before he gloomily began on his first mouthful. It was worse than he
+feared, and he was in no mood to be either very imaginative or very
+indulgent to a girl's whims when Lydia said, suddenly and stiffly, "I
+wish you wouldn't speak so about Paul. I don't know what makes everybody
+tease me so about him!"
+
+Her father was chewing grimly. "I don't know why they shouldn't, I'm
+sure," he said. "Young folks can't expect everybody to keep their eyes
+shut and draw no conclusions. Of course I understand Paul's not saying
+anything definite till now, on account of your being so young."
+
+Something of Marietta's unsparing presentation of facts was inherited
+from her father, though, under his wife's tutelage, he usually spared
+Lydia when he thought of it. At this time he was speaking almost
+absently, his attention divided between the exceptions to his rulings
+taken by the corporation counsel and the quality of his dinner; both
+disturbing to his quiet. He finally gave up the attempt at mastication
+and swallowed the morsel bodily, with a visible gulp. As he felt the
+consequent dull lump of discomfort, he allowed himself his first
+articulate protest. "Good Heavens! What meat!"
+
+Lydia had grown quite pale. She pushed back her plate and looked at her
+father with horrified eyes. "Father! What a thing to say!" she finally
+cried out. "You make me ashamed to look him--to look anybody in the
+face. Why, I never dreamed of such a thing! I never--"
+
+Judge Emery was very fond of his pretty daughter, and at this appeal
+from what he felt to be a very mild expression of justified discontent,
+he melted at once. "Now, never mind, Lydia, it won't kill me. Only as
+soon as your mother gets about again, for the Lord's sake have her take
+you to a butcher shop and learn to select meats."
+
+Lydia looked at him blankly. She had the feeling that her father was so
+remote from her that she could hardly see him. She opened her lips to
+speak, but at that moment the maid--the latest acquisition from the
+employment agency, a slatternly Irish girl--went through the dining-room
+on her way to answer the door-bell, and her father's amused comment cut
+her short. "Lydia, you'll have your guests thinking they're at a lunch
+counter if you let that girl go on wearing that agglomeration of hair."
+
+The maid reappeared, sidling into the room, half carrying, half dragging
+a narrow, tall green pasteboard box, higher than herself but still not
+long enough for its contents, which protruded in leafy confusion from
+one end. "It's for you," she said bluntly, depositing it beside Lydia
+and retreating into the kitchen.
+
+Lydia looked at it in wonder, turning to crimson confusion when her
+father said: "From Paul, I suppose. Very nice, I'm sure. Ring the bell
+for dessert before you open it. Of course you're in a hurry to read the
+card." He smiled with a tender amusement at the girl, who met his eyes
+with a look of fright. She opened the box, from which arose a column of
+strong, spicy odor, almost like something visible, and naïvely read the
+card aloud: "To the little girl grown up at last--to the young lady I've
+waited so long to see."
+
+She laid the card down beside her plate and kept her eyes upon it,
+hanging her head in silence. Her father began to consume his dessert
+rapidly. The cream in it was delicious, and he ate with appreciation. To
+him, as to many middle-aged Americans, the two vital parts of a meal
+were the meat and the dessert. The added pleasures or comforting
+consolations of soup, salads, vegetables, entrées, made dishes, were not
+for him. He ate them, but with a robust indifference. "Meat's business,"
+he was wont to say, "and dessert's fun. The rest of one's victuals is
+society and art and literature and such--things to leave to the women."
+
+He now stopped his consumption of his dessert and recalled himself with
+an effort to his daughter's impalpable difficulties. She was murmuring,
+"But, Father--you must be mistaken-- Why, nobody so much as hinted at
+such a--"
+
+"That's your mother's doings. She'd be furious now if she knew I'd
+spoken right out. But you don't want to be treated like a little girl
+all your life, do you?" He laughed at her speechless embarrassment with
+a kind obtuseness to the horror of youth at seeing its shy fastnesses of
+reserve laid open to indifferent feet. Divining, however, through his
+affection for her, that she was really more than pleasantly startled by
+his bluntness, he began to make everything smooth by saying: "There
+aren't many girls in Endbury who don't envy my little Lydia, I guess.
+Paul is considered--"
+
+At this point Lydia rose hurriedly and actually ran away from the sound
+of his voice. She fled upstairs so rapidly that he heard the click of
+her heel on the top step before he could draw his breath. He laughed
+uneasily, finished his dessert in one or two huge mouthfuls, and
+followed her. He was recalled by the ringing of the telephone bell, and
+when he went upstairs again he was smiling broadly. With his lawyer's
+caution, he waited a moment outside his wife's room, where he heard
+Lydia's voice, to see if her mother had hit upon some happy inspiration
+to quiet the girl's exaggerated maidenly shyness. He had the tenderest
+indulgence to his daughter's confusion, but he was not without a
+humorous, middle-aged realization of the extremely transitory nature of
+this phase of youth. He had lived long enough to see so many blushing
+girls transformed into matter-of-fact matrons that the inevitable end of
+the business was already present to his mind. He was vastly relieved
+that Lydia had a mother to understand her fancies, and upon his wife,
+whom he would not have trusted to undertake the smallest business
+transaction without his advice, he transferred, with a sigh of content,
+the entire responsibility of wisely counseling their daughter. "Thank
+the Lord, that's not my job!" he had often said about some knotty point
+in the up-bringing of the children. Mrs. Emery had always answered that
+she could not be too thankful for a "husband who was not a meddler."
+
+The Judge now listened at the door to the conversation between the two
+women with a grin of satisfaction.
+
+"Why, my dear, what is there so terrible in having the handsomest and
+most promising young man in Endbury devoted to you? You don't need to
+marry him for years and years if you don't want to--or never, if you
+don't like him enough." She laughed a little, teasingly, "Perhaps it's
+all just our nonsense, and he never has thought of you in that way.
+Maybe when he comes to see you he'll tell you about a beautiful girl in
+Urbana or Cincinnati that he's engaged to--and _then_ what would your
+silly father say?"
+
+"Oh, if I could only think that," breathed Lydia, as though she had been
+reprieved from a death sentence. "Of course! Father was just joking. But
+he startled me so!"
+
+"He was probably thinking of his horrid law business, darling. When a
+big trial is on he wouldn't know me from Eve. He says _anything_ at such
+times."
+
+Judge Emery laughed noiselessly, and quite without resentment at this
+wifely characterization.
+
+Lydia went on: "It wasn't so much what he said, you know--as--oh, the
+way he took it for granted--"
+
+"Well, don't think about it any more, dear; just be your sweet natural
+self when Paul comes to see you the first time--and don't let's talk any
+more now. Mother gets tired so easily."
+
+Lydia's remorseful outcry over having fatigued her mother seemed a good
+occasion for Judge Emery's entrance into the room and for his
+announcement. He felt that she would make an effort to control any
+agitation she might feel, and indeed, beyond a startled gasp, she made
+no comment on his news. Mrs. Emery herself was more obviously stirred to
+emotion. "To-night? Why, I didn't think he'd be in town for several days
+yet."
+
+"He only got in at five o'clock this afternoon, he said."
+
+The two parents exchanged meaning glances over this chronology, and Mrs.
+Emery flushed and smiled. "Now, Lydia," she said, "it's a perfect shame
+I'm not well enough to be there when he comes. It would make it easier
+for you. But I wish you'd say honestly whether you'd rather have your
+father there or see Paul alone."
+
+Judge Emery's face took on an aggrieved look of alarm. "Good gracious,
+my dear! What good would I be? You know I can't be tactful. Besides,
+I've got an appointment with Melton."
+
+Lydia rose from where she knelt by the bed. Her chin was quivering.
+"Why, you make me feel so--so queer! Both of you!--As though it were
+anything--to see Paul--when I've known him always."
+
+Her mother seized on the rôle opened to them by this speech, and said
+quickly: "Why, of course! Aren't we silly! I don't know what possesses
+us. When he comes you just run along and see him, and say your father
+and I are sorry not to be there."
+
+During the next half-hour she made every effort, heroically though
+obviously seconded by her husband, to keep the conversation in a light
+and casual vein, but when the door-bell rang, they all three heard it
+with a start. Mrs. Emery said, very carelessly, "There he is, dear. Run
+along and remember me to him." But she pulled Lydia down to her,
+straightened a bow on her waist with a twitch, loosened a lock of the
+girl's shining dark hair, and kissed her with a sudden yearning fervor.
+
+After they were alone, Judge Emery laughed aloud. "You're just as bad as
+I am, Sarah. You don't _say_ anything, but--"
+
+"Oh, I know," his wife said; "I can't help it!" She deliberated
+unresignedly over the situation for a moment, and then, "It seems as
+though I couldn't have it so, to be sick just now, when I'm needed so
+much. This first month is so important! And Lydia's getting such a
+different idea of things from what I meant, having this awful time with
+servants, and all. I have a sort of feeling once in a while that she's
+getting notions!" She pronounced the word darkly.
+
+"Notions?" Judge Emery asked. He had never learned to interpret his
+wife's obscurities when the mantle of intuitions fell on her.
+
+"Oh, don't ask me what kind! I don't know. If I knew I could do
+something about it. But she speaks queerly once in a while, and the
+evening of the day she was out with Marietta in the Black Rock woods she
+was-- Do you know, I think it's not good for Lydia to be outdoors too
+much. It seems to go to her head so. She gets to looking like
+Harry--almost reckless, and like some little scampering wild animal."
+
+Judge Emery rose and buttoned his coat about his spare figure. "Maybe
+she takes a back track, after some of my folks. You know there's one
+line in my mother's family that was always crazy about the woods. My
+grandfather on my mother's side used to go off just as regular as the
+month of May came around, and--"
+
+Mrs. Emery interrupted him with the ruthless and justifiable impatience
+of people at the family history of their relations by marriage. "Oh, go
+along! And stop and speak to Paul on your way out. Just drop in as you
+pass the door. We don't want to really chaperone her. Nobody does that
+yet--but--the Hollisters are so formal about their girls--well, you stop
+in, anyhow. It's borne in on me that that'll look better, after all."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+FATHER AND DAUGHTER
+
+
+In the midst of his conference with Dr. Melton, an hour later, it came
+upon Judge Emery with a clap that he had forgotten this behest of his
+wife's, plunged deep in legal speculations as he had been, the instant
+he turned from her door. He brought his hand down on the table.
+
+"What's the matter?" asked the little doctor, peering up at him.
+
+"Oh, nothing important--women's cobwebs. I'm afraid I'll have to go,
+though. We can take this up again to-morrow, can't we?"
+
+"At your service," said the doctor; but he pulled with some exasperation
+at a big pile of pamphlets still to be examined.
+
+"It's something about Lydia's receiving a call from Paul Hollister, and
+her mother wanting me to stop in as I left the house and say
+good-evening--sort of represent the family--do the proper thing. Don't
+it tickle you to see women who used to sleigh-ride from seven to eleven
+every evening in a little cutter just big enough for one and a half,
+begin to wonder if they hadn't better chaperone their girls when they
+have callers in the next room?"
+
+He stirred up the pamphlets with a discontented look. "Confound it, I
+wish I could stay! Which one of those has the statistics about the
+accidents when the men aren't allowed one day in seven?"
+
+"See here, Emery!" In spite of his evident wish to exhort, the doctor
+continued sitting as he spoke. He was so short that to rise could have
+given him no perceptible advantage over the tall lawyer. "See here; do
+you know that you have a most unusual girl for a daughter?"
+
+"I have heard people say that I have a glimmering notion of her merits,"
+said the other with a humorous gravity.
+
+"Oh, I don't mean pretty, and appealing, and with a good complexion, and
+all that--and I don't mean you don't spoil her most outrageously. I mean
+she's got the oddest make-up for a modern American girl--she's simple."
+
+"I don't see anything odd about her--or simple!" Her father resented the
+adjectives with some warmth.
+
+Dr. Melton answered with his usual free-handed use of language: "Well,
+it's because, like everybody else old and spoiled and stodgy and
+settled, you've no eyes in your head when it comes to something
+important, like young people. Because they're all smooth and rosy you
+think they're all alike." He rushed on, delivering himself as always
+with restless vivacity of gesture, "I tell you youth is one of the most
+wastefully ignored forces in the world! Talk about our neglecting to get
+the good out of our water-power! The way we shut off the capacity of
+youth to see things as they are, before it gets purblind with our own
+cowardly unreason--why, it's as if we tried to make water run uphill
+instead of turning our mill-wheels with its natural energy."
+
+Judge Emery had listened to a word or two of this harangue and then had
+looked for and found his hat and coat, with which he had invested
+himself, and now stood ready for the street, one hand on the knob of the
+door. "Well, good-night to you," he said pleasantly, as though the
+doctor were not speaking; "I'll try to see you to-morrow."
+
+Dr. Melton jumped to his feet, laughing, ran across the room and caught
+at the other's arm. "Don't blame me. Much preaching of true gospel to
+deaf ears has made me yell all the time. You know you don't really hear
+me, any more than anyone else."
+
+"There's no doubt about that, I don't!" acquiesced the Judge frankly.
+
+"I will run on, though I know it never does any good. How'd I begin
+this time? What started me off? What was I saying?"
+
+"You were saying that Lydia was queer and half-witted," said the Judge
+moderately.
+
+"I said she was simple--and by that I mean she's so wise you'd better
+look out or she'll find you out. She's as dangerous as a bomb. She has a
+scent for essentials. She can tell 'em from all our flummery. I'm afraid
+of her, and I'm afraid _for_ her! Remember the fate of the father in the
+_Erl-King_! He thought, I dare say, that he was doing a fine thing for
+his child, to hurry it along to a nice, warm, dry, safe place!"
+
+Judge Emery broke in, impatient of this fantastic word-bandying. "Oh,
+come, Melton, I can't stand here while you spin your paradoxes. I've got
+to get home before young Hollister leaves or my wife won't like it."
+
+"I'll go with you, then," cried the little doctor, clapping on his hat.
+"You sha'n't escape me that way. I'm in full cry after the best figure
+of speech I've hit on in months."
+
+"Good Lord!" The lawyer looked down laughingly at his friend as the two
+set off, a stork beside a sparrow. "You and your figures!"
+
+"It came over me with a bang the other day that in Lydia we have in our
+midst that society-destroying child in _The Kaiser's New Clothes_."
+
+"Eh?" said Lydia's father blankly.
+
+"You remember the last scene in that inimitable tale? Where the Kaiser
+walks abroad with all the people shouting and hurrahing for the new
+clothes, and not daring to trust their own eyes, and suddenly a little
+child's voice is heard, 'But the Kaiser has nothing on!'"
+
+"I don't know what you're talking about," said the Judge with a patient
+indifference.
+
+"Well, you will know when you hear Lydia say that some day. She
+knows--she'll know! Perhaps you've done well to send her to that idiotic
+finishing school."
+
+"Don't lay it to me!" cried the Judge, laughing; "_I_ didn't send
+her--or not send her. If you were married you'd know that fathers never
+have anything to say about what their daughters do."
+
+"More fools they!" rejoined the doctor pointedly. "But in this case
+maybe it's all right. She's as ignorant as a Hottentot, of course, but
+perhaps any real education might have spoiled her innate capacity to--"
+
+"Oh, pshaw!" The Judge was vaguely uneasy. "You let Lydia alone. Talk
+your nonsense about something else. There's nothing queer about Lydia,
+thank heavens! She's just like all young ladies."
+
+"That's a horrible thing to say about one's own daughter!" cried the
+doctor, falling immediately into the lightly mournful, satirical vein
+that was the alternative to his usual racing talk. "There won't be
+anything queer about her long, that's fact. In real life the child is
+never really allowed to complete that sentence. A hundred hands are
+clapped over its mouth, and it's hustled, and shaken, and frightened,
+and scolded, till it thinks there's something the matter with its
+eyesight. And Lydia's a sweet, gentle child, who'll want to say whatever
+pleases people she loves--that'll be another bandage over her eyes. And
+she's not dowered with an innate fondness for shrieking out
+contradictions at the top of her voice, and unless you've a real passion
+for that you get silenced early in life."
+
+The lawyer laughed with the good-natured contempt of a large, silent man
+for a small, voluble one. "That's a tragedy you can't know much about
+from experience, Melton. No cruel force ever silenced you."
+
+He paused at the walk leading to his house. A big street light glowed
+and sputtered over their heads. "Come in, won't you, and see Lydia?"
+
+"No; no cruel force has ever _silenced_ me," the doctor mused, putting
+his hands slowly into his pockets, "but it has bound me hand and foot. I
+talk, and I talk, but do you ever see me doing anything different from
+the worst fools of us all?"
+
+"Are you coming in?" The Judge spoke with his absent tolerance of his
+doctor's fancies.
+
+"No, thank you, as the farmer said to the steeple-climber. I'm going
+home to my lonely office to give thanks to Providence that I'm not
+responsible for a daughter."
+
+The Judge frowned. "Nonsense! Look at Marietta."
+
+"I do," said the doctor.
+
+"Well--?" The lawyer was challenging. In the long run the doctor rubbed
+him the wrong way.
+
+"I hope you make a better job of bandaging Lydia's eyes than you did
+hers."
+
+The Judge had turned toward the house. At this he stopped and made an
+irritated gesture. "Melton, you are enough to give a logical man brain
+fever. You're always proclaiming that parents have no real influence
+over their children's lives--that it's fate, or destiny, or
+temperament--and now--you blame me because Marietta's discontented over
+her husband's small income."
+
+The doctor looked up quickly, his face twitching. "You think that's the
+cause of Marietta's discontent? By Heaven, I wish Lydia could go into a
+convent."
+
+Suddenly his many-wrinkled little face set like a mask of tragedy. "Oh,
+Nat, you know what Lydia's always been to me--like my own--as
+precious--Oh, take care of her! take care of her! See, Lydia can't
+fight. She can't, even if she knew what was going on to fight against--"
+His voice broke. He looked up at his tall friend and shivered.
+
+Judge Emery clapped him on the shoulder with a rough friendliness. "No
+wonder you do miracles in curing women, Marius. You must know their
+insides. You talk like a mother in a fit of the nerves over a sick
+child. In the Lord's name, what has Lydia to fight against? If there was
+ever a creature with a happy, successful life before her-- Besides,
+don't we all stand ready to do her fighting for her?"
+
+Though the night was cool, the doctor took off his hat and wiped his
+forehead. He looked up once as though he were about to speak, but in
+the end he only put his hat back on his head, nodded, and went his way,
+his quick, light, uneven tread waking a faint echo in the empty street.
+
+As the Judge let himself in at the front door, a murmur of voices from
+the brightly-lighted parlor struck gratefully on his ear. He was not too
+late. "How are you, Hollister?" he called as he pulled off his overcoat.
+"Glad to see you back. Let's hear all about the Urbana experience."
+
+Hollister's dramatic interest in each engagement of his battle for
+success was infectious. Those who knew him, whether they liked him or
+not, waited for news of the results of his latest skirmish as they
+waited for the installments of an exciting serial story.
+
+As the older man entered, the tall, quick-moving young fellow came over
+to the door and shook his hand with energy. The Judge reflected that
+nobody but Hollister could so convey the effect that he was being made
+kindly welcome in his own house; but he did not dislike this vigor of
+personality. He sat down on the chair which his young guest indicated as
+a suitable one, and rubbed his chin, smiling at his daughter. "Dr.
+Melton sent his love to you, but he wouldn't come in."
+
+Paul looked brightly at Lydia. "I should hope not! My first evening with
+her! To share it with anybody! Except her father, of course!" He added
+the last as an afterthought, more with the air of putting the Judge at
+his ease than of excusing himself for an ungraceful slip of the tongue.
+
+The Judge laughed, restraining an impulse to call out, "You're a wonder,
+young man!" and said instead, "Well, let's hear the news."
+
+Lydia said nothing, but her aspect, always vividly expressive of her
+mood, struck her father as odd. As he glanced at her from time to time
+during the ready, spirited narrative of the young "captain in the army
+of electricity," as he had once called himself, Lydia's father felt a
+qualm of uneasiness. Her lips were very red and a little open, as though
+she were breathless from some exertion, and a deep flush stained her
+cheeks. She looked at Paul while he talked animatedly to her father, but
+when he addressed himself to her she looked down or away, meeting her
+father's eyes with a curious effect of not seeing him at all. The Judge,
+moved by the oblique, harassing intimations he had been forced to hear
+from the doctor as to the possibility of his not understanding all that
+was in his daughter's mind, was oppressed by that most nightmarish of
+emotions for a man of clear-cut intellectual interests--an apprehension,
+like an imperceptible, clinging cobweb, not to be brushed away. He
+wished heartily that the next year were over and Lydia "safely married."
+Daughters were so much more of a responsibility than sons. They forced
+on one the reality of a world of intangible conditions which one could,
+somehow, comfortably ignore with sons. And yet, how about Harry? Perhaps
+if some one had not ignored with him--
+
+"I should have been back ten days ago," Paul drew to the end of his
+story, "but I simply had to wait to oversee those tests myself. Since
+I've adopted that rule of personally checking the inspector's work,
+we've been able to report forty per cent. fewer complaints of newly
+installed dynamos to the general office. And you see in this case, from
+the accident, what might have happened."
+
+"By the Lord!" cried the lawyer, moved in spite of his preoccupations by
+the story of danger the other had been relating, "I should think it
+would turn your hair white every time a dynamo's installed. How did you
+feel when the fly-wheel broke?"
+
+"The fly-wheel isn't on the dynamo, of course," corrected Paul, "so I
+don't feel responsible for it in a business way, and that's everything.
+As for being frightened, why, it's all over so quickly. You don't have
+time to take in what's happening. You're there or you're not. And if you
+are, the best thing is to get busy with repairs," he added, with a
+simple, manly depreciation of his courage. "You mustn't think it often
+happens, you know; it's supposed never to."
+
+He spoke of the personal side of the matter with a dry brevity which
+contrasted effectively with the unconscious eloquence with which he had
+previously brought before their eyes the tense excitement in the new
+power-house when the wheels first stir to life in incredibly rapid
+revolutions and the mysterious modern genii begins to rush through the
+wires. At no time did Lydia's suitor show to better advantage than in
+speaking of his profession. The alertness of his face and the prompt
+decision of his speech suited the subject. His mouth fell into lines of
+grimly fixed purpose which expressed even more than his words when he
+spoke of the rivalry in endurance, patience and daring in the army of
+young electrical engineers, all set, as he was, on crowding one another
+out of the rapidly narrowing road to preferment and the few great golden
+prizes of the profession.
+
+This evening he was more than usually fervent. Judge Emery thought he
+detected in him traces of the same excitement that flamed from Lydia's
+cheeks. "I tell you, Judge, I was wrong when I spoke of the 'army' of
+electricity. In the army advancement comes only from somebody's death,
+and with us it's simply a question of who's got the most to give. He
+gets the most back--and that's all there is to it. The company's bound
+to have the man it can get the most work out of. If you can do two
+ordinary men's work, you get two men's pay. See? There's no limit to the
+application of that principle. Why, our field organizer on the Pacific
+Coast is only a little older than I, and, by Jove! the work they say
+he'll turn off is something marvelous! You wouldn't believe it. But you
+can train yourself to it, like everything else. To be able to
+concentrate--not to lose a detail--to put every ounce of your force into
+it--that's the thing."
+
+He brought one hand down inside the other, and sat for a moment in
+silence as tense with stirring possibilities to the others as to
+himself. The Judge felt moved to a most unusual sensation, as if he were
+a loosened bowstring beside this twanging, taut intensity. He felt
+slightly dismayed to have his unspoken principles carried to this _n_th
+power. He had given the best of himself, all his thoughts, illusions,
+hopes, endeavors, to his ideal of success, but his ambition had never
+been concentrated enough to serve as a lens through which the rays of
+his efforts might focus themselves into the single beam of devastating
+heat on which Paul counted so certainly to burn away the obstacles
+between himself and success. Various protesting comments rose to his
+lips, which he kept back, disconcerted to find how much they resembled
+certain remarks of Dr. Melton's.
+
+The young man stirred, looked at Lydia, and smiled brilliantly. "I
+mustn't keep this little sick-nurse up any later, I suppose," he said;
+but for a moment he made no movement to go. He and Lydia exchanged a
+gaze as long and silent as if they had been alone. It occurred to the
+Judge that they both looked dazzled. When Paul rose he drew a long
+breath and shook his head half humorously at his host. "You and I will
+have to look to our guns, during the next season, to hold our own, won't
+we? I've been making Lydia promise to reserve me three dances at every
+single ball this winter, and I think I'm heroic not to insist on
+more--but her first season--!"
+
+Lydia said, with her pretty, light laugh, a little shaking now, "But
+suppose you're out of town, setting up some new dynamo or something and
+your three dances come along?"
+
+Paul crossed the room to her, as if drawn irresistibly by the sound of
+her voice. He stood by her, looking down into her eyes (he was very
+tall), bending over her, smiling, pressing, confident, masterful.
+"You're to sit out those three dances and think of me, and think of
+me--of course! I shall be thinking of you."
+
+Lydia's little tremulous air of archness dropped under this point-blank
+rejoinder. She flushed, and looked at her father. That unimaginative
+person started toward her as though she had called to him for help, and
+then, ashamed of his inexplicable impulse, turned away confusedly and
+disappeared into the hall.
+
+Paul took this movement as a frank statement of the older man's desire
+to be, for the moment, rid of him. "Oh, I _am_ going, Judge," he called
+after him, unabashed; "it is just a bit hard to tear myself away--I've
+been waiting so long for her to get back!" To Lydia he went on, "I've
+grown thin and pale waiting for you, while you--look at yourself, you
+heartless little witch!"
+
+He pointed across to a tall mirror in which they were reflected against
+the rich background of his roses. For a moment both the beautiful young
+creatures looked each into his own eyes, mysterious with youth's total
+ignorance of its own meaning. Paul took Lydia's hand in his, and pointed
+again to their reflections as they stood side by side. He tried to
+speak, but for once his ready tongue was silent. Judge Emery came back
+to the door, a weary patience on his white, tired face.
+
+The young man turned away with a sigh and a smile. "Yes, yes, Judge, I'm
+off. Good-night, Lydia. Don't forget the theater Wednesday night."
+
+He crossed the room with a rapid, even step, shook hands with the Judge,
+and got himself out of the room with an easy briskness which the older
+man, mindful of his own rustic youth, was half-inclined to envy.
+
+After he and Lydia were left alone he did not venture a word of comment,
+lest he hit on the wrong thing. He went silently about, putting out the
+lights, and locking the windows. Lydia stood where Paul had left her,
+looking at her bright image in the mirror. When the last bulb went out,
+the room was in a flickering twilight, the street arc-light blinking
+uncertainly into the windows. Judge Emery stood waiting for his daughter
+to move. He could scarcely see her form--her face not at all, but there
+flashed suddenly upon him the memory of her appealing look toward him
+earlier. It shook him as it had then. His heart yearned over her. He
+would have given anything he possessed for the habit of intimate talk
+with her. He put out his hands, but in the twilight she did not see the
+gesture. He felt shy, abashed, horribly ill at ease, torn by his
+tenderness, by his sense of remoteness. He said, uncertainly,
+"Lydia--Lydia dear--"
+
+She started. "Oh, yes, of course. It's late." She passed, brushed
+lightly against him, as he stood trembling with the sense of her
+dearness to him. She began to ascend the stairs. He had felt from her
+the emanation of excitement, guessed that she was shivering like himself
+before a crisis--and he could find no word to say.
+
+She had passed him as though he were a part of the furniture. He had
+never talked to her about--about things. He stood at the foot of the
+stairs in the darkness, listening to her light, mounting footfall. Once
+he opened his mouth to call to her, but the habit of a lifetime closed
+it.
+
+"She will talk to her mother," he told himself; "her mother will know
+what to say." When he followed her up the stairs he was conscious
+chiefly that he was immeasurably tired. Melton, perhaps, had something
+on his side with his everlasting warnings about nervous breakdowns. He
+could not stand long strains as he used to do.
+
+He fell asleep tracing out the thread of the argument presented that day
+by the counsel for the defense.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+CASUS BELLI
+
+
+Dr. Melton looked up in some surprise from his circle of lamplight as
+his goddaughter came swiftly into the room. "Your mother worse?" he
+queried sharply.
+
+"No, no, dear Godfather. I just thought I'd come over and see you for a
+while. I had a little headache--Marietta's back from Cleveland to-day,
+and she and Flora Burgess are at the house--"
+
+"You've said enough. I'm thankful that you have this refuge to fly to
+from such--"
+
+"Oh, Flora's not so bad as you make her out, the queer, kind little old
+dowdy--only I didn't feel like talking 'parties,' and 'who's who,'
+to-night--and their being with Mother made it all right for me to leave
+her."
+
+The doctor took off his eye-shade and showed his little wizened face
+rather paler than usual. "That's a combination that would kill _me_, and
+your mother not well yet--still, many folks, many tastes."
+
+He looked at Lydia penetratingly. She had taken a chair before the
+soft-coal fire and was staring at it rather moodily. "Well, Lydia, my
+dear, and how does Endbury strike you now? Speaking of many tastes, what
+are yours going to be like, I wonder?"
+
+"I wonder," she repeated absently.
+
+"Well, at least you know whether the young man who called on you last
+night is to your taste?"
+
+Lydia turned her face away and made a nervous gesture. "Oh, don't,
+Godfather!"
+
+"Very well, I won't," he said cheerfully, turning to his books with the
+instinct of one who knows his womankind.
+
+There was a long silence, broken only by the purring of the coal. Then
+Lydia gave a laugh and went to sit on the arm of his chair. "Of course
+that was what I came to see you about," she admitted, her sensitive lips
+quivering into a smile that was not light-hearted; "but now I'm here I
+find I haven't anything to say. Perhaps you'd better give me a pink pill
+and send me home to forget all about everything."
+
+Dr. Melton took her fingers and held them closely in his thin, sinewy
+hands. "Oh, if I could--if I only could do something for you!" He
+searched her face anxiously. "What did young Hollister say that makes
+you so troubled?"
+
+She sat down on the edge of his writing-table and reflected. "It wasn't
+anything he _said_," she admitted. "He was all right, I guess. Father
+had scared the life out of me before he came, by sort of taking it for
+granted--Oh, you know--the silly way people do--"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, Paul was as nice as could be about that, so far as words go-- He
+didn't say a thing embarrassing or--or hard to answer, but he let me
+_see_--all the same! He kept saying what an immense help I'd be to an
+ambitious man. He said he didn't see why I shouldn't grow into the
+leader of Endbury society, like the Mrs. Hollister, his aunt, that he
+and his sister live with, you know."
+
+"I suppose he's right," conceded the doctor, reluctantly.
+
+"Well, while he was talking about it, it seemed all very well--you know
+the way he goes at things--how he makes you feel as though he were a
+locomotive going sixty miles an hour and you were inside the engine cab,
+holding on for dear life?"
+
+Dr. Melton shook his head. "Paul has given me a great variety of
+sensations," he admitted, "but I can't say that he ever gave me quite
+this locomotive-cab illusion you speak of."
+
+"Well, he has me, lots of times," persisted Lydia. "It's awfully
+exciting--you don't know where you're going, and you can't stop to
+think, everything tears past you so fast and your breath is so blown out
+of you. You feel like screaming. You forget everything else, you get
+so--so stirred up and excited. But after it's over there's always a time
+when things are flat. And this morning, and all day long, I've felt
+very--different about what he wants and all. I don't believe I'm very
+well, perhaps--or maybe--" she broke off, to say with emotion, "Oh,
+Godfather, wouldn't it be too awful if I should turn out to be without
+ambition." She pronounced the word with the reverence for its meaning
+that had been drilled into her all her life, and looked at Dr. Melton
+with troubled eyes.
+
+He thrust his lips out with a grimace habitual to him in moments of
+feeling, and for an instant said nothing. When he spoke his voice broke
+on her name, as it had the night before when he had stood looking up at
+her windows. "Oh, Lydia!--Oh, my dear, I'm terribly afraid of your
+future!"
+
+"I'm a little scared of it myself," she said tremulously, and hid her
+face on his shoulder.
+
+She was the first to speak. "Wouldn't Marietta just scream with laughter
+at us?" she reminded him. "We _are_ foolish, too! There's nothing in the
+world you could lay your finger on. There's nothing anyhow, I guess, but
+nerves. I wouldn't dare breathe it to anybody else, but you always know
+how I'm feeling, anyhow. It's as though--here I am, grown up, and
+there's nothing for me to do that's worth while--even if--even
+if--Paul--"
+
+The doctor took a sudden resolution. "Why don't you talk to your father,
+Lydia? Why don't you ask him about--"
+
+He was cut short by Lydia's gesture of utter wonder. "_Father_? Don't
+you know that there's a big trial on? He couldn't tell without figuring
+up, if you should ask him quick, whether I'm fourteen or nineteen--or
+nine! Mother wouldn't let me, anyhow, even if he could have any idea of
+what I was driving at. She never let us bother him the least bit when
+there was something big happening in his lawyering. I remember that
+time I had pneumonia and nearly died, when I was a little girl, that she
+told him I had just a cold; and he never knew any different for years
+afterward, when I happened to say something about it. She didn't want
+him worried when he needed all his wits for some important business."
+
+The doctor looked at her with frowning intensity, and then down at his
+papers. He seemed on the point of some forcible utterance, which he
+restrained with many twitchings of his mouth. Finally he got up and went
+to a window, staring out silently.
+
+"I think I'll go and look up dear Aunt Julia," said Lydia.
+
+"Very well, my dear," said the doctor over his shoulder. "She's in her
+room, I think." In exactly the same mild tone, he added, "Damnation!"
+
+"What did you say?" asked Lydia.
+
+He turned toward her, and took up a book from the table. "I said
+nothing, dear Lydia--I've nothing to say, I find."
+
+Lydia broke into a light, mocking laugh--the doctor's volubility was an
+old joke--and began to speak, when a woman's voice called, "Oh, Marius,
+here's Mr.---- why, Lydia, how did you get in without my seeing you?"
+
+She entered the room as she spoke--a middle-aged woman, with large blue
+eyes and graying fair hair, who evidently did her duty by the prevailing
+styles in dress with a comfortable moderation of effort. Lydia's mother,
+as the sister of Mrs. Sandworth's long-dead husband, thought it
+necessary, from time to time, to endeavor to stir her sister-in-law up
+to a keener sense of what was due the world in the matter of personal
+appearance; but Mrs. Sandworth, born a Melton, had the irritating
+unconcern for social problems of that distinguished Kentucky family. She
+cared only to please her brother Marius, she said, and he never cared
+what she had on, but only what was in her mind--a remark that had once
+caused Judge Emery to say, in a fit of exasperation with her wandering
+wits, that if she ever had as little on as she had in her mind, he
+guessed Melton would sit up and take notice.
+
+Lydia now rushed at her aunt, exclaiming, "Oh, Aunt Julia, how _good_
+you do look to me! The office door was open and I slipped in that way,
+without ringing the bell."
+
+"It's four years old, and never been touched, not even the sleeves,"
+said the other deprecatingly.
+
+Her brother laughed. "Who did you say was here--Oh, it's you, Rankin;
+come in, come in."
+
+The newcomer was half-way across the room before he saw Lydia. He
+stopped, with a look of extreme pleasure and surprise, which Lydia
+answered with a frank smile.
+
+"Why, have you met my niece?" asked Mrs. Sandworth, looking from one to
+the other.
+
+"Oh, yes; Mr. Rankin's my oldest new friend in Endbury. I met him the
+first day I was back."
+
+"And when I set up the newel-post--"
+
+"And I ran on to his house by accident the day Marietta and I were out
+with little Pete, when it rained and I borrowed his overcoat and
+umbrella--"
+
+"And then I had to call to take them away, of course--"
+
+They intoned their confessions like a gay antiphonal chant. A bright
+color had come up in Lydia's cheeks. She looked very sunny and
+good-humored, like a cheerful child, an expression which up to that year
+had been habitual to her. Dr. Melton looked at her without speaking.
+
+"So, you see," she concluded, "not to speak of several other
+times--we're very well acquainted."
+
+"Well, Marius! Did you ever!" Mrs. Sandworth appealed to her brother.
+
+"Oh, I've known about it all along. Rankin and I have discussed Lydia as
+well as other weighty matters, a great many times."
+
+Mrs. Sandworth's easily diverted mind sped off into another channel.
+"Yes, how you do discuss. I'm going to look right at the clock every
+minute from now on, so's to be sure to remind you of that engagement at
+Judge Emery's office at half-past nine. I know what happens when you and
+Mr. Rankin get to talking."
+
+"I'll not stay long; Miss Emery has precedence."
+
+"Oh, don't mind me," said Lydia.
+
+"They won't--nor anything else," her aunt assured her.
+
+Rankin laughed at this characterization. The doctor did not seem to
+hear. He was brooding, and drumming on the table. From this reverie he
+was startled by the younger man's next statement.
+
+"I've got an apprentice," he announced.
+
+"Eh?" queried the doctor with unexpected sharpness.
+
+"The fifteen-year-old son of my neighbor, Luigi Carfarone, who works on
+the railroad. The boy's been bad--truant--street gamin--all that sort of
+thing, and his mother, who comes in to clean for me sometimes, has been
+awfully anxious about him. But it seems he has a passion for
+tools--maybe his ancestors were mediæval craftsmen. Anyhow, he's been
+working for me lately, doing some of the simpler jobs, and really
+learning fast. And he's been so interested he's forgotten all his
+deviltry. So, yesterday, didn't he and his father and his mother and
+about a dozen littler brothers and sisters all come in solemn
+procession, dressed in their best, to dedicate him to me and my
+profession, as they grandly call it."
+
+"Oh, how perfectly lovely!" cried Lydia.
+
+The doctor resumed his drumming morosely. "Of course you know the end of
+that."
+
+"You mean he'll get tired of it, and take to robbing chicken-roosts
+again?"
+
+"Not much! He'll like it, and stick to it, and bring others, and you'll
+extend operations and build shops, and in no time you'll go the way of
+all the world--a big factory, running night and day; you on the keen
+jump every minute; dust an inch thick over your books and music; nerves
+taut; head humming with business schemes to beat your competitors;
+forget your wife most of the time except to give her money; making
+profits hand over fist; suborning legislators to wink at your getting
+special railroad rates for your stuff; can't remember how many children
+you have; grand success; notable example of what can be done by
+attention to business; nervous prostration at forty-five; Bright's
+disease at fifty; leave a million."
+
+Rankin burst into a great roar of boyish laughter at this prophetic
+flight. The doctor gnawed his lower lip, and looked at him without
+smiling. "I've got ten million blue devils on my back to-night," he
+said.
+
+"So I see--so I see." Rankin was still laughing, but as he continued to
+look into his old friend's face his own grew grave by reflection. "You
+don't believe all that?"
+
+"Oh, you won't mean to. It'll come gradually." He broke out suddenly,
+"Good Heavens, Rankin, give me a serious answer."
+
+"Answer!" The cabinet-maker's bewilderment was immense. "Have you asked
+me anything?"
+
+The doctor turned away to his desk with the pettish gesture of a woman
+whose inner thoughts are not divined.
+
+"He makes me feel very thick-witted and dense," Rankin appealed to the
+two women.
+
+Mrs. Sandworth exonerated him from blame. "Oh, nobody ever can make out
+what he's driving at. I never try." She took out a piece of crochet
+work. "Lydia, they're at it now. I know the voice Marius gets on.
+_Would_ you make this in shell stitch? It's much newer, of course, but
+they say it don't wash so well." As Lydia's attention wavered, "Oh,
+there's not a particle of use in trying to make out what they're saying.
+They just go on and on."
+
+Rankin was addressing himself to the doctor's back. "I don't, you know,
+see anything wicked in making a lot of chairs by machinery instead of a
+few by hand. I'm no handcraft faddist. I did that in the beginning only
+because I had to begin somehow to earn my living honestly without being
+too tied up to folks, and I couldn't think of any other way. But I
+think, now that you've put the idea into my head--I think it would be a
+good thing to gather the boys of the neighborhood around me--and, by
+gracious! the girls too! That's one of my convictions--that girls need
+very much the same treatment as boys. And if it should develop into a
+large business (which I doubt strongly), what's the harm? The motive
+lying back of it would be different from what I so fear and hate in big
+businesses. You can bet your last cent on one thing, and that is that
+the main idea would not be to make as much furniture as fast as
+possible, as cheap as possible, but to make it good, and to make only as
+much as would leave me and every last one of the folks that work for me
+time and strength to live--'leisure to be good.' Who said that, anyway?
+It's fine."
+
+"_Hymn to Adversity_," supplied the doctor, who was better read in the
+poets than the younger generation. He added, skeptically, "Could you,
+though, do any such thing? Wouldn't it run _you_, once you got to
+going?"
+
+"Well, if worst came to worst--" began Rankin, then changing front, he
+began again: "My great-aunt--"
+
+The doctor fell back in his chair with a groan and a laugh.
+
+"Yes; the same one you may have heard me mention before. She told me
+that all through her childhood her family was saving and pulling
+together to build a fine big house. They worked along for years until,
+when she was a young lady, they finally accomplished it; built a big
+three-story house that was the admiration of the countryside. Then they
+moved in. And it took the women-folks every minute of their time, and
+more, to keep it clean and in order; it cost as much to keep it up,
+heated, furnished, repaired, painted, and everything the way a fine
+house should be, as their entire living used to cost. The fine big
+grounds they had laid out to go with the mansion took so much time to--"
+
+"You see. You see. That's just what I meant," broke in the doctor.
+
+"Well, I'm a near relative of my great-aunt's. One day, when all the
+rest of the family was away, she set fire to the house and burned it to
+the ground, with everything in it."
+
+"She didn't!" broke in Mrs. Sandworth, who had been coaxed to a fitful
+attention by the promise of a coherent story.
+
+Rankin laughed. "Well, that was the way she told it to me, and I don't
+doubt she _would_ have," he amended.
+
+The doctor grunted, "Huh! But would _you_!" He went on, "You couldn't
+compete with your rivals, anyhow, if you didn't concentrate everything
+on making chairs. Don't you know the successful business man's best
+advertisement? 'All of my life-strength I've put into the product I
+offer you,' he says to the public, and it's true."
+
+"Oh, well, if I couldn't do business there'd be an end of the matter,
+and none of your horrible prophecies would come true."
+
+"Your wife wouldn't let you."--Dr. Melton took up another line of
+attack--"she'd want a motor-car and 'nice' associates and a fashionable
+school for the children, and a home in the 'respectable' part of town."
+
+Rankin's easy-going manner changed. He sat up and frowned. "There you
+step on one of my corns, Doctor"--he did not apologize for the rustic
+metaphor--"I don't believe a single, solitary identical word of that.
+It's my most hotly held conviction that women are so much like humans
+that you can't tell the difference with a microscope. I mean, if they're
+interested in petty, personal things it's because they're not given a
+fair chance at big, impersonal things. Everybody's jumping on the
+American woman because she knows more about bridge-whist than about her
+husband's business. _Why_ does she? Because he's satisfied to have
+her--you can take my word for it! He likes her to be absorbed in clubs
+and bridge and idiotic little dabblings in near-culture and pseudo-art,
+just for the reason that a busy mother gives her baby a sticky feather
+to play with. It keeps the baby busy. It keeps his wife's attention off
+him. It's the American man just as much as the woman who's mortally
+afraid of a sure-enough marriage with sure-enough shared interests. He
+doesn't want to bother with children, or with the servant problem or the
+questions of family life, and he doesn't want his wife bothering him in
+his business any more than she wants him interfering with hers. That
+idea of the matter is common to them both."
+
+"That's a fine, chivalric view of the situation," said the doctor
+sardonically. "Maybe if you'd practiced as long in as many American
+families as I have, you might have a less idealistic view of your female
+compatriots."
+
+"I don't idealize 'em," cried Rankin. "Good Lord! Don't I say they're
+just like men? They amount to something if they're given something worth
+while to do--not otherwise."
+
+"Don't you call bringing up children worth while?"
+
+"You bet I do. So much so that I'd have the fathers take their full half
+of it. I'd have men do more inside the house and less outside, and the
+women the other way 'round."
+
+The doctor recoiled at this. "Oh, you're a visionary. It couldn't be
+done."
+
+"It couldn't be done in a minute," admitted Rankin.
+
+The doctor mused. "It's an interesting thought. But it's not for our
+generation. A new idea is like a wedge. You have to introduce it by the
+thin edge. The only way to get it started is by beginning with the
+children. Adults are hopeless. There's never any use trying to change
+them."
+
+"Oh, you can't fool children," said Rankin. "It's no use teaching them
+something you're not willing to make a try at yourself. They see through
+that quick enough! What you're really after, is what they see and learn
+to go after themselves. If anything's to be done, the adults must take
+the first step."
+
+"But, as society is organized, the idea is preposterous."
+
+"Society's been organized a whole lot of different ways in its time. Who
+tells me that it's bound to stay this way? I tell you right now, it
+hasn't got _me_ bluffed, anyhow! My wife--if I ever have one--is going
+to be my sure-enough wife, and my children, _my_ children. I won't
+_have_ a business that they can't know about, or that doesn't leave me
+strength enough to share in all their lives. I can earn enough growing
+potatoes and doing odd jobs of carpentering for that!"
+
+The doctor looked wonderingly at the other's kindling face. "Rankin,"
+he asked irrelevantly, "aren't there _ever_ moments when you despair of
+the world?"
+
+The voice of the younger man had the fine tremor of sincerity as he
+answered, "Why, good heavens, _no_, Doctor! That's why I dare criticize
+it so."
+
+The doctor looked with an intensity almost fierce into the other's
+confident eyes. He laid his thin, sinewy hand on the other's big brown
+fist, as though he would fain absorb conviction by contact. "But I'm
+sick with the slowness of the progress you talk of--believe in," he
+burst out finally. "It comes too late--the advance from our tragic
+materialism; too late for so many that could have profited by it most."
+He looked toward Lydia bending over her aunt's fancy work. Rankin
+followed the direction of his eyes.
+
+"Yes; that's what I mean," said the doctor heavily, rising from his
+chair. "That and such thousands of others. Oh, for a Theseus to hunt
+down this Minotaur of false standards and wretched ideas of success! I
+see them, the precious youths and maidens, going in by thousands to his
+den of mean aspirations, and not a hand is raised to warn them. They
+must be silly and tragic because everyone else is!"
+
+Rankin shook his head. "I think I'm proving that you don't have to go
+into the labyrinth--that you can live in health and happiness outside."
+
+"There's rather more than that to be done, you'll admit," said the
+doctor with an uncompromising bitterness.
+
+Rankin colored. "I don't pretend that it's much of anything--what I've
+done."
+
+The doctor did not deny him. He thrust out his lips and rubbed his hand
+nervously over his face. Finally, "But you have done it, at least," he
+brought out, "and I've only talked. As another doctor has said: 'I've
+never taken a bribe; but there's a pale shade of bribery known as
+prosperity.'"
+
+They fell into a silence, broken by Mrs. Sandworth's asking, "Lydia,
+have your folks got an old mythology book? I studied it at school, of
+course, but it has sort of passed out of my mind. Was it the Minotaur
+that sowed teeth and something else very odd came up that you wouldn't
+expect?"
+
+Lydia did not smile. "I don't know whether we have the book or not, but
+Miss Slater told us the story of the Minotaur. There's a picture of
+Theseus and Ariadne in Europe somewhere--Munich, I think--or maybe
+Siena. It was where one of the girls had a sore throat, I remember, and
+we had to stay quite a while. Miss Slater told us about it then."
+
+The doctor stood up. "Julia, it's nearly half-past now. Who remembered
+this time? I'm off, all of you. Rankin, see that Lydia gets home safely,
+will you?"
+
+"Oh, I must go too--now, with you." The girl jumped up. "I didn't
+realize it was so late. They'll be wondering at home."
+
+"Come along, then, both of you. I'll go with you to the corner where I
+take my car."
+
+The chill of the night air sent them along at a brisk gait, Lydia
+swinging easily between them, her head on a level with Rankin's, the
+doctor's hat on a level with her ear. She said nothing, and the two
+talked across her, disjointed bits of an argument apparently under
+endless discussion between them.
+
+The doctor flung down, with a militant despondency, "It'd be no use
+trying to do anything, even if you weren't so slothful and sedentary as
+you are! It moves in a vicious circle. Because material success is what
+the majority want, the majority'll go on wanting it. Hardy says
+somewhere that it's innate in human nature not to desire the undesired
+of others."
+
+Rankin sang out a ringing "Aw, g'wan! It's innate in human nature to
+murder and steal whenever it pleases, and I guess even Hardy'd admit
+that those aren't the amusements of the majority quite so extensively as
+they used to be--what? First thing you know people'll begin to desire
+things because they're worth desiring and not because other folks have
+them--even so astonishing a flight as that!" he made a boyish
+gesture--"and what a grand time that'll be to live in, to be sure!"
+
+They were waiting at the corner for the doctor's street car, which now
+came noisily down toward them. He watched it advance, and proffered as a
+valedictory, his gloom untempered to the last, "You're a wild man that
+lives in the woods. I've doctored everybody in the world for thirty
+years. Which knows human nature best?"
+
+Rankin roared after him defiantly, waking the echoes and startling the
+occupants of the car, "I do! I do! I do!"
+
+The car bore the doctor away, a perversely melancholy little figure,
+contemplating the young people blackly.
+
+"Whatever do you suppose set him off so?" Rankin wondered aloud as they
+resumed their rapid, swinging walk through the cold air.
+
+"I'm afraid I did," Lydia surmised. "I had a wretched fit of the blues,
+and I guess he must have caught them from me."
+
+Rankin looked down at her keenly, his thoughts apparently quite altered
+by her phrase. "Ah, he worries a great deal about you," he murmured.
+
+Lydia laughed nervously, and said nothing. They walked swiftly in
+silence. The stars were thick above them in the wind-swept autumn night.
+Lydia tilted her head to look up at them once or twice. She saw Rankin's
+face pale under the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat, his eyes meeting
+hers in an intent regard like a wordless speech. The fine, cold, austere
+wind swept them along like leaves, whipping their young pulses, chanting
+loudly in the leafless branches of the maples, and filling the dark
+spaces above with a great humming roar. They thrilled responsive to all
+this and to the mood of high seriousness each divined in the other.
+
+Lydia's voice, breaking in upon the intimate silence, continued the
+talk, but it was with another note. The mute interval, filled with wind
+and darkness and the light of stars, had swung them up to a higher
+plane. She spoke with an artless sureness of comprehension--a
+certainty--they were close in spirit at that moment, and she was not
+frightened, not even conscious of it. "Why should the doctor worry?
+_What is the matter?_ Marietta says the trouble with me is that I'm
+spoiled with having everything that I want."
+
+"_Have_ you everything you want?" Rankin's bluntness of interrogation
+was unmitigated.
+
+Lydia looked up at him swiftly, keenly. In his grave face there was that
+which made her break out with an open quivering emotion she had not
+shown even to the doctor's loving heart. "It's a weight on my very
+soul--that there's nothing for me to look forward to--nothing, nothing
+that's worth growing up to do. I haven't been taught anything--but I
+know I want to be something better than--perhaps I can't be--but I want
+to try! I want to try! That's not much to ask--just a chance to try--But
+I don't even know how to get that. I don't even dare to speak
+of--of--such things. People laugh and say it's Sunday-schooley fancies
+that'll disappear, that I'll forget as I get into living. But I don't
+want to forget. I'm afraid I shall. I want to keep trying. I don't
+know--"
+
+They did not slacken their swift advance as they talked. They looked at
+each other seriously in the starlight.
+
+Rankin had given an indrawn exclamation as she finished, and after an
+instant's pause he said, with a deep emotion, "Oh, perhaps--at least we
+both want to try--_Be Ariadne for me!_ Help me to find the clue to
+what's wrong in our lives, and perhaps--" He looked down at her, shaken,
+drawing quick breaths. She answered his gaze silently, her face as
+shining white as his.
+
+He went on: "You shall decide what Ariadne may be or may come to be--I
+will take whatever you choose to give--and bless you!"
+
+She had a gesture of humility. "_I_ haven't anything to give."
+
+His accent was memorable as he cried, "You have yourself--you--you! But
+you are too gentle! It is hard for you--it will be too hard for you to
+do what you feel should be done. I could perhaps do the things if you
+would tell me--help you not to forget--not to let life make you forget
+what is worth doing and learning!"
+
+She put back a mesh of her wind-blown hair to look at him intently, and
+to say again in wonder, "I'm not anything. What can you think I--what
+can you hope--"
+
+They were standing now on the walk before her father's house. "I can
+hope--" his voice shook, "I can hope that you may make me into a man
+worthy to help you to be the best that's in you."
+
+Lydia put out her hand impulsively. It did not tremble. She looked at
+him with radiant, steady eyes. He raised the slim, gloved fingers to his
+lips. "Whether to leave you, or to try to--Oh, I would give my life to
+know how best to serve you," he said huskily. He turned away, the sound
+of his steps ringing loud in the silent street.
+
+Lydia went slowly up the walk and into the empty hall. She stood an
+instant, her hands clasped before her breast, her eyes closed, her face
+still and clear. Then she moved upstairs like one in a dream.
+
+As she passed her mother's door she started violently, and for an
+instant had no breath to answer. Some one had called her name
+laughingly.
+
+Finally, "Yes," she answered without stirring.
+
+"Oh, come in, come in!" cried Marietta mockingly. "We know all about
+everything. We heard you come up the street, and saw you philandering on
+the front walk. And for all it's so dark, we made out that Paul kissed
+your hand when he went away."
+
+There was a silence in the hall. Then Lydia appeared in the door. Mrs.
+Emery gave a scream. "Why, Lydia! what makes you look so queer?"
+
+They turned startled, inquiring, daunting faces upon her. It was the
+baptism of fire to Lydia. The battle, inevitable for her, had begun. She
+faced it; she did not take refuge in the safe, silent lie which opened
+before her, but her courage was a piteous one. In her utter heartsick
+shrinking from the consequences of her answer she had a premonition of
+the weakness that was to make the combat so unequal. "It was not Paul,"
+she said, pale in the doorway; "it was Daniel Rankin."
+
+- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
+
+                                BOOK II
+
+                         IN THE LOCOMOTIVE CAB
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+WHAT IS BEST FOR LYDIA
+
+
+The girls who were to be débutantes that season, the "crowd" or (more
+accurately to quote Madeleine Hollister's racy characterization) "the
+gang," stood before Hallam's drug store, chattering like a group of
+bright-colored paroquets. They had finished three or four ice-cream
+sodas apiece, and now, inimitably unconscious that they were on the
+street corner, they were "getting up" a matinée party for the
+performance of the popular actress whom, at that time, it was the
+fashion for all girls of their age and condition to adore. They had
+worked themselves up to a state of hysteric excitement over the
+prospect.
+
+A tall brown-eyed blonde, with the physical development of a woman and
+the facial expression of a child of twelve, cried out, "I feel as though
+I should swoon for joy to see that darling way she holds her hands when
+the leading man's making love to her--so sort of helpless--like this--"
+
+"Oh, Madeleine, that's not a _bit_ the way. It's so!"
+
+The first speaker protested, "Well, I guess I ought to be able to do it.
+I've practiced for _hours_ in front of the glass doing it."
+
+"For mercy's sake that's nothing. So have I. Who hasn't?"
+
+Madeleine referred the question to Lydia, "Lyd has seen her later than
+anybody. She saw her in London. Just think of going to the theater in
+London--as if it was anywhere. She says they're crazy about her over
+there."
+
+"_Oh, wild!_" Lydia told them. "Her picture's in every single window!"
+
+"Which one? Which one?" they clamored, hanging on her answer
+breathlessly.
+
+"That fascinating one with the rose, where she's holding her head
+sideways and--" Oh, yes, they had that one, their exclamation cut her
+short, relieved that their collections were complete.
+
+"Lyd met a woman on the steamer coming back whose sister-in-law has the
+same hairdresser," Madeleine went on.
+
+They were electrified. "Oh, _honestly_? Is it her own?" They trembled
+visibly before solution of a problem which had puzzled them, as they
+would have said, "for eternities."
+
+"Every hair," Lydia affirmed, "and naturally that color."
+
+Their enthusiasm was prodigious, "How grand! How perfectly grand!"
+
+They turned on Lydia with reproaches. "Here you've been back two months
+and we haven't got a bit of good out of you. Think of your having known
+that, all this--"
+
+"Her mother's sick, you know," Madeleine Hollister explained.
+
+"She hasn't been so sick but what Lydia could get out to go buggy-riding
+with your brother Paul ever since he got back this last time."
+
+Lydia, as though she wished to lose herself, had been entering with a
+feverish intensity into the spirit of their lively chatter; but now,
+instead of responding with some prompt, defensive flippancy, she colored
+high and was silent. A clock above them struck five. "Oh, I must get
+on," she cried; "I'm down here, you know, to walk home with Father."
+
+They laughed loudly, "Oh, yes, we know all about this sudden enthusiasm
+for Poppa's society. Where are you going to meet Paul?"
+
+Lydia looked about at the crush of drays, trolley-cars, and
+delivery-wagons jamming the busy street, "Well, not here down-town," she
+replied, her tone one of satisfied security.
+
+A confused and conscious stir among her companions and a burst of talk
+from them cut her short. They cried variously, according to their
+temperaments, "Oh, there he comes now!" "I think it's mean Lydia's
+gobbling him up from under our noses!" "I used to have a ride or two
+behind that gray while Lydia was away!" "My! Isn't he a good-looker!"
+
+They had all turned like needles to the north, and stared as the
+spider-light wagon, glistening with varnish, bore down on them, looking
+singularly distinguished and costly among the dingy business-vehicles
+which made up the traffic of the crowded street. The young driver guided
+the high-stepping gray with a reckless, competent hand through the most
+incredibly narrow openings and sent his vehicle up against the
+flower-like group of girls, laughing as he drew rein, at the open,
+humorous outcry against him. A chorus of eager recrimination rose to his
+ears, "Now, Mr. Hollister, this is the first time Lydia's been out with
+our crowd since she came home!" "You might let her alone!" "Go away,
+Paul, you greedy thing!" "I haven't asked Lydia a single thing about her
+European trip!"
+
+"Well, maybe you think," he cried, springing out to the sidewalk, "that
+I've been spending the last year traveling around Europe with Lydia! I
+haven't heard any more than you have." He threw aside the lap-robe of
+supple broadcloth, and offered his hand to Lydia. A flash of resentment
+at the cool silence of this invitation sprang up in the girl's eyes.
+There was in her face a despairing effort at mutiny. Her hands nervously
+opened and shut the clasp of the furs at her throat. She tried to look
+unconscious, to look like the other girls, to laugh, not to know his
+meaning, to turn away.
+
+The young man plunged straight through these pitiful cobwebs. "Why, come
+on, Lydia," he cried with a good-humored pointedness, "I've been all
+over town looking for you." She backed away, looking over her shoulder,
+as if for a lane of escape, flushing, paling. "Oh, no, no thank you,
+Paul. Not _this_ afternoon!" she cried imploringly, with a soft fury of
+protest, "I'm on my way to Father's office. I want to walk home with
+him. I want to see him. I thought it would be nice to walk home with
+him. I see so little of him! I thought it would be nice to walk home
+with him." She was repeating herself, stammering and uncertain, but
+achieving nevertheless a steady retreat from the confident figure
+standing by the wagon.
+
+This retreat was cut short by his next speech. "Oh, I've just come from
+your father. I went to his office, thinking you might be there. He said
+to tell you and your mother that he won't be home to dinner to-night at
+all. He's got some citations on hand he has to verify."
+
+Lydia had stopped her actual recoil at his first words and now stood
+still, but she still tugged at the invisible chain which held her. She
+was panting a little. She shook her head. "Well--anyhow--I want to see
+him!" she insisted with a transparently aimless obstinacy like a
+frightened child's. "I want to see my father." Paul laughed easily,
+"Well, you'd better choose some other time if you want to get anything
+out of him. He had turned everybody out and was just settling to work
+with a pile of law-books before him. You know how your father looks
+under those circumstances!" He held the picture up to her, relentlessly
+smiling.
+
+Lydia's lips quivered, but she said nothing.
+
+Paul went on soothingly, "I've only come to take you straight home,
+anyhow. Your mother wants you. She said she had one of those fainting
+turns again. She said to be sure to bring you."
+
+At the mention of her mother's name, Lydia turned quite pale. She began
+to walk slowly back towards the wagon. There was angry, helpless misery
+in her dark eyes, but there was no longer any resistance. "Oh, if Mother
+needs me--" she murmured. She took the offered hand, stepped into the
+wagon and even went through some fitful pretense of responding to the
+chorus of facetious good-bys which rose from the group they were
+leaving.
+
+She said little or nothing in answer to the young man's kind, cheerful
+talk, as they drove along one main thoroughfare after another,
+conspicuous by the brilliant, prosperous beauty of their well-fed youth
+and their handsome garb, pointed out by people on the sidewalks,
+constantly nodding in response to greetings from acquaintances. Lydia
+flushed deeply at the first of these salutations, a flush which grew
+deeper and deeper as these features of their processional advance
+repeated themselves. She put her hand to her throat from time to time as
+though it ached and when the red rubber-tired wheels turned noiselessly
+in on the asphalt of her home street, she threw the lap-robe brusquely
+back from her knees as though for an instant escape.
+
+The young man's pleasant chat stopped. "Look here, Lydia," he said in
+another tone, one that forced her eyes to meet his, "look here, don't
+you forget one thing!" His voice was deep with the sincerest sympathy,
+his eyes full of emotion, "Don't you forget, little Lydia, that nobody's
+sorrier for you than I am! And I don't want anything that--" he cried
+out in sudden passion--"Good Lord, I'd be cut to bits before I'd even
+_want_ anything that wasn't best for you!" He looked away and mastered
+himself again to quiet friendliness, "You know that, _don't you_, Lydia?
+You know that all I want is for you to have the most successful life
+anyone can?"
+
+He leaned to her imploring in his turn.
+
+She drew a quick breath, and moved her head from side to side
+restlessly. Then drawn by the steady insistence of his eyes, she said,
+as if touched by his patient, determined kindness, "Oh, yes, yes, Paul,
+I realize how awfully good you're being to me! I wish I could--but--yes,
+of course I see how good you are to me!"
+
+He laid his hand an instant over hers, withdrawing it before she herself
+could make the action. "It makes me happy to have you know I want to
+be," he said simply, "now that's all. You needn't be afraid. I shan't
+bother you."
+
+They were in front of the Emery house now. He did not try to detain her
+longer. He helped her down, only repeating as she gave him her gloved
+hand an instant, "That's what I'm for--to be good to you."
+
+The wagon drove off, the young man refraining from so much as a backward
+glance.
+
+The girl turned to the house and stood a moment, opening and shutting
+her hands. When she moved, it was to walk so rapidly as almost to run up
+the walk, up the steps, into the hall and into her mother's presence,
+where, still on the crest of the wave of her resolution, she cried,
+"Mother, did you really send Paul for me again. Did you _really_?"
+
+"Why, yes, dear," said Mrs. Emery, surprised, sitting up on the sofa
+with an obvious effort; "did somebody say I didn't?"
+
+"I hoped you didn't!" cried Lydia bitterly; "it was--horrid! I was out
+with all the girls in front of Hallam's--everybody was so--they all
+laughed so when--they looked at me so!"
+
+Mrs. Emery spoke with dignity, "Naturally I couldn't know where he would
+find you."
+
+"But, Mother, you _did_ know that every afternoon for two weeks
+you've--it's been managed so that I've been out with Paul."
+
+Mrs. Emery ignored this and went on plaintively, "I didn't see that it
+was so unreasonable for an invalid to send whoever she could find after
+her only daughter because she was feeling worse."
+
+Lydia's frenzy carried her at once straight to the exaggeration which is
+the sure forerunner of defeat in the sort of a conflict which was
+engaging her. "_Are_ you feeling any worse?" she cried in a despairing
+incredulity which was instantly marked as inhumanly unfilial by the
+scared revulsion on her face as well as Mrs. Emery's pale glare of
+horror. "Oh, I didn't mean that!" she cried, running to her mother;
+"I'm sorry, Mother! I'm sorry!"
+
+The tears began running down Mrs. Emery's cheeks, "I don't know my
+little Lydia any more," she said weakly, dropping her head back on the
+pillow.
+
+"I don't know myself!" cried Lydia, sobbing violently, "I'm so unhappy!"
+
+Mrs. Emery took her in her arms with a forgiveness which dropped like a
+noose over Lydia's neck, "There, there, darling! Mother knows you didn't
+mean it! But you must remember, Lydia dearest, if you're unhappy these
+days, so is your poor mother."
+
+"I'm making you so!" sobbed Lydia, "I know it! something like this
+happens every day! It's why you don't get well faster! I'm making you
+unhappy!"
+
+"It doesn't make any difference about me!" Mrs. Emery heroically assured
+her, "I don't want you to be influenced by thinking about my feelings,
+Lydia. Above everything in the world, I don't want you to feel the
+_slightest_ pressure from me--or any one of the family. Oh, darling, all
+I want--all any of us want, is what is best for our little Lydia!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+A SOP TO THE WOLVES
+
+
+Six o'clock had struck when Mrs. Sandworth came wearily back from her
+Christmas shopping. It was only the middle of November, but each year
+she began her preparations for that day of rejoicing earlier and
+earlier, in a vain attempt to avoid some of the embittering desolation
+of confusion and fatigue which for her, as for all her acquaintances,
+marked the December festival. She let herself down heavily from the
+trolley-car which had brought her from the business part of Endbury back
+to what was known as the "residential section," a name bestowed on it to
+the exclusion of several other much larger divisions of town devoted
+exclusively to the small brick buildings blackened by coal smoke in
+which ordinary people lived.
+
+As she walked slowly up the street, her arms were full of bundles, her
+heart full of an ardent prayer that she might find her brother either
+out or in a peaceable mood. She loved and admired Dr. Melton more than
+anyone else in the world, but there were moments when the sum total of
+her conviction about him was an admission that his was not a reposeful
+personality. For the last fortnight, this peculiarity had been
+accentuated till Mrs. Sandworth's loyalty had cracked at every seam in
+order not to find him intolerable to live with. Moreover, her own kind
+heart and intense partiality for peace in all things had suffered
+acutely from the same suspense that had wrought the doctor to his
+wretched fever of anxiety. It had been a time of torment for
+everybody--everybody was agreed on that; and Mrs. Sandworth had felt
+that life in the same house with Lydia's godfather had given her more
+than her share of misery.
+
+On this dark November evening she was so tired that every inch of her
+soft plumpness ached. She had not prospered in her shopping. Things had
+not matched. She let herself into the front door with a sigh of relief
+at finding the hall empty. She looked cautiously into the doctor's study
+and drew a long breath, peeped into the parlor and, almost smiling, went
+on cheerfully upstairs to her room. From afar, she saw the welcoming
+flicker of the coal fire in her grate, and felt a glow of surprised
+gratitude to the latest transient from the employment agency who was now
+occupying her kitchen. She did not often get one that was thoughtful
+about keeping up fires when nobody was at home. It would be delicious to
+get off her corset and shoes, let down her hair--there he was, bolt
+upright before the fire, his back to the door. She took in the
+significance of his tense attitude and prepared herself for the worst,
+sinking into a chair, letting her bundles slide at various tangents from
+her rounded surface, and surveying her brother with the utmost
+unresignation. "Well, what is it now?" she asked.
+
+He had not heard her enter, and now flashed around, casting in her face
+like a hard-thrown missile, "Lydia's engaged."
+
+All Mrs. Sandworth's lassitude vanished. She flung herself on him in a
+wild outcry of inquiry--"Which one? Which one?"
+
+He answered her angrily, "Which do you suppose? Doesn't a steam-roller
+make some impression on a rose?"
+
+"Oh!" she cried, enlightened; and then, with widespread solemnity,
+"Well, think--of--that!"
+
+"Not if I can help it," groaned the doctor.
+
+"But that's not fair," his sister protested a moment later as she took
+in the rest of his speech.
+
+"Heaven knows it's not," he agreed bitterly.
+
+She stared. "I mean that Paul hasn't been nearly so steam-rollery as
+usual."
+
+The doctor rubbed his face furiously, as though to brush off a
+disagreeable clinging web. "He hasn't had to be. There have been plenty
+of other forces to do his rolling for him."
+
+"If you mean her father--you know he's kept his hands off
+_religiously_."
+
+"He has that, damn him!" The doctor raged about the room.
+
+A silent prayer for patience wrote itself on Mrs. Sandworth's face.
+"You're just as inconsistent as you can be!" she cried.
+
+"I'm more than that," he sighed, sitting down suddenly on a chair in the
+corner of the room; "I'm heartsick." He shivered, thrust his hands into
+his pockets and surveyed his shoes gloomily.
+
+One of Mrs. Sandworth's cheerful capacities was for continuing
+tranquilly the minute processes of everyday life through every
+disturbance in the region of the emotions. You _had_ to, she said, to
+get them done--anybody that lived with the doctor. She now took
+advantage of his silence to count over her packages, remove her wraps,
+loosen a couple of hooks at her waist and fluff up the roll of graying
+hair over her forehead. The doctor looked at her.
+
+She answered him reasonably, "It wouldn't help Lydia any if I took it
+off and threw it in the fire, would it? It's my best one, too; the
+other's at the hairdresser's, getting curled."
+
+"It's not," the doctor broke out--"it's not, Heaven be my judge! that
+_I_ want to settle it. But I did want Lydia to settle it herself."
+
+"She has, at last," Mrs. Sandworth reminded him, in a little surprise at
+his forgetting so important a fact.
+
+"She has _not_!" roared the doctor.
+
+His literal-minded sister looked aggrieved bewilderment. She felt a
+bitterness at having been stirred without due cause. "Marius, you're
+unkind. What did you tell me she had for--when I'm so tired it seems as
+if I could lie down and die if I--"
+
+Dr. Melton knew his sister. He made a rapid plunge through the
+obscurity of her brain into her heart's warm clarity, and, "Oh, Julia,
+if you had seen her!" he cried.
+
+She leaned toward him, responsive to the emotion in his voice. "Tell me
+about it, poor Marius," she said, yearning maternally over his pain.
+
+"I can't--if you had seen her--"
+
+"But how did you hear? Did she tell you? When did--"
+
+"I was there at five, and her mother met me at the door. She took me
+upstairs, a finger on her lip, and there she and Marietta said they
+guessed this afternoon would settle things. A week ago, she said, she'd
+had an up-and-down talk with that dreadful carpenter and as good as
+forbade him the house--"
+
+Mrs. Sandworth had a gesture of intuition. "Oh, if they've managed to
+shut Lydia off from seeing him--"
+
+The doctor nodded. "That's what her mother counted on. She said she
+thought it a sign that Lydia was just infatuated with Rankin--her being
+so different after she'd seen him--so defiant--so unlike Lydia! But now
+she hadn't seen him for a week, and her mother and Marietta had been
+'talking to her'--_Julia!_--and then Paul had come to see her every
+evening, and had been just right--firm and yet not exacting, and ever so
+gentle and kind--and this afternoon when he came Lydia cried and didn't
+want to go down, but her mother said she mustn't be childish, and
+Marietta had just taken her right down to the library and left her there
+with Paul, and there she was now." The doctor started up and beat his
+thin, corded hand on the mantel. He could not speak. His sister got up
+and laid a tender hand on his shoulder. "Poor Marius!" she said again.
+
+He drew a long breath. "I did not fly at their throats--I turned and ran
+like mad down the stairs and into the library. It was Rankin I wanted to
+kill for letting his pride come in--for leaving her there alone with
+those--I was ready to snatch Lydia up bodily and carry her off to--" He
+stopped short and laughed harshly. "I reach to Lydia's shoulder," he
+commented on his own speech. "That's me. To see what's to be done and--"
+
+"What _was_ to be done?" asked Mrs. Sandworth patiently. She was quite
+used to understanding but half of what her brother said and had acquired
+a quiet art of untangling by tireless questionings the thread of
+narrative from the maze of his comments and ejaculations.
+
+"There was nothing to be done. I was too late."
+
+"You didn't burst in on them while Paul was kissing her or anything, did
+you?"
+
+"Paul wasn't there."
+
+"Not there! Why, Marius, you're worse than usual. Didn't you tell me her
+mother said--"
+
+"He had been there--one look at Lydia showed that. She sat there alone
+in the dim light, her face as white--and when I came in she said,
+without looking to see who it was, 'I'm engaged to Paul.' She said it to
+her mother, who was right after me, of course, and then to Marietta."
+
+"Well--!" breathed Mrs. Sandworth as he paused; "so that was all there
+was to it?"
+
+"Oh, no; they did the proper thing. They kissed her, and cried, and
+congratulated everybody, and her mother said, with an eye on me:
+'Darling, you're _not_ doing this just because you know it'll make us so
+very happy, _are_ you?' Lydia said, 'Oh, no; she supposed not,' and
+started to go upstairs. But when Marietta said she'd go and telephone to
+Flora Burgess to announce it, Lydia came down like a flash. It was _not_
+to be announced she told them; she'd _die_ if they told anybody! Paul
+had promised solemnly not to tell anybody. Her mother said, of course
+she knew how Lydia felt about it. It _was_ a handicap for a girl in her
+first season. Lydia was half-way up the stairs again, but at that she
+looked down at her mother--_God!_ Julia, if a child of mine had ever
+looked at me like that--"
+
+Mrs. Sandworth patted him vaguely. "Oh, people always look white and
+queer in the twilight, you know--even quite _florid_ complexions."
+
+The doctor made a rush to the door.
+
+"But dinner must be ready to put on the table," she called after him.
+
+"Put it on, then," he cried, and disappeared.
+
+A plain statement was manna to Mrs. Sandworth. She had finished her
+soup, and was beginning on her hamburg steak when the doctor came
+soberly in, took his place, and began to eat in silence. She took up the
+conversation where they had left it.
+
+"So it's all over," she commented, watching his plate to see that he did
+not forget to salt his meat and help himself to gravy.
+
+"Nothing's ever over in a human life," he contradicted her. "Why do you
+suppose she doesn't want it announced?"
+
+"You don't suppose she means to break it off later?"
+
+"I haven't any idea _what_ she means, any more than she has, poor child!
+But it's plain that this is only to gain time--a sop to the wolves."
+
+"Wolves!" cried poor Mrs. Sandworth.
+
+"Well, tigers and hyenas, perhaps," he added moderately.
+
+"They're crazy about Lydia, that whole Emery family," she protested.
+
+"They are that," he agreed sardonically. "But I don't mean only her
+family. I mean unclean prowling standards of what's what, as well as--"
+
+"They'd lie down and let her walk over them! You know they would--"
+
+"If they thought she was going in the right direction."
+
+Mrs. Sandworth gave him up, and drifted off into speculation. "I wonder
+what she could have found in that man to think of! A girl brought up as
+she's been!"
+
+"Perhaps she was only snatching a little sensible talk where she could
+get it."
+
+"But they _didn't_ talk sensibly. Marietta said Lydia tried, one of the
+times when they were going over it with her, Lydia tried to tell her
+mother some of the things they said that night when he took her home
+from here. Marietta said they were 'too sickish!' 'Flat Sunday-school
+cant about wanting to be good,' and all that sort of thing."
+
+"That certainly wouldn't have tempted _Marietta_ from the path of virtue
+and sharp attention to a good match," murmured the doctor. "Nobody can
+claim that there's anything very seductive to the average young lady in
+Rankin's fanaticism."
+
+"Oh, you admit he's a fanatic!" Mrs. Sandworth seized on a valuable
+piece of driftwood which the doctor's tempest had thrown at her feet.
+
+"Everybody who's worth his salt is a fanatic."
+
+"Not Paul. Everybody says he's so sane and levelheaded."
+
+"There isn't a hotter one in creation!"
+
+"Than _Paul_?"
+
+"Than Paul."
+
+"Oh, Marius!" she reproached him for levity.
+
+"He's a fanatic for success."
+
+"Oh, I don't call _that_--"
+
+"Nor nobody else in Endbury--but it is, all the same. And the only
+wonder is that Lydia should have been attracted by Rankin's heretical
+brand and not by Paul's orthodox variety. It shows she's rare."
+
+"Good gracious, Marius! You talk as though it were a question of ideas
+or convictions."
+
+"That's a horrible conception," he admitted gravely.
+
+"It's which one she's in love with!" Mrs. Sandworth emitted this with
+solemnity.
+
+The doctor stood up to go. "She's not in love with either," he
+pronounced. "She's never been allowed the faintest sniff at reality or
+life or experience--how can she be in love?"
+
+"Well, they're in love with her," she triumphed for her sex.
+
+"I don't know anything about Paul's inner workings, and as for Rankin, I
+don't know whether he's in love with her or not. He's sorry for
+her--he's touched by her--"
+
+Mrs. Sandworth felt the ground slip from beneath her feet. "Good
+gracious me! If he's not in love with her, nor she with him, what are
+you making all this fuss about?"
+
+The doctor thrust out his lips. "I'm only protesting in my usual feeble,
+inadequate manner, after the harm's all done, at idiots and egotists
+laying their dirty hands on a sacred thing--the right of youth to its
+own life--"
+
+"Well, if you call that a feeble protest--!" she called after him.
+
+He reappeared, hat in hand. "It's nothing to what I'd like to say. I
+will add that Daniel Rankin's a man in a million."
+
+Mrs. Sandworth responded, rather neatly for her, that she should hope so
+indeed, and added, "But, Marius, she couldn't have married him--really!
+Mercy! What had he to offer her--compared with Paul? Everybody has
+always said what a _suitable_ marriage--"
+
+Dr. Melton crammed his hat on his head fiercely and said nothing.
+
+"But it's so," she insisted.
+
+"He hasn't anything to offer to Marietta, perhaps."
+
+"Marietta's _married_!" Mrs. Sandworth kept herself anchored fast to the
+facts of any case under discussion.
+
+"_Is_ she?" queried the doctor with a sincerity of interrogation which
+his sister found distracting.
+
+"Oh, Marius!" she reproached him again; and then helplessly, "How did we
+get on to Marietta, anyhow? I thought we were talking of Lydia's
+engagement."
+
+"I was," he assured her.
+
+"And I was going to ask you really seriously, just straight out, what
+you are so down on the Emerys for? What have they done that's so bad?"
+
+"They've brought her up so that now in her time of need she hasn't a
+weapon to resist them."
+
+"Oh, Ma--" began Mrs. Sandworth despairingly.
+
+"Well, then, I will tell you--I'll explain in words of one syllable.
+Mind you, I don't undertake to settle the question--Heaven forbid! It
+may be all right for Marietta Mortimer to kill herself body and soul by
+inches to keep what bores her to death to have--a social position in
+Endbury's two-for-a-cent society, but, for the Lord's sake, why do they
+make such a howling and yelling just at the time when Lydia's got the
+tragically important question to decide as to whether that's what _she_
+wants? It's like expecting her to do a problem in calculus in the midst
+of an earthquake."
+
+Mrs. Sandworth had a mortal antipathy to figures of speech, acquired of
+much painful experience with her brother's conversation. She sank back
+in her chair and waved him off. "Calculus!" she cried, outraged;
+"earthquakes! And I'm sure you're as unfair as can be! You can't say her
+father's obscured any question. You _know_ he's not a dictatorial
+father. His principle is not to interfere at all with his children."
+
+"Yes; that's his principle all right. His specialties are in other
+lines, and they have been for a long time. His wife has seen to that."
+
+Mrs. Sandworth had one of her lucid divinations of the inner meaning of
+a situation. "Oh, the poor Emerys! Poor Lydia! Oh, Marius, aren't you
+glad we haven't any children!"
+
+"Every child that's not getting a fair chance at what it ought to have,
+should be our child," he said.
+
+He went up to her and kissed her gently. "Good-night," he said.
+
+"Where are you going?"
+
+"To the Black Rock woods."
+
+"Tell him--" she was inspired--"tell him to try to see Lydia again."
+
+"I was going to do that. But she won't be allowed to. It's pretty late
+now. She ought to have seen him a great many years ago--from the time he
+was born."
+
+"But she's ever so much younger than he," cried Mrs. Sandworth after
+him, informingly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+LYDIA DECIDES IN PERFECT FREEDOM
+
+
+The maid had announced to Mrs. Emery, finishing an unusually careful
+morning toilet, that Miss Burgess, society reporter of the Endbury
+_Chronicle_, was below. Before the mistress of the house could finish
+adjusting her well-matched gray pompadour, a second arrival was
+heralded, "The gentleman from the greenhouse, to see about Miss Lydia's
+party decorations." And as the handsome matron came down the stairs a
+third comer was introduced into the hall--Mme. Boyle herself, the best
+dressmaker in town, who had come in person to see about the refitting of
+the débutante's Paris dresses, the débutante having found the change
+back to the climate of Endbury so trying that her figure had grown quite
+noticeably thinner.
+
+"It was the one thing necessary to make Maddemwaselle's tournoor exactly
+perfect," Mme. Boyle told Mrs. Emery. Out of a sense of what was due her
+loyal Endbury customers, Mme. Boyle assumed a guileless coloring of
+Frenchiness, which was evidently a symbol, and no more intended for a
+pretense of reality than the honestly false brown front that surmounted
+her competent, kindly Celtic face.
+
+Mrs. Emery stopped a moment by the newel-post to direct Madame to
+Lydia's room and to offer up a devout thanksgiving to the kindly
+Providence that constantly smoothed the path before her. "Oh, Madame,
+just think if it had been a season when hips were in style!" As she
+continued her progress to what she was beginning to contemplate calling
+her drawing-room, she glowed with a sense of well-being which buoyed her
+up like wings. In common with many other estimable people, she could
+not but value more highly what she had had to struggle to retain, and
+the exciting vicissitudes of the last fortnight had left her with a
+sweet taste of victory in her mouth.
+
+She greeted Miss Burgess with the careful cordiality due to an ally of
+many years' standing, and with a manner perceptibly but indefinably
+different from that which she would have bestowed on a social equal.
+Mrs. Emery had labored to acquire exactly that tone in her dealings with
+the society reporter, and her achievement of it was a fact which brought
+an equal satisfaction to both women. Miss Burgess' mother was an
+Englishwoman, an ex-housekeeper, who had transmitted to her daughter a
+sense, rare as yet in America, of the beauty and dignity of class
+distinctions. In her turn Miss Burgess herself, the hard-working,
+good-natured woman of fifty who for twenty years had reported the doings
+of those citizens of Endbury whom she considered the "gentry," had
+toiled with the utmost disinterestedness to build up a feeling, or, as
+she called it, a "tone," which, among other things, should exclude her
+from equality. When she began she was, perhaps, the only person in town
+who had an unerring instinct for social differences; but, like a kindly,
+experienced actor of a minor rôle in theatricals, she had silently given
+so many professional tips to the amateur principals in the play, and had
+acted her own part with such unflagging consistency and good-will, that
+she had often now the satisfaction of seeing one of her pupils move
+through her rôle with a most edifying effect of having been born to it.
+
+Long ago she had taken the Emerys to her warm heart and she had rejoiced
+in all their upward progress with the sweet unenvious joy of an ugly
+woman in a pretty, much-loved sister's successes. Lydia was to her, as
+to Mrs. Emery, a bright symbol of what she would fain have been herself.
+Miss Burgess' feeling for her somewhat resembled that devout affection
+which, she had read, was felt by faithful old servants of great English
+families for the young ladies of the house. The pathetic completeness of
+her own insignificance of aspect had spared her any uneasy ambitions
+for personal advancement, and it is probable that the vigor of her
+character and her pleasure in industry were such that she had been
+happier in her daily column and weekly five-column _Society Notes_ than
+if she had been as successful a society matron as Mrs. Emery herself.
+
+She lived the life of a creator, working at an art she had invented, in
+a workroom of her own contriving, loyally drawing the shutters to shade
+an unfortunate occurrence in one of the best families, setting forth a
+partial success with its best profile to the public, and flooding with
+light real achievements like Mrs. Hollister's rose party (_the_ Mrs.
+Hollister--Paul's aunt, and Madeleine's). All that she wrote was read by
+nearly every woman in Endbury. She was a person of importance, and a
+very busy and happy old maid.
+
+Mrs. Emery had a great taste for Miss Burgess' conversation, admiring
+greatly her whole-hearted devotion to Endbury's social welfare. She had
+once said of her to Dr. Melton, "There is what _I_ call a
+public-spirited woman." He had answered, "I envy Flora Burgess with the
+fierce embittered envy I feel for a cow"--an ambiguous compliment which
+Mrs. Emery had resented on behalf of her old ally.
+
+Now, as Mrs. Emery added to her greeting, "You'll excuse me just a
+moment, won't you, I must settle some things with my decorator," Miss
+Burgess felt a rich content in her hostess' choice of words. There
+_were_ people in Endbury society who would have called him, as had the
+perplexed maid, "the gentleman from the greenhouse." Later, asked for
+advice, she had walked about the lower floor of the house with Mrs.
+Emery and the florist, saturated with satisfaction in the process of
+deciding where the palms should be put that were to conceal the
+"orchestra" of four instruments, and with what flowers the mantels
+should be "banked."
+
+After the man had gone, they settled to a consideration of various
+important matters which was interrupted by an impassioned call of Madame
+Boyle from the stairs, "Could she bring Maddemwaselle down to show this
+_perfect_ fit?"--and they glided into a rapt admiration of the
+unwrinkled surface of peach-colored satin which clad Lydia's slender and
+flexibly erect back. When she turned about so that Madame could show
+them the truly exqueese effect of the trimming at the throat, her face
+showed pearly shadows instead of its usual flower-like glow. As Madame
+left the room for a moment, Miss Burgess said, with a kind, respectful
+facetiousness, "I see that even fairy princesses find the emotions of
+getting engaged a little trying."
+
+Lydia started, and flushed painfully. "Oh, Mother--" she began.
+
+Her mother cut her short. "My _dear_! Miss Burgess!" she pointed out, as
+who should deplore keeping a secret from the family priest, "You know
+she never breathes a word that people don't want known. And she had to
+be told so she can know how to _put_ things all this winter."
+
+"I'm sure it's the most wonderfully _suitable_ marriage," pronounced
+Miss Burgess.
+
+A ring at the door-bell was instantly followed by the bursting open of
+the door and the impetuous onslaught of a girl, a tall, handsome,
+brown-eyed blonde about Lydia's age, who, wasting no time in greetings
+to the older women, flung herself on Lydia's neck with a wild outcry of
+jubilation. "My dear! Isn't it dandy! Perfectly _dandy_! Paul met me at
+the train last night and when he told me I nearly swooned for joy! Of
+all the tickled sisters-in-law! I wanted to come right over here last
+night, but Paul said it was a secret, and wouldn't let me." A momentary
+failure of lung-power forced her to a pause in which she perceived
+Lydia's attire. She recoiled with a dramatic rush. "Oh, you've got one
+of them _on_! Lydia, how insanely swell you do look! Why, Mrs.
+Emery"--she turned to Lydia's mother with a light-hearted
+unconsciousness that she had not addressed her before--"she doesn't look
+_real_, does she!"
+
+There was an instant's pause as the three women gazed ecstatically at
+Lydia, who had again turned her back and was leaning her forehead
+against the window. Then the girl sprang at her again. "Well, my
+goodness, Lydia! I just love you to pieces, of course, but if we were of
+the same complexion I should certainly put poison in your candy. As it
+is, me so blonde and you so dark--I tell you what--what we won't do this
+winter--" She ran up to her again, putting her arms around her neck from
+behind and whispering in her ear.
+
+Miss Burgess turned to her hostess with her sweet, motherly smile.
+"Aren't girls the _dearest_ things?" she whispered. "I love to see them
+so young, and full of their own little affairs. I think it's dreadful
+nowadays how so many of them are allowed to get serious-minded."
+
+Madeleine was saying to Lydia, "You sly little thing--to land Paul
+before the season even began! Where are you going to get your lingerie?
+Oh, _isn't_ it fun? If I go abroad I'll smuggle it back for you. You
+haven't got your ring yet, I don't suppose? Make him make it a ruby.
+That's ever so much sweller than that everlasting old diamond. He's
+something to land, too, Paul is, if I do say it--not, of course, that
+we've either of us got any money, but," she looked about the handsomely
+furnished house, "you'll have lots, and Paul'll soon be making it hand
+over fist--and I'll be marrying it!" She ended with a triumphant
+pirouette her vision of the future, and encountered Madame Boyle,
+entering with a white and gold evening wrap which sent her into another
+paroxysm of admiration. The dressmaker had just begun to say that she
+thought another line of gold braid around the neck would--when Mrs.
+Emery, looking out of the window, declared the caterer to be approaching
+and that she _must_ have aid from her subordinates before he should
+enter. "I do _not_ want to have that old red lemonade and sweet crackers
+everybody has, and slabs of ice-cream floating around on your plate.
+Think quick, all of you! What kind of crackers can we have?"
+
+"Animal crackers," suggested Madeleine, with the accent of a remark
+intended to be humorous, drawing Lydia into a corner. "Now, don't make
+Lydia work. She's _It_ right now, and everything's to be done for her.
+Madame, come over here with that cloak and let's see about the--and Oh,
+you and Lydia, for the love of Heaven tell me what I'm to do about this
+fashion for no hips, and me with a figure of eight! Lydia, the fit of
+that thing is _sublime_!"
+
+"Maddemwaselle, don't you see how a little more gold right here--"
+
+"Here, Lydia," called her mother, "it wasn't the caterer after all; it's
+flowers for you. Take it over there to the young lady in pink," she
+directed the boy.
+
+Madeleine seized on the box, and tore it open with one of her vigorous,
+competent gestures. "_Orchids!_" she shouted in a single volcanic burst
+of appreciation. "I never had orchids sent me in my life! Paul must have
+telegraphed for them. You can't buy them in Endbury. And here's a note
+that says it's to be answered at once, while the boy waits--Oh, my! Oh,
+my!"
+
+"Lydia, dear, here's the caterer, after all. Will you just please say
+one thing. Would you rather have the coffee or the water-ices served
+upstairs--Oh, here's your Aunt Julia--Julia Sandworth, I never needed
+advice more."
+
+Mrs. Sandworth's appearance was the chord which resolved into one burst
+of sound all the various motives emitted by the different temperaments
+in the room. Every one appealed to her at once.
+
+"Just a touch of gold braid on the collar, next the face, don't you--"
+
+"Why not a real supper at midnight, with creamed oysters and things, as
+they do in the East?"
+
+"Do _you_ see anything out of the way in publishing the details of Miss
+Lydia's dress the day before? It gives people a chance to know what to
+look for."
+
+[Illustration: "No, no; I can't--see him--I can't see him any more--"]
+
+"How can we avoid that awful jam-up there is on the stairs when people
+begin to--"
+
+Mrs. Sandworth made her way to the corner where Lydia stood, presenting
+a faultlessly fitted back to the world so that Madame Boyle might, with
+a fat, moist forefinger, indicate the spot where a "soupçon" of gold
+was needed.
+
+"Please, ma'am, the gentleman said I was to wait for an answer," said
+the messenger boy beside her.
+
+"And she hasn't _read_ it, yet!" Madeleine was horrified to remember
+this fact.
+
+"Turn around, Lydia," said Mrs. Sandworth.
+
+Lydia's white lids fluttered. The eyes they revealed were lustrous and
+quite blank. Madeleine darted away, crying, "I'm going to get pen and
+paper for you to write your note right now."
+
+"Lydia," said Mrs. Sandworth, in a low tone, "Daniel Rankin wants to
+speak with you again. Your godfather is waiting here in the hall to know
+if you'll see him. He didn't want to _force_ an interview on you if you
+didn't want it. He wants to see you but he wanted you to decide in
+perfect _freedom_--"
+
+The tragic, troubled, helpless face that Lydia showed at this speech was
+a commentary on the last word. She looked around the room, her eyebrows
+drawn into a knot, one hand at her throat, but she did not answer. Her
+aunt thought she had not understood. "Just collect your thoughts,
+Lydia--"
+
+The girl beat one slim fist inside the other with a sudden nervous
+movement. "But that's what I can't do, Aunt Julia. You know how easily I
+get rattled--I don't know what I'm--I _can't_ collect my thoughts."
+
+As the older woman opened her lips to speak again she cut her short with
+a broken whispered appeal. "No, no; I can't--see him--? I can't stand
+any more--tell him I guess I'll be all right--it's settled now--Mother's
+told all these--I like Paul. I _do_ like him! Mother's told everybody
+here--no, no--I can't, Aunt Julia! I _can't_!"
+
+Mrs. Sandworth, her eyes full of tears, opened her arms impulsively, but
+Lydia drew back. "Oh, let me alone!" she wailed. "I'm so tired!"
+
+Madame Boyle caught this through the clatter of voices. "Why, poor
+Maddemwaselle!" she cried, her kindly, harassed, fatigued face melting.
+"Sit down. Sit down. I can show the ladies about this collar just as
+well that way--if they'll ever look."
+
+Mrs. Sandworth had disappeared.
+
+Madeleine, coming with the pen and ink, was laughing as she told them,
+"I didn't know Dr. Melton was in the house. I ran into him pacing up and
+down in the hall like a little bear, and just now I saw him--isn't he
+too comical! He must have heard our chatter--I saw him running down the
+walk as fast as he could go it, his fingers in his ears as if he were
+trying to get away from a dynamite bomb before it went bang."
+
+"He hasn't much patience with many necessary details of life," said Mrs.
+Emery with dignity. She turned her criticism of her doctor into a
+compliment to her brother's widow by adding, "Whatever he would do
+without Julia to look after him, I'm sure none of us can imagine."
+
+"He is a very original character," said Miss Burgess, discriminatingly.
+
+Madeleine dismissed the subject with a compendious, "He's the most
+killingly, screamingly funny little man that ever lived!"
+
+"Now, _ladies_," implored Madame Boyle, "one more row--not solid--just a
+soupçon--"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+MID-SEASON NERVES
+
+
+"If I should wait and read my paper here instead of on the cars, do you
+suppose Lydia would be up before I left?" asked the Judge as he put his
+napkin in the ring and pushed away from the breakfast table.
+
+Mrs. Emery looked up, smiling, from a letter, "'Of course such a great
+favorite as Miss Emery,'" she read aloud, "'will be hard to secure, but
+both the Governor and I feel that our party wouldn't be complete without
+her. We're expecting a number of other Endbury young people.' And do you
+know who writes that?" she asked triumphantly of her husband.
+
+"How should I?" answered the Judge reasonably.
+
+"Mrs. Ex-Governor Mallory, to be sure. It's their annual St. Valentine's
+day house-party at their old family estate in Union County."
+
+The Judge got up, laughing. "Old family estate," he mocked.
+
+"They are one of the oldest and best families in this State," cried his
+wife.
+
+"The Governor's an old blackguard," said her husband tolerantly.
+
+"The Mallorys--the Hollisters--Lydia is certainly," began Mrs. Emery,
+complacently.
+
+Lydia's father laughed again. "Oh, with you and Flora Burgess as manager
+and press agent--! You haven't answered my question about whether if I
+waited and--"
+
+"No, she wouldn't," said Mrs. Emery decisively. "After dancing so late
+nights, I want her to sleep every minute she's not wanted somewhere. _I_
+have the responsibility of looking after her health, you know. I hope
+she'll sleep now till just time to get up and dress for Marietta's
+lunch-party at one o'clock."
+
+The father of the family frowned. "Is Marietta giving another
+lunch-party for Lydia? They can't afford to do so much. Marietta's--"
+
+"This is a great chance for Marietta--poor girl! she hasn't many such
+chances--Lydia's carrying everything before her so, I mean."
+
+"How does Marietta get into the game?" asked her father obtusely.
+
+Mrs. Emery hesitated a scarcely perceptible instant, a hesitation
+apparently illuminating to her husband. He laughed again, the tolerant,
+indifferent laugh he had for his women-folks' goings-on. "She thinks she
+can go up as the tail to Lydia's kite, does she? She'd better not be too
+sure. If I don't miss my guess, Paul'll have a word or two to say about
+carrying extra weight. Gosh! Marietta's a fool some ways for a woman
+that has her brains."
+
+He stated this opinion with a detached, impersonal irresponsibility, and
+began to prepare himself for the plunge into the damp cold of the
+Endbury January. His wife preserved a dignified silence, and in the
+middle of a sentence of his later talk, which had again turned on his
+grievance about never seeing Lydia, she got up, went into the hall, and
+began to use the telephone for her morning shopping. Her conversation
+gave the impression that she was ordering veal cutlets, maidenhair
+ferns, wax floor-polish, chiffon ruching, and closed carriages, from one
+and the same invisible interlocutor, who seemed impartially unable to
+supply any of these needs without rather testy exhortation. Mrs. Emery
+was one of the women who are always well served by "tradespeople," as
+she now called them, "and a good reason why," she was wont to explain
+with self-gratulatory grimness.
+
+The Judge waited, one hand on the door-knob, squaring his jaw over his
+muffler, and listening with a darkening face to the interminable
+succession of purchases. After a time he released the door-knob,
+loosened his muffler, and sat down heavily, his eyes fixed on his wife's
+back.
+
+After an interval, Mrs. Emery paused in the act of ringing up another
+number, looked over her shoulder, saw him there and inquired uneasily,
+"What are you waiting for? You'll catch cold with all your things on.
+Isn't Dr. Melton always telling you to be careful?"
+
+She felt a vague resentment at his being there "after hours," as she
+might have put it, so definitely had long usage accustomed her to a
+sense of solitary proprietorship of the house except at certain fixed
+and not very frequent periods. She almost felt that he was eavesdropping
+while she "ran her own business." There was also his remark about
+Marietta and kites, unatoned for as yet. She had not forgotten that she
+"owed him one," as Madeleine Hollister light-heartedly phrased the
+connubial balanced relationship which had come under her irreverent and
+keen observation. A cumulative sharpness from all these causes was in
+her voice as she remarked, "Didn't I tell you that Lydia--"
+
+Judge Emery's voice in answer was as sharp as her own. "Look-y here,
+Susan, I bet you've ordered fifty dollars' worth of stuff since you
+stood there."
+
+"Well, what if I have?" She was up in arms in an instant against his
+breaking a long-standing treaty between them--a treaty not tacit, but
+frequently and definitely stated.
+
+They regulated their relations on a sound business basis, they were wont
+to say of themselves, the natural one, the right one. The husband earned
+the money, the wife saw that it was spent to the best advantage, and
+neither needed to bother his head or dissipate his energies about the
+other's end of the matter. They had found it meant less friction, they
+said; fewer occasions for differences of opinion. Once, when they had
+been urging this system upon their son George, then about to marry, Dr.
+Melton had made the suggestion that there would be still fewer
+differences of opinion if married people agreed never to see each other
+after the ceremony in the church. There would be no friction at all
+with that system, he added. It was one of his preposterous speeches
+which had become a family joke with the Emerys.
+
+"Well, what if I have?" Mrs. Emery advanced defiantly upon her husband,
+with this remark repeated.
+
+Judge Emery shared a well-known domestic peculiarity with other
+estimable and otherwise courageous men. He retreated precipitately
+before the energy of his wife's counter-attack, only saying sulkily, to
+conceal from himself the fact of his retreat, "Well, we're not
+millionaires, you know."
+
+"Did I ever think we were?" she said, smiling inwardly at his change of
+front. "If you stand right up to men, they'll give in," she often
+counseled other matrons. She began to look up another number in the
+telephone book.
+
+"If you order fifty dollars' worth every morning, besides--"
+
+"Three-four-four--Weston," remarked his wife to the telephone. To her
+husband she said conclusively, "I thought we were agreed to make Lydia's
+first season everything it ought to be. And isn't she being worth it?
+There hasn't a girl come out in Endbury in _years_ that's been so
+popular, or had so much--" She jerked her head around to the
+telephone--"Three-four-four--Weston? Is this Mr. Schmidt? I want Mr.
+Schmidt himself. Tell him Mrs. Emery--"
+
+The Judge broke in, with the air of launching the most startling of
+arguments, "Well, my salary won't stand it; that's sure! If this keeps
+up I'll have to resign from the bench and go into practice again."
+
+His wife looked at him without surprise. "Well, I've often thought that
+might be a very good thing." She added, with good-humored impatience,
+"Oh, go along, Nathaniel. You know it's just one of your bilious
+attacks, and you will catch cold sitting there with all your--Mr.
+Schmidt, I want to complain about the man who dished up the ice-cream at
+my last reception. I am going to give another one next week, and I want
+a different--"
+
+"I won't be back to lunch," said her husband. The door slammed.
+
+As he turned into the front walk it opened after him, and his wife
+called after him, "I'm going to give a dinner party for Lydia's girl
+friends here this evening, so you'd better get your dinner down-town or
+at the Meltons'. I'll telephone Julia that--"
+
+The Judge stopped, disappointment, almost dismay, on his face. "I'm
+going to keep track from now on," he called angrily, "of just how often
+I catch a glimpse of Lydia. I bet it won't be five minutes a week."
+
+Mrs. Emery evidently did not catch what he said, and as evidently
+considered it of no consequence that she did not. She nodded
+indifferently and, drawing in her head, shut the door.
+
+At the end of the next week the Judge announced that he had put down
+every time he and Lydia had been in a room together, and it amounted to
+just forty-five minutes, all told. Lydia, a dazzling vision in white and
+gold, had come downstairs on her way to a dance, and because Paul, who
+was to be her escort, was a little late, she told her father that now
+was his time for a "visit." This question of "visiting" had grown to be
+quite a joke. Judge Emery clutched eagerly at anything in the nature of
+an understanding or common interest between them.
+
+"Oh, I don't know you well enough to visit with you," he now said
+laughingly, "but I'll look at you long enough so I'll recognize you the
+next time I meet you on the street-car."
+
+Lydia sat down on his knee, lightly, so as not to crumple her gauzy
+draperies, and looked at her father with the whimsical expression that
+became her face so well. "I'm paying you back," she said gayly. "I
+remember when I was a little girl I used to wonder why you came all the
+way out here to eat your meals. It seemed so much easier for you to get
+them near your office. Honest, I did."
+
+"Ah, that was when I was still struggling to get my toes into a crack in
+the wall and climb up. I didn't have time for you then. And you're very
+ungrateful to bring it up against me, for all I was doing was to wear my
+nose clear off on the grindstone so's to be able to buy you such pretty
+trash as this." He stroked the girl's shimmering draperies, not thinking
+of what he was saying, smiling at her, delighted with her beauty, with
+her nearness to him, with this brief snatch of intimate talk.
+
+"Ungrateful--yourself! What am I doing but wearing my nose off on the
+grindstone--Dr. Melton threatens nervous prostration every day--so's to
+show off your pretty trash to the best advantage. _I_ haven't any time
+to bother with _you_ now!" she mocked him laughingly, her hands on his
+shoulders.
+
+"Well, that sounds like a bargain," he admitted, leaning back in his
+chair; "I suppose I've got to be satisfied if you are. _Are_ you
+satisfied?" he asked with a sudden seriousness. "How do you like Paul,
+now you know him better?"
+
+Lydia flushed, and looked away in a tremulous confusion. "Why, when I'm
+with him I can't think of another thing in the world," she confessed in
+a low, ardent tone.
+
+"Ah, well, then that's all right," said the Judge comfortably.
+
+There was a pause, during which Lydia looked at the fire dreamily, and
+he looked at Lydia. The girl's face grew more and more absent and
+brooding.
+
+The door-bell rang. "There he is, I suppose," said her father.
+
+"But isn't it a pity we couldn't make connections?" she asked musingly.
+"Maybe I'd have liked you better with your nose on, better even than
+pretty trash."
+
+"Eh?" said Judge Emery. His blankness was so acute that he slipped for
+an instant back into a rusticity he had long ago left behind him. "What
+say, Lydia?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, yes, Paul; I didn't hear you come in," called the girl, jumping up
+and beginning to put on her wraps.
+
+The young man darted into the room to help her, saying over his
+shoulder: "Much obliged to you, Judge, for your good word to Egdon,
+March and Company. I got the contract for the equipment of their new
+factory to-day."
+
+The Judge screwed himself round in his chair till he could see Paul
+bending at Lydia's feet, putting on her high overshoes. "That's quite a
+contract, isn't it?" he asked, highly pleased.
+
+"The biggest I ever got my teeth into," said Paul, straightening up.
+"I'm ashamed to have Lydia know anything about it, though. I didn't
+bring a hack to take her to the dance."
+
+"Oh, I never thought you would," cried Lydia, standing up and stamping
+her feet down in her overshoes--an action that added emphasis to her
+protest. "I'd rather walk, it's such a little way. I like it better when
+I'm not costing people money."
+
+"You're not like most of your sex," said Paul. "Down in Mexico, when I
+was there on the Brighton job, I heard a Spanish proverb: 'If a pretty
+woman smiles, some purse is shedding tears.'"
+
+The two men exchanged laughing glances of understanding. Lydia frowned.
+"That is hateful--and horrid--and a _lie_!" she cried energetically,
+finding that they paid no attention to her protest.
+
+"_I_ didn't invent it," Paul exonerated himself lightly.
+
+"But you laughed at it--you think it's so--you--" She was trembling in a
+sudden resentment at once inexplicable and amusing to the other two.
+
+"Highty-tighty! you little spitfire!" cried her father, laughing. "I see
+_your_ finish, my boy!"
+
+"Good gracious, Lydia, how you do fly at a man! I take it back. I take
+it back." Paul looked admiringly at his pretty sweetheart's flashing
+eyes and crimson cheeks as he spoke.
+
+She turned away and picked up her cloak without speaking.
+
+"To tell the truth," said Paul, going on with the conversation as though
+it had not been interrupted, and addressing his father-in-law-to-be,
+"every penny I can rake and scrape is going into the house. Lydia's
+such a sensible little thing I knew she'd think it better to have
+something permanent than an ocean of orchids and candy now. Besides,
+such a belle as she is gets them from everybody else."
+
+Mrs. Emery often pointed out to Lydia's inexperience that it was rare to
+see a man so magnanimously free from jealousy as her fiancé.
+
+"The architect and I were going over it to-day," the young electrician
+went on, "and I decided, seeing this new contract means such a lot, that
+I would have the panels in the hall carved, after all--of course if you
+agree," he turned to Lydia, but went on without waiting for an answer.
+"The effect will be much handsomer--will go with the rest of the house
+better."
+
+"They'd be lots harder to dust," said Lydia dubiously, putting a
+spangled web of gold over her hair. The contrast between her aspect and
+the dingy suggestions of her speech made both men laugh tenderly. "When
+Titania takes to being practical--" laughed Paul.
+
+Lydia went on seriously. "Honestly, Paul, I'm afraid the house is
+getting too handsome, anyhow--everything in it. It's too expensive,
+I'm--"
+
+"Nothing's too good for you." Paul said this with conviction. "And
+besides, it's an asset. The mortgage won't be so very large. And if
+we're in it, we'll just have to live up to it. It'll be a stimulus."
+
+"I hope it doesn't stimulate us into our graves," said Lydia, as she
+kissed her father good-night.
+
+"Well, your families aren't paupers on either side," said Paul.
+
+A casual remark like this was the nearest approach he ever made to
+admitting that he expected Lydia to inherit money. He would have been
+shocked at the idea of allowing any question of money to influence his
+marriage, and would not have lifted a hand to learn the state of his
+future father-in-law's finances. Still, it was evident to the most
+disinterested eye that there were plenty of funds behind the Emery's
+ample, comfortable mode of life, and on this point his eyes were keen,
+for all their delicacy.
+
+As the young people paused at the door, Judge Emery took a note-book out
+of his pocket and elaborately made a note. "Fifty-five minutes in eight
+days, Lydia," he called.
+
+At the end of a fortnight he proclaimed aloud that the record was too
+discouraging to keep any longer; he was losing ground instead of
+gaining. He had followed Mrs. Emery to her room one afternoon to make
+this complaint, and now moved about uneasily, trying to bestow his
+large, square figure where he would not be in the way of his wife, who
+was hurrying nervously about to pack Lydia's traveling bag. She looked
+very tired and pale, and spoke as though near a nervous outbreak of some
+sort. Didn't he know that Lydia had to start for the Mallory Valentine
+house-party this afternoon, she asked with an asperity not directed at
+the Judge's complaint, for she considered that negligible, but at Lydia
+for being late. She often became so absorbed and fascinated by her own
+managerial capacity that she was vastly put out by lapses on the part of
+the object of it. She did not spare herself when it was a question of
+Lydia's career. Without a thought of fatigue or her own personal tastes,
+she devoted herself with a fanatic zeal to furthering her daughter's
+interests. It sometimes seemed very hard to bear that Lydia herself was
+so much less zealous in the matter.
+
+When the girl came in now, flushed and guiltily breathless, Dr. Melton
+trotted at her heels, calling out excuses for her tardiness. "It's my
+fault. I met her scurrying away from a card-party, and she was exactly
+on time. But I walked along with her and detained her."
+
+"It was the sunset," said Lydia, hurrying to change her hat and wraps.
+"It was so fine that when Godfather called my attention to it, I just
+_stood_! I forgot everything! There may have been sunsets before this
+winter, but it seems as though I hadn't had time to see one before--over
+the ironworks, you know, where that hideous black smoke is all day, and
+the sun turned it into such loveliness--"
+
+"You've missed your trolley-car," said her mother succinctly.
+
+"Oh, I'm _sorry_!" cried Lydia, in a remorse evidently directed more
+toward displeasing her mother than the other consequences of her delay,
+for she asked in a moment, very meekly, "Will it make so very much
+difference if I don't go till the next one?"
+
+"You'll miss the Governor. He was coming down to meet those on this car.
+You'll have to go all alone. All the rest of the party were on this
+one."
+
+"Oh, I don't care about that," cried Lydia. "If that's all--I'd ever so
+much rather go alone. I'm never alone a single minute, and it'll rest
+me. The crowd would have been so noisy and carried on so--they always
+do."
+
+Her mother's aggrieved disappointment did not disappear. She said
+nothing, bringing Lydia's traveling wraps to her silently, and emanating
+disapproval until Lydia drooped and looked piteously at her godfather.
+
+Dr. Melton cried out at this, "Look here, Susan Emery, you're like the
+carpenter that was so proud of his good planing that he planed his
+boards all away to shavings."
+
+Mrs. Emery looked at him with a lack of comprehension of his meaning
+equaled only by her evident indifference to it.
+
+"I mean--I thought what you were going in for was giving Lydia a good
+time this winter. You're running her as though she were a
+transcontinental railway system."
+
+"You can't accomplish anything without system in this world," said Mrs.
+Emery. She added, "Perhaps Lydia will find, when she comes to ordering
+her own life, that she will miss her old mother's forethought and care."
+
+Lydia flung herself remorsefully on her mother's neck. "I'm so _sorry_,
+Mother dear," she almost sobbed. Dr. Melton's professional eye took in
+the fact that everyone in the room was high-strung and tense. "The
+middle-of-the-social-season symptom," he called it to himself. "I'm so
+sorry, Mother," Lydia went on. "I will be more careful next time. You
+are _so_ good to--to--"
+
+"Good Heavens!" said Dr. Melton. "All the child did was to give herself
+a moment's time to look at a fine spectacle, after spending all a
+precious afternoon on such a tragically idiotic pursuit as cards."
+
+"Oh, _sunsets_!" Mrs. Emery disposed of them with a word. "Come, Lydia."
+
+"I'll go with her, and carry her bag," said the doctor.
+
+"You made such a good job of getting her here on time," said Mrs. Emery,
+unappeased.
+
+The Judge offered to go, as a means of one of his rare visits with
+Lydia, but his wife declared with emphasis that she didn't care who went
+or didn't go so long as she herself saw that Lydia did not take to
+star-gazing again. It ended by all four proceeding down the street
+together.
+
+"You're sure you remember everything, Lydia?" asked her mother.
+
+"Let me see," said the girl, laughing nervously. "Do I? The Governor's
+wife is his second, so I'm to waste no time admiring the first set of
+children. They're Methodists, so I'm to keep quiet about our being
+Episcopalians--"
+
+"I guess we're not Episcopalians enough to hurt," commented her father,
+who had never taken the conversion of his women-folks very seriously.
+
+"And it's my pink crêpe for dinner and tan-colored suit if they have
+afternoon tea. And Mrs. Mallory is to be asked to visit us, but not her
+daughter, because of her impossible husband, and I'm to play my
+prettiest to the Governor, because he's always needing dynamos and such
+in the works, and Paul--"
+
+The big car came booming around the corner, and she stopped her category
+of recommendations. The doctor rushed in with a last one as they stepped
+hurriedly toward the rear platform: "And don't forget that your host is
+the most unmitigated old rascal that ever stood in with two political
+machines at once."
+
+The Judge swung her up on the platform, the doctor gave her valise to
+the conductor, her mother waved her hand, and she was off.
+
+The two men turned away. Not so Mrs. Emery. She was staring after the
+car in a fierce endeavor to focus her gaze on the interior. "Who was
+that man that jumped up so surprised to speak to Lydia?"
+
+"I didn't notice anybody," said the Judge.
+
+Dr. Melton spoke quickly. "Lydia's getting in a very nervous state, my
+friends; I want you to know that. This confounded life is too much for
+her."
+
+"She doesn't kill herself getting up in the morning," complained her
+father. "It is a month now since I've seen her at breakfast."
+
+"I don't _let_ her get up," said Mrs. Emery. "I guess if you'd been up
+till two every morning dancing split dances because you were _the_ belle
+of the season, you'd sleep late! Besides," she went on, "she'll be all
+right as soon as her engagement is announced. The excitement of that'll
+brace her up."
+
+"Good Lord! It's not more excitement she needs," began Dr. Melton; but
+they had reached the house, and Mrs. Emery, obviously preoccupied,
+pulled her husband quickly in, dismissing the doctor with a nod.
+
+She drew the Judge hurriedly into the hall, and, "It was that Rankin!"
+she cried, the slam of the door underscoring her words, "and _I_ believe
+Marius Melton knew he was going on that car and made Lydia late on
+purpose."
+
+Judge Emery was in the state in which of late the end of the day's work
+found him--overwhelmingly fatigued. He had not an ounce of superfluous
+energy to answer his wife's tocsin. "Well, what if it was?" he said.
+
+"They'll be an hour and a half together--alone--more alone than anywhere
+except on a desert island. Alone--an hour and a half!"
+
+"Oh, Susan! If Paul can't in three months make more headway than Rankin
+can tear down in an hour and a half--"
+
+She raged at him, revolted at the calmness with which he was
+unbuttoning his overcoat and unwinding his muffler, "You don't
+understand--_anything_! I'm not afraid she'll elope with him--Paul's got
+her too solid for that--Rankin probably won't say anything of _that_
+kind! But he'll put notions in her head again--she's so impressionable.
+And she says queer things now, once in a while, if she's left alone a
+minute. She needs managing. She's not like that levelheaded, sensible
+Madeleine Hollister. Lydia has to be guided, and you don't see
+anything--you leave it all to me."
+
+She was almost crying with nervous exhaustion. That Lydia's course ran
+smooth through a thousand complications was not accomplished without an
+incalculable expenditure of nervous force on her mother's part. Dr.
+Melton had several times of late predicted that he would have his old
+patient back under his care again. Judge Emery, remembering this
+prophecy, was now moved by his wife's pale agitation to a
+heart-sickening mixture of apprehension for her and of recollection of
+his own extreme discomfort whenever she was sick. He tried to soothe
+her. "But, Susan, there's nothing we can do about it," he said
+reasoningly, hanging up his overcoat, blandly ignorant that her
+irritation came largely from his failure to fall in with her conception
+of the moment as a tragic one.
+
+"You could _care_ something about it," she said bitterly, standing with
+all her wraps on. The telephone bell rang. She motioned him back. "No; I
+might as well go first as last. It'll be something I'd have to see
+about, anyway."
+
+As he hesitated in the middle of the hall, longing to betake himself to
+a deep easy chair and a moment's relaxation, and not daring to do so, he
+was startled by an electric change in his wife's voice. "You're at
+Hardville, you say? Oh, Flora Burgess, I could go down on my knees in
+thanksgiving. I want you to run right out as fast as you can and get on
+the next Interurban car from Endbury. Lydia's on it--" she cast caution
+from her desperately--"and I've just heard that there's somebody I
+don't want her to talk to--you know--_carpenters_--run--fly--never mind
+what they say! Make them talk to you, too!"
+
+She turned back to her husband, transfigured with triumph. "I guess
+that'll put a spoke in _his_ wheel!" she cried. "Flora Burgess's at
+Hardville, and that's only half an hour from here. I guess they can't
+get very far in half an hour."
+
+The Judge considered the matter with pursed lips. "I wish it hadn't
+happened," he mused, as unresponsive to his wife's relief as he had been
+to her anxiety. "At first, I mean--last autumn--at all."
+
+His wife caught him up with a good humor gay with relief. "Oh, give you
+time, Nat, and you come round to seeing what's under your nose. I was
+wishing it hadn't happened long before I knew it had. I breathed it in
+the air before we ever knew she'd so much as seen him."
+
+"Melton says he thinks the fellow has a future before him--"
+
+"Oh, Marius Melton! How many of his swans have stuffed feather pillows!"
+
+The Judge demurred. "I often wish I could think he _was_--but Melton's
+no fool." He added, uneasily, "He's been pestering me again about taking
+a long rest--says I'm really out of condition."
+
+"Perhaps a change of work would do you good--to be in active practice
+again. You could be your own master more--take more vacations, maybe."
+
+The Judge surveyed her with a whimsical smile. "I'd make a lot more
+money in practice," he admitted.
+
+If she heard this comment she made no sign, but went on, "You do work
+too constantly, too. I've always said so! If you'd be willing to take a
+little more relaxation--go out more--"
+
+Judge Emery shuddered. "Endbury tea-parties--!"
+
+His wife, half-way up the stairs, laughed down at him. "Tea-parties!
+There hasn't been a tea-party given in Endbury since we were wearing
+pull-backs."
+
+The laugh was so good-natured that the Judge hoped for a favorable
+opening and ventured to say irrelevantly, as though reverting
+automatically to a subject always in his mind, "But, honest, Susie,
+can't we shave expenses down some? This winter is costing--"
+
+She turned on him, not resentfully this time, but with a solemn appeal.
+"Why, Nat! Lydia's season! The last winter we'll have her with us, no
+doubt! I'd go on bread and water afterward to give her what she wants
+now--wouldn't _you_? What are we old folks good for but to do our best
+by our children?"
+
+The Judge looked up at her, baffled, inarticulate. "Oh, of course," he
+agreed helplessly, "we want to do the best by our children."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+A HALF-HOUR'S LIBERTY
+
+
+Inside the big Interurban car Lydia and Rankin were talking with a
+freedom that enormously surprised Lydia. The man had started up with an
+exclamation of pleasure, had taken her bag, found a vacant seat, put her
+next the window and sat down by her before Lydia, quite breathless with
+the shock of seeing him, could do more than notice how vigorous he
+looked, his tall, spare figure alert and erect, his ruddy hair and
+close-clipped beard contrasting vividly with his dark-blue flannel shirt
+and soft black hat. He was on a business trip, evidently, for on his
+knees he held a tool-box with large ungloved hands, roughened and red.
+
+With his usual sweeping disregard of conventional approaches, he plunged
+boldly into the matter with which their thoughts were at once occupied.
+"So this was why Dr. Melton insisted I should take this car. Well, I'm
+grateful to him! It gives me a chance to relieve my mind of a weight of
+remorse I've been carrying around."
+
+Lydia looked at him, relieved and surprised at the hearty spontaneity of
+this opening.
+
+He misunderstood her expression. "You don't mind, do you, my speaking to
+you about last fall--my saying I am so very sorry I made you all the
+trouble Dr. Melton tells me I did? I'm really very sorry!"
+
+Nothing could have more completely disarmed Lydia's acquired fear of him
+as the bogey-man of her mother's exhortations. It is true that she was,
+as she put it to herself, somewhat taken down by the contrast between
+her secret thought of him as a wounded, rejected suitor, and this
+clear-eyed, self-possessed, friendly reality before her; but, after a
+momentary feeling of pique, coming from a sense of the romantic,
+superficially grafted on her natural good feeling, she was filled with
+an immense relief. Lydia was no man-eater. In spite of traditional
+wisdom, she, like a considerable number of her contemporaries, was as
+far removed from this stage of feminine development as from a Stone-age
+appetite for raw meat. She now drew a long breath of the most honest
+satisfaction that she had done him no harm, and smiled at Rankin. He
+waited for her to speak, and she finally said: "It's awfully good of you
+to put it that way! I've been afraid you must have been angry with me
+and hurt that I--so you didn't mind at all!"
+
+Rankin smiled at little ruefully at her swift conclusion. "I believe in
+telling the truth, even to young ladies, and I can not say I didn't mind
+at all--or that I don't now. But I am convinced that you were right in
+dropping me--out of the realm of acquaintances." His assumption was,
+Lydia saw with gratitude, that they were talking simply about a possible
+acquaintanceship between them. "It's evidently true--what I told you the
+very first time I saw you. We don't belong in the same world."
+
+As he said this, he looked at her with an expression Lydia thought
+severe. She protested, "What makes you so sure?"
+
+"Because to live in my world--even to step into it from time to
+time--requires the courage to believe in it."
+
+"And you think I didn't?" asked Lydia. It was an inestimable comfort to
+her to have brought into the light the problem that had so long lain in
+the back of her head, a confused mass of dark conjecture.
+
+"Did you?" he asked steadily. "You ought to know."
+
+There was silence, while Lydia turned her head away and looked at the
+brown, flat winter landscape jerking itself past the windows as the car
+began to develop speed in the first long, open space between
+settlements. She was trying to remember something distinct about the
+nightmare of misery that had followed her admission of the identity of
+the man who had kissed her hand that starry night in October, but from
+the black chaos of her recollection she brought out only, "Oh, you don't
+realize how things are with a girl--how many million little ways she's
+bound and tied down, just from everybody in the family loving her as--"
+
+"Oh, yes, I do; I prove I do by saying that you were probably right in
+yielding so absolutely to that overwhelming influence. If you hadn't the
+strength to break through it decisively even once, you certainly
+couldn't have gotten any satisfaction out of doing things contrary to
+it. So it's all right, you see."
+
+Lydia's drooping face did not show that she derived the satisfaction
+from this view of her limitations that her companion seemed to expect.
+"You mean I'm a poor-spirited, weak thing, who'd better never try to
+take a step of my own," she said with a sorry smile.
+
+"I don't mean anything unkind," he told her gently. "I've succeeded in
+convincing myself that your action of last autumn was the result of a
+deep-rooted instinct for self-preservation--and that's certainly most
+justifiable. It meant I'd expected too harsh a strength from you--" he
+went on with a whimsical smile, which even the steadiness of his eyes
+did not keep from sadness--"as though I'd hoped you could lift a
+thousand-pound weight, like the strong woman in the side-show."
+
+She responded to his attempt at lightness with as plain an undercurrent
+of seriousness as his own. "Why do you live so that people have to lift
+thousand-pound weights before they dare so much as say good-morning to
+you?"
+
+"Because I don't dare live any other way," he answered.
+
+"It's hard on other people," Lydia ventured, but retreated hastily
+before the first expression of upbraiding she had seen in his eyes. He
+had so suddenly turned grave with the thought that it had been harder on
+him than on anyone else that she cried out hurriedly, "But you didn't
+help a bit--you left it all to me--"
+
+She stopped, her face burning in uncertainty of the meaning of her
+words.
+
+Rankin's answer came with the swiftness of one who has meditated long on
+a question. "I'm glad you've given me a chance to say what--I've wished
+you might know. I thought it over and over at the time--and since--and
+I'm sure it would not have been honorable--or delicate--or right, _not_
+to leave it all to you. That much was yours to decide--whether you would
+take the first step. It would have been a crime to have hurried or urged
+you beyond what lay in your heart to do--or to have overborne you
+against some deep-lying, innate instinct."
+
+Lydia's voice was shaking in self-pity as she cried out, "Oh, if you
+knew what the others--nobody _else_ was afraid to hurry or urge me to--"
+
+She stopped and looked away, her heart beating rapidly with a flood of
+recollections. Rankin's lips opened, but he shut them firmly, as though
+he did not trust himself to speak. His large red hands closed savagely
+on the handle of his tool-box. There was a silence between them.
+
+The car began to move more slowly, and the conductor, standing up from
+the seat where he had been dozing, remarked in a conversational tone to
+a woman with two children near him, "Gardenton--this is the cross-roads
+to Gardenton." Later, as the car stood still under the singing vibration
+of the trolley-wire overhead, he added in the general direction of Lydia
+and Rankin, now the only passengers, "Next stop is Wardsboro'!" His
+voice came to them with a singular clearness in the quiet of the
+momentary stop. They were in the midst of a mournful expanse of bare
+ploughed fields, frozen and brown. The motorman released his brake,
+letting the brass arm swing noisily about, the conductor sat down again,
+and as the car began to move forward again he closed his eyes. He looked
+very tired and, now that an almost instant sleep had relaxed his
+features, pathetically young.
+
+"How pale he is," said Lydia, wishing to break the silence with a
+harmless remark. "He looks tired to death."
+
+"He probably is just that," said Rankin, wincing. "It's sickening, the
+way they work. Seven days a week, most of them, you know."
+
+"No; I didn't know," cried Lydia, shocked. "Why, that's awful. When do
+they see their families?"
+
+"They don't. One of them, whose house isn't far from mine, told me that
+he hadn't seen his children, except asleep, for three weeks."
+
+"But something ought to be done about it!" The girl's deep-lying
+instinct for instant reparation rose up hotly.
+
+"Are they so much worse off than most American business men?" queried
+Rankin. "Do any of them feel they can take the time to see much more
+than the outside of their children; and isn't seeing them asleep about
+as--"
+
+Lydia cut him short quickly. "You're always blaming them for that," she
+cried. "You ought to pity them. They can't help it. It's better for the
+children to have bread and butter, isn't it--"
+
+Rankin shook his head. "I can't be fooled with that sort of talk--I've
+lived with too many kinds of people. At least half the time it isn't a
+question of bread and butter. It's a question of giving the children
+bread and butter and sugar rather than bread and butter and father. Of
+course, I'm a fanatic on the subject. I'd rather leave off even the
+butter than the father--let alone the sugar."
+
+"But here's this very motorman you know about--what could he do?"
+
+"They're not forced by the company to work seven days a week--only
+they're not given pay enough to let them take even one day off without
+feeling it. This very motorman I was talking with got to telling me why
+he was working so extra hard just then. His oldest daughter is going to
+graduate from the high school and he wants to give her a fine graduating
+dress, as good as anybody's, and a graduating 'present.' It seems that's
+the style now for graduating girls. He said he and his wife wanted her
+always to remember that day as a bright spot, and not as a time when
+she was humiliated by being different from other girls."
+
+"Well, my goodness! you're not criticizing them for that, are you? I
+think it was just as sweet and lovely of them as can be to realize how a
+girl feels."
+
+Rankin looked at her, smiled slightly, and said nothing. His silence
+made Lydia thoughtful. After a time, "I see what you mean, of course,"
+she said slowly, "that it would be _better_ for her, perhaps--but if he
+_loves_ her, her father _wants_ to do things for her."
+
+Rankin's roar of exasperation at this speech was so evidently directed
+at an old enemy of an argument that Lydia was only for an instant
+startled by it. "I _don't_ say he can do too much for her," he cried.
+"He can't! Nobody can do too much for anybody else if it's the right
+thing."
+
+"And what in the world do you think _would_ be the right thing in this
+case?" Lydia put the question as a poser.
+
+"Why, of course, to pamper her vanity; to feed her moral cowardice; to
+make her more afraid than ever of senseless public opinion; to deprive
+her of a fine exercise for her spiritual force; to shut her off from a
+sense of her material situation in life until the knowledge of it will
+come as a tragedy to her; to let her grow up without any knowledge of
+her father's point of view--"
+
+"There, there! That's enough!" said Lydia.
+
+"I didn't need to be so violent about it, that's a fact," apologized
+Rankin.
+
+"But you're talking of people the way they ought to be," objected Lydia,
+apparently drawing again from a stock of inculcated arguments. "Do you
+really, honestly, suppose that that girl would rather have an
+opportunity to do something for her parents and--and--and all that, than
+have a fine dress that would cost a lot and make the other girls
+envious?"
+
+"Oh, Lydia!" cried her companion, not noticing the betrayal of a mental
+habit in the slipping out of her name. "You're just in a state of
+saturated solution of Dr. Melton. Don't you believe a word he says
+about folks. They're lots better than he thinks. The only reason anybody
+has for raging at them for being a bad lot is because they are such a
+good lot! They are so chuck-full of good possibilities! There's so much
+more good in them than bad. You think that, don't you? You _must_!
+There's nothing to go on, if you don't."
+
+As Lydia began to answer she felt herself, as once or twice before when
+with Rankin, suddenly an immeasurable distance from her usual ways of
+mental life. She looked about her upon a horizon very ample and quite
+strange, without being able to trace the rapid steps that had carried
+her away from the close-walled room full of knickknacks and trifles,
+where she usually lived. She drew a deep breath of surprise and changed
+her answer to an honest "I don't believe I know whether I believe you or
+not. I don't think I ever thought of it before."
+
+"What _do_ you think about?" The question was evidently too sincere an
+interrogation to resent.
+
+The girl made several beginnings at an answer, stopped, looked out of
+the window, looked down at her shoe-tip, and finally burst into her
+little clear trill of amusement. "I don't," she said, looking full at
+Rankin, her eyes shining. "You've caught me! I can't remember a single
+time in my day when I think about anything but hurrying to get dressed
+in time to be at the next party promptly. Maybe some folks can think
+when they're hurrying to get dressed, but I can't."
+
+Rankin was very little moved to hilarity by this statement, but he was
+too young to resist the contagion of Lydia's mirth, and laughed back at
+her, wondering at the mobility of her ever-changing face.
+
+"If you don't think, what do you _do_?" he interrogated with mock
+relentlessness.
+
+"Nothing," said Lydia recklessly, still laughing.
+
+"What do you feel?" he went on in the same tone, but Lydia's face
+changed quickly.
+
+"Oh--lots!" she said uncertainly, and was silent.
+
+The car began to pass some poor, small houses, and in a moment came to
+a standstill in the midst of a straggling village. The young conductor
+still slept on, his head fallen so far on his shoulder that his
+breathing was difficult. The motorman, getting no signal to go on,
+looked back through the window, putting his face close to the glass to
+see, for it had grown dusky outside and the electric lights were not yet
+turned on. After a look at the sleeping man he glanced apprehensively at
+the two passengers, and then, apparently reassured that they were not
+"company detectives," he pushed open the door. "This is Wardsboro'," he
+told them as he went down the aisle, "and the next stop is Hardville."
+
+He was a strong, burly man, and easily lifted the slight, boyish form of
+the conductor to a more comfortable position, propping him up in a
+corner of the seat. The young man did not waken, but his face relaxed
+into peaceful lines of unconsciousness as his head fell back, and his
+breathing became long and regular, like a sleeping child's. As the big
+motorman went back to his post, he explained a little sheepishly to the
+two, who had watched his operation in attentive silence, "It's against
+the rules, I know, but there ain't anybody but you two here, and he
+don't look as though he'd really got his growth yet. I got a boy ain't
+sixteen that looks as old as he does, and ruggeder at that. I reckon the
+long hours are too much for him."
+
+"Do you know him?" asked Rankin.
+
+The motorman turned his red, weather-beaten face to them from the
+doorway where he stood, pulling on his clumsy gloves. "Who, me?" he
+asked. "No; I never seen him till to-day. He's a new hand, I reckon." He
+drew the door after him with a rattling slam, rang the bell for himself,
+and started the car forward.
+
+In the warm, vibrating solitude of the car, the two young people looked
+at each other in a silent transport. Lydia's dark eyes were glistening,
+and she checked Rankin, about to speak, with a quick, broken "No; don't
+say a word! You'd spoil it!"
+
+There was between them one of the long, vital silences, full of
+certainty of a common emotion, which had once or twice before marked a
+significant change in their relation. Finally, "That's something I shall
+never forget," said Lydia.
+
+Rankin looked at her in silence, and then, quickly, away.
+
+"It's like an answer to what I was saying--a refutation of what Dr.
+Melton thinks--about people--"
+
+As Rankin still made no answer, she exclaimed in a ravished surprise,
+"Why, I never saw anything so lovely--that made me so happy! I feel warm
+all over!"
+
+Indeed, her face shone through the dusk upon her companion, who could
+now no longer constrain himself to look away from her. He said, his
+voice vibrant with a deep note which instantly carried Lydia back to the
+other time when she had heard it, under the stars of last October, "It's
+only an instrument exquisitely in tune which can so respond--" He broke
+off, closed his lips, and, turning away from her, gazed sightlessly out
+at the dim, flat horizon, now the only outline visible in the twilight.
+
+Lydia said nothing, either then or when, after a long pause, he said
+that he would leave the car at the next station.
+
+"It has been very pleasant to see you again," he said, bending over his
+tool-box, "and you mustn't lay it up against me that I haven't
+congratulated you on your engagement. Of course you know how I wish you
+all happiness."
+
+"Thank you," said Lydia.
+
+Ahead of the car, some lights suddenly winking above the horizon
+announced the approach of Hardville. Rankin stood up, slipped on his
+rough overcoat, and sat down again. He drew a long breath, and began
+evenly: "I know you won't misunderstand me if I try to say one more
+thing. I probably won't see you again for years, and it would be a great
+joy to me to be sure that you know how hearty is my good-will to you.
+I'm afraid you can't think of me without pain, because I was the cause
+of such discomfort to you, but I know you are too generous to blame me
+for what was an involuntary hurt. Of course I ought to have known how
+your guardians would feel about your knowing me--"
+
+"Oh, _why_ should you be so that all that happened!" cried Lydia
+suddenly. "If it was too hard for me, why couldn't you have made it
+easier--thought differently--acted like other people. _Would_ you--if I
+hadn't--if we had gone on knowing each other?"
+
+Rankin turned very white. "No," he said; "I couldn't."
+
+"It seems to me," said Lydia hurriedly, "that, without being willing to
+concede anything to their ideas, you ask a great deal of your friends."
+
+"Yes," said Rankin, "I do. It's a hard struggle I'm in with myself and
+the world--oh, evidently much too hard for you even to look at from a
+distance." His voice broke. "The best thing I can do for you is to stay
+away--" He rose, and stepped into the aisle. "But you are so kind--you
+will let me serve you in any other way, if I can--ever. If I can ever do
+something that's hard for you to do--you must know that I stand as ready
+as even Dr. Melton to do it for you if I can."
+
+Indeed, for the moment, as Lydia looked up into his kind, strong face,
+his impersonal tenderness made him seem almost such an old, tried friend
+as her godfather; almost as unlikely to expect any intimate personal
+return from her.
+
+"You must remember," he went on, "the great joy it gave us both to-day
+even to see an act of kindness. Give me an opportunity to do one for you
+if I ever can."
+
+It already seemed to Lydia as though he had gone away from her, as
+though this were but a beneficent memory of him lingering by her side.
+She hardly noticed when he left her alone in the car.
+
+The conductor started up, wakened by the silence, and announced wildly,
+"Wardsboro', Wardsboro'!"
+
+"No, it ain't; it's the first stop in Hardville," contradicted the
+motorman, sticking his head in through the door. "Turn on them lights!"
+
+As the glass bulbs leaped to a dazzling glare, Lydia blinked and looked
+away out of the window. A moment later an arm laid about her neck made
+her bound up in amazement and confront a small, middle-aged woman, with
+a hat too young for her tired, sallow face, with a note-book in her
+hand and an apologetic expression of affection in her light blue eyes.
+"I'm sorry I startled you, Miss Lydia," she said. "I keep forgetting
+you're not still a little girl I can pick up and hug."
+
+"Oh, you!" breathed the girl, sitting down again. "I didn't think there
+was anybody in the car with me, you see."
+
+"Have you come all the way from Endbury alone, then?" asked Miss
+Burgess, looking about her suspiciously.
+
+"No, I have not," said Lydia uncompromisingly. "Mr. Rankin, the
+cabinet-maker, has been with me till just now."
+
+Miss Burgess sat down hastily in the vacant seat by Lydia. "And he's
+coming back?" she inquired.
+
+"No; he got off at Hardville. This _is_ Hardville, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes. I happened to be out reporting a big church bazaar here." She
+settled back comfortably. "What a nice chance for a cozy little visit I
+shall have with you. These long trips on the Interurban are fine for
+talking. Unless I shall tire you? Did Mr. Rankin talk much? What does he
+talk _about_, anyhow? He's always so rude to me that I've never heard
+him say a word except about his work."
+
+Lydia considered for a moment. "We talked about the street-car
+conductors having such long hours to work," she said, "and later about
+whether people have more bad in them than good."
+
+"Oh!" said Miss Burgess.
+
+Lydia smiled faintly, the ghost of her whimsical little look of mockery.
+"We decided that they have more good," she said.
+
+Miss Burgess cast about her for a suitable comment. At last, "Really!"
+she said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+ENGAGED TO BE MARRIED
+
+
+All over the half-finished house the workmen began to lay down their
+tools. Paul Hollister's face broke into a good-humored smile as a moment
+later he caught the faraway five-o'clock whistles calling from the city.
+He was in a very happy mood these days and the best aspect of the
+phenomena of the world was what impressed him most. As the workmen
+disappeared down the driveway to the main road, running to catch the
+next trolley-car to Endbury, he looked after them with little of the
+usual exasperation of the house-builder whose work they were slighting,
+but with an agreeable sense of their extreme inferiority to him in the
+matter of fixity of purpose. He felt that they symbolized the weakness
+of most of humanity, and promised himself with a comfortable confidence
+an easy and lifelong victory over such feeble adversaries. Of late,
+business had been going even better than ever.
+
+The days had begun to grow appreciably longer with the approach of
+spring, and there had been several noons of an almost summer-like
+mildness, but now, in spite of the fact that the sun was still shining,
+the first chill of the late March evening dropped suddenly upon the
+bare-raftered structure whose open windows and door-spaces offered no
+barrier to the damp breeze. Hollister stirred from his pleasant reverie
+and began to walk briskly about, inspecting the amount of work
+accomplished since his last visit. He kept very close track of the
+industry of his workmen and the competence of his contractor, and
+Lydia's father admired greatly the way in which his future son-in-law
+did not allow himself to be "done" by those past masters of the art. It
+argued well for the future, Judge Emery thought, and he called Lydia's
+attention to the trait with approval.
+
+Before the wide aperture which was to be the front door, the owner of
+the house stopped and looked eagerly out toward the road. It was near
+the time when Lydia had promised to be there, and he meant to see her
+and run to meet her when she first turned in upon the ground that was to
+be her home. It was the first time that Lydia had happened to visit the
+new house alone. Either her mother or Hollister's sister had accompanied
+her on the two or three other occasions, but to-day she telephoned that
+Mrs. Emery had been really out-and-out forbidden by Dr. Melton to get
+out of bed for two or three days, and as for Madeleine--at this point
+Madeleine had snatched the receiver from Lydia's hand and had informed
+her brother that Madeleine was going to be busy with _her_ young man and
+couldn't get off to chaperone people that had been as long engaged as he
+and Lydia.
+
+That was part of the bright color of the world to Paul--his sister's
+recent engagement to their uncle's partner in the iron works, a very
+prosperous, young-old bachelor of fifty-odd, whose intense preoccupation
+with business had never been pierced by any consciousness of the other
+sex until Madeleine had, as she proclaimed in her own vernacular, "taken
+a club to him." It was a very brilliant match for her, and justified her
+own prophecy concerning herself that she was not to be satisfied with
+any old-fashioned, smooth-running course for true love. "It must shoot
+the chutes, or nothing," she was accustomed to say, in her cheerful,
+high-spirited manner.
+
+Paul thought, with self-approval, that, for orphans of the poorer branch
+of the Hollister family, he and Madeleine had not done badly with their
+lives thus far.
+
+He looked again impatiently toward the entrance to the grounds. A
+trolley-car had just rattled by on the main road. If Lydia was on it,
+she would appear at that turning under the trees. No; evidently she had
+not been on that one. The harsh jar of the trolley's progress died away
+in the distance and no Lydia appeared. He had fifteen minutes to wait
+for the next one.
+
+He drew out a note-book and began jotting down some ideas about the
+disposition of the five acres surrounding the house. He was ambitious to
+have the appearance of a country estate and avoid the "surburban" look
+which would be so fatally easy to acquire in the suburban place. He
+decided that he would not as yet fence in his land. The house was the
+last one of a group of handsome residences that had lately sprung up in
+the vicinity of the new Country Club, and to the south was still open
+country, so that without a fence, he reflected, he could have himself,
+and convey tacitly to others, the illusion of owning the wide sweep of
+meadow and field which stretched away a mile or more to a group of beech
+trees.
+
+He jumped down lightly from the porch, as yet but sketchily outlined in
+joists and rafters, and stood in a litter of shavings, bits of board and
+piles of yellow earth, with a kindling eye. He had that happy prophetic
+vision of the home-builder which overlooks all present deficiencies and
+in an instant, with a confident magic, erects all that the slow years
+are to build. He saw a handsome, well-kept house, correctly colonial in
+style, grounds artfully laid out to increase the impression of space, a
+hospitable, smoothly run interior, artistic, homelike, admired.
+
+A meadow-lark near him began to tinkle out its pretty silver notes. The
+sun set slowly below the smoky horizon; a dewy peace fell about the
+deserted place. Paul had his visions of other than material elements in
+his future and Lydia's. Such a dream came to him there, standing in the
+dusk before the germ of his home to be. He saw himself an alert man of
+forty-five, a good citizen, always on the side of civic honor; a good
+captain of industry, quick to see and reward merit; a good husband who
+loved and cherished his wife as on the day he married her, and protected
+her from all the asperities of reality; a good father--he had almost an
+actual vision of the children who would carry on his work in
+life--girls of Lydia's beauty and sweetness, boys with his energy and
+uprightness--and there was Lydia, too, the Lydia of twenty years from
+now--in the full bloom of physical allurement still, a gracious hostess,
+a public-spirited matron, lending the luster of his name to all worthy
+charities indorsed by the best people, laying down with a firm good
+taste dictates as to the worthy social development of the town. Before
+this vision there rose up in him the ardent impulse to immediate effort
+which is the sign manual of the man of action. He stirred and flung his
+arm out.
+
+"It's all up to me," he said aloud. "I can do it if I go after it hard
+enough. I've got to make good for Lydia's sake and mine. She must have
+the best I can get--the very best I know how to get for her."
+
+A sound behind him made him catch his breath. He was trembling as he
+turned about and saw Lydia coming swiftly up the driveway. "Good
+Heavens, how I love her!" he thought as he ran down to meet her.
+
+He was trembling when he took her in his arms, folding her in that close
+embrace of surprised rapture at finding everything real, and no dream,
+which is the unique joy of betrothal. He would not let her speak for a
+moment, pressing his lips upon hers. When he released her, she cried in
+a whisper, "Oh, it's wonderful how when you're close to me everything
+else just isn't in the world!"
+
+"That's being in love, Lydia," Paul told her with a grave thankfulness.
+
+"I don't mean," she went on, with her ever-present effort to express
+honestly her meaning, "I don't mean just--just being really
+close--having your arms around me, though that always makes me forget
+things, too--but being--_feeling_ close, you know--inside. Not having
+any inner corner where we're not together--the way we are now--the way I
+knew we should be when I saw you running down to meet me. I always know
+the minute I see you whether it's going to be this way." She added, a
+little wistfully, "Sometimes, you know, it isn't."
+
+Paul lifted her up to the porch and led her across into the hallway.
+Here he took her in his arms again and said with a shaken accent:
+"Dearest Lydia, dearest! I wish it were always the way you want it--"
+
+Lydia dropped her head back on his shoulder and looked at him earnestly.
+In the half-light, white and clear from the freshly plastered walls, her
+face was like alabaster. "Dear Paul, isn't that what getting married
+means--to learn how to be really, really close to each other all the
+time. There isn't anything else worth getting married for, is there?
+_Is_ there?"
+
+Her lover looked down into her eyes, into her sweet, earnest face, and
+could not speak. Finally, his hand at his throat, "Oh, Lydia, you're too
+good for me!" he said huskily. "You're too good for any man!"
+
+"No, no, no!" she protested with a soft energy. "I'm weak, as weak as
+water. You must give me a lot of your strength or I'll go under."
+
+"God knows I'll give you anything I have."
+
+"Then, never let things come between us--never, never, never! I'm all
+right as long as I'm close to you. If we just keep that, nothing else
+can matter."
+
+They were silent, standing with clasped hands in the passage-way that
+was to be the thoroughfare of their common life. It was a moment that
+was to come back many times to Lydia's memory during later innumerable,
+hurried daily farewells. The thought of the significance of the place
+came to her mind now. She said softly, "This must be a foretaste of what
+we're to have under this roof. How good it seems not to be in a hurry
+to--"
+
+With a start Paul came to himself from his unusual forgetfulness of his
+surroundings. "We _ought_ to be in a hurry now, dearest. Dr. Melton
+keeps me stirred up all the time to take care of you, and I'm sure I'm
+not doing that to let you stand here in this cold evening air. Come, let
+me show you--the closet under the stairs, you know, and the place for
+the refrigerator."
+
+Lydia yielded to his care for her with her sweet passivity, echoed his
+opinion about the details, and ran beside him down the driveway, to
+catch the next car to Endbury, with a singular light grace for a tall
+woman encumbered with long skirts.
+
+In spite of their haste, they missed the car and were obliged to wait
+for a quarter of an hour beside the tracks. They talked cheerfully on
+indifferent topics, the sense of intimate comradeship gilding all they
+said. In their hearts was fresh the memory of the scene in the new
+house. They looked at each other and smiled happily in the intervals of
+their talk.
+
+Paul was recapitulating to Lydia the advantages of the location of their
+house. "We are in the vanguard of a new movement in American life," he
+said, "the movement away from the cities. Madeleine tells me that she
+and Lowder are planning a house at the other end of this street, and you
+can be sure they know what they are about."
+
+Lydia did not dissent from this opinion of her future sister-in-law, but
+she interrupted Paul a moment later, to say fondly, "_Oh_, but I'm glad
+that you aren't fifty-five and bald and with lots of money!"
+
+Paul laughed. "Madeleine'll get on all right. She knows what she's
+about. It's a pair of them."
+
+"Well, I am church-thankful that that is not what _we_ are about!"
+exclaimed Lydia.
+
+Her lover voiced the extreme content with his lot which had been his
+obsession that day. "We have _everything_, darling. We shall have all
+that Madeleine and old Lowder have and we have now all this heavenly
+happiness that they'll never know--or miss," he added, giving them their
+due.
+
+"I didn't mean that," protested Lydia. "It seems to me that being like
+them and being like us are two contradictory things. You _can't_ be both
+and have the things that go with both. And what I'm so thankful for is
+that we're us and not them."
+
+Paul laughed. "You just see if there's anything so contradictory. Trust
+me. You just see if you don't beat Madeleine on her own ground yet."
+
+"I don't _want_--" began Lydia; but Paul had gone back to his first
+theme and was expanding it for her benefit. "Yes; we're getting the
+English idea. In twenty years from now you'll find the social center of
+every moderate-sized American city shifted to some such place as this."
+
+Lydia craned her neck down the tracks impatiently. "I hope we don't miss
+a trolley car every day of those twenty years," she said, laughing.
+
+"We'll have an automobile," he said. Then, reflecting that this was a
+somewhat exaggerated prophecy, he went on, with the honesty he meant
+always to show Lydia (so far as should be wise), "No; I'm afraid we
+sha'n't, either--not for some time. It'll take several years to finish
+paying altogether for the house, and we'll have to pull hard to keep up
+our end for a time. But we're young, so much won't be expected of
+us--and if we just dig in for a few years now while we're fresh, we can
+lie back and--"
+
+"Well, _gracious_!" said Lydia, "who wants an automobile, anyhow! Only I
+wish the trolley didn't take so long. It's going to take the best part
+of an hour, you know; the ten or twelve minutes to get here from the
+house, the two or three minutes to wait, the thirty minutes on the car,
+the ten minutes to your office--and then all that turned inside out when
+you come back in the evening."
+
+"Oh, I'll be able to do a lot of business figuring in that time. It
+won't be wasted."
+
+They fell into happy picture-making of their future. Lydia wanted to
+have chickens and a garden, she said. She'd always wanted to be a
+farmer's wife--an idea that caused Paul much laughter. They revised the
+plans for the furnishing of the hall--the china closet could stand
+against the west wall of the dining-room; why had they not thought of
+that before? The little room upstairs was to be a sewing-room "Although
+I hate sewing," cried Lydia, "and nowadays, when ready-mades are so
+cheap and good--"
+
+"Nobody expected you to make yourself tailored street dresses," said
+Paul; "but don't I all the time hear Madeleine and my aunt saying how
+the 'last _chic_ of a costume, the little indefinable touches that give
+a toilet distinction,' they have to fuss up themselves out of bits of
+lace and ribbon and fur and truck?" He was quoting, evidently, with an
+amused emphasis.
+
+Lydia leaned to him, her eyes wide in a mock solemnity. "Paul, I have a
+horrible confession to make to you. I _loathe_ the 'last _chic_, the
+little indefinable touches that give a toilet,' and so forth! It makes
+me sick to spend my time on them. What difference does it make to real
+folks if their toilets _aren't_ 'and so forth!'"
+
+She looked so deliciously whimsical with her down-drawn face of
+rebellious contrition that Paul was enchanted. "And this I learn when
+it's too late for me to draw back!" he cried in horror. "Woman! woman!
+this tardy confession"
+
+"Oh, there are lots of other confessions. Just wait."
+
+"Out with them!"
+
+"I don't know _anything_."
+
+"That's something," admitted Paul.
+
+"And you must teach me."
+
+"Oh, this docile little 1840 wife! Don't you know the suffragists will
+get you if you talk meek like that? What do you want to know? Volts, and
+dynamos, and induction coils?"
+
+"Everything," said Lydia comprehensively, "that you know. Books,
+politics, music--"
+
+"Lord! what a hash! What makes you think I know anything about such
+things?"
+
+"Why, you went through Cornell. You must know about books. And you're a
+man, you must know about politics; and as for music, we'll learn about
+that together. Aunt Julia and Godfather are going to give us a
+piano-player--though I know they can't afford it, the dears!"
+
+"People _are_ good to us." Paul's flush of gratitude for his good
+fortune continued.
+
+"You like music, don't you?" asked Lydia.
+
+"I guess so; I don't know much about it. Some crazy German post-grads at
+Cornell used to make up a string quartette among themselves and play
+some things I liked to hear--I guess it was pretty good music, too. They
+were sharks on it, I know. Yes; now I think of it, I used to like it
+fine. Maybe if I heard more--"
+
+"Oh, the evenings together!" breathed Lydia. "Doesn't it take your
+breath away to think of them? We'll read together--"
+
+Paul saw the picture. "Yes; there're lots of books I've always meant to
+get around to."
+
+They were silent, musing.
+
+Then Paul laughed aloud. Lydia started and looked at him inquiringly.
+
+"Oh, I was just thinking how old married folks would laugh to hear us
+infants planning our little castles in Spain. You know how they always
+smile at such ideas, and say every couple starts out with them and after
+about six months gets down to concentrating on keeping up the furnace
+fire and making sure the biscuits are good."
+
+Lydia laid her hand eagerly on his arm. "But don't let's, Paul! Please,
+_please_ don't let us! Just because everybody else does is no reason why
+we _have_ to. You're always saying folks can make things go their way if
+they try hard enough--you're so clever and--"
+
+"Oh, I'm a wonder, I know! You needn't tell me how smart I am."
+
+"But, Paul, I'm in earnest--I mean it--"
+
+The car had arrived by this time and he swung her up to the platform.
+Like other moderns they were so accustomed to spend a large part of
+their time in being transported from place to place that they were quite
+at home in the noisy public conveyance, and after a pause to pay fares,
+remove wraps, and nod to an acquaintance or two, they went on with their
+conversation as though they were alone. People looked approvingly at the
+comely, well-dressed young couple, so naïvely absorbed in each other,
+and speculated as to whether they were just married or just about to
+be.
+
+After they were deposited at the corner nearest the Emery house, the
+change to the silent street, up which they walked slowly, reluctant to
+separate, took them back to their first mood of this loveliest of all
+their hours together--the sweet intimacy of their first meeting in the
+new house.
+
+Lydia felt herself so wholly in sympathy with Paul that she was moved to
+touch upon something that had never been mentioned between them. "Paul,
+dear," she said, her certainty that he would understand, surrounding her
+with an atmosphere of spiritual harmony which she recognized was the
+thing in all the world which mattered most to her, "Paul dear, I never
+told you--there's nothing to tell, really--but when I went to the
+Mallory's house-party in February I rode from here to Hardville with Mr.
+Rankin and had a long talk with him. You don't mind, do you?"
+
+Her lover drew her hand within his arm and gave it an affectionate
+pressure. "You may not know things, Lydia, as you say, but you are the
+_nicest_ girl! the straightest! I knew that at the time--Miss Burgess
+told me. But I'm glad you've given me a chance to say how sorry I was
+for you last autumn when everybody was pestering you so about him. I
+knew how you felt--better than you did, I'll bet I did! I wasn't a bit
+afraid. I knew you could never care for anybody but me. Why, you're
+_mine_, Lydia, I'm yours, and that's all there is to it. You know it as
+well as I do."
+
+"_I know it when I'm with you_," she told him with a bravely honest,
+unspoken reservation.
+
+He laughed his appreciation of her insistent sincerity. "Well, when
+you're married won't you be with me all the time? So that's fixed! And
+as for meeting somebody by accident on the street-cars--why, you foolish
+darling, you're not marrying a Turk, or an octopus--but an American."
+
+Lydia was silent, but her look was enough to fill the pause richly. She
+was savoring to the full the joy of close community of spirit which had
+been so rare in her pleasant life of material comfort, and she was
+saying a humble prayer that she might be good enough to be worthy of it,
+that she might be wise enough to make it the daily and hourly atmosphere
+of her life with Paul.
+
+"What are you thinking about, darling?" asked the other.
+
+"I was thinking how lovely it's going to be to be really married and
+come to know each other well. We don't know each other at all yet,
+_really_, you know."
+
+Paul was brought up short, as so often with Lydia, by an odd,
+disconcerted feeling, half pleasure, half shock, from the discovery in
+her of pages that he had not read, germs of ideas that had not come from
+him. "Why, darling Lydia, what do you mean? We know each other through
+and through!" he now protested. It gave a tang of the unexpected to her
+uniform sweetness, this always having a corner still to turn which kept
+her out of his sight. Paul was used to seeing most women achieve this
+effect of uncertainty by the use of coquetry, and in the free-and-easy
+give and take between young America of both sexes, he had learned with a
+somewhat cynical shrewdness to discount it. He entered into the game,
+but, in his own phrase, he always knew what he was about. Lydia, on the
+contrary, often penetrated his armor by one of these shafts, barbed by
+her complete unconsciousness of any intent. He felt now, with a
+momentary anguish, that he could never be sure of her belonging quite to
+him until they were married, and cried out upon her idea almost angrily,
+"I don't know what you mean! We know each other now."
+
+"Oh, no, we don't," she insisted. "There are lots of queer fancies in me
+that you'll only find out by living with me--and, Oh, Paul! the fine,
+noble things I _feel_ in you! But I can see the whole of them only by
+seeing you day by day. And then there are lots of things that aren't in
+us, really, yet, but only planted. They'll grow--we'll grow--Paul,
+to-day is an epoch. We've passed a new milestone."
+
+"How do you mean?" he asked.
+
+"The way we've felt--the way we've talked--of real things--out there in
+our own--" She laughed a little, a serene murmur of drollery which came
+to her when she was at peace. "We've been engaged since November, but we
+only got engaged to be married to-day--just as our wedding's to be in
+June, but goodness knows when our marriage will be."
+
+Paul smiled at her tenderly. "If I'd known the date was so uncertain as
+that I shouldn't have dared to go so far in my house-building."
+
+"Oh, it's all right so far," she reassured him, smiling; "but we must
+pitch in and finish it. Why, that's just it, Paul--" she was struck with
+the aptness of her illustration--"that's just it. We've got the rafters
+and joists up now; maybe before we're married, if we're good, we can get
+the roof on so it won't rain on us; but all the finishing, all that
+makes it good to live in, has got to be done after the wedding."
+
+He did not know exactly what she was talking about, but he made up for
+vagueness by fervor. "After we are married," he cried, "I'll move
+mountains and turn stones to gold."
+
+"But the first thing to do is to lay floors for us to walk on," Lydia
+told him.
+
+For answer, he drew her into his arms and closed her mouth with a kiss.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+CARD-DEALING AND PATENT CANDLES
+
+
+Spring had come with its usual hotly advancing rush upon the low-lying,
+sheltered southerly city. There had been a few days of magical warmth,
+full of spring madness, when every growing thing had expanded leaves
+with furious haste, when the noise of children playing in the street
+sounded loud through newly-opened windows, when, even on city streets,
+every breath of the sweet, lively air was an intoxicating potion. Then,
+with a bound, the heat was there. Evenings and nights were still cool,
+but noons were as oppressive as in July. The scarcely expanded leaves
+hung limp in a summer heat.
+
+All during that eventful winter, Mrs. Emery had frequently remarked to
+her sister-in-law that Lydia's social career progressed positively with
+such brilliancy that it was like "something you read about." Mrs.
+Sandworth invariably added the qualifying clause, "But in a very nice
+book, you know, with only nice people in it, where everything comes out
+nicely at the end." Her confidence in literature as a respectable source
+of pleasure was not so guileless as Mrs. Emery's. It had been cruelly
+shaken by dipping into some of the Russian novels of the doctor's.
+
+Not infrequently the two ladies felt, with a happy importance, that they
+were the authors of the book and that the agreeable episodes and
+dramatic incidents which had kept the flow of the narrative so sparkling
+were the product of their own creative genius. When April came on, and
+Lydia agreed to the announcement of her engagement, they felt the need
+of some remarkable way of signaling that important event and of closing
+her season with a burst of glory. For her season had to end! Dr. Melton
+said positively that if Lydia had another month of the life she had been
+leading he would not be responsible for the consequences. "She has a
+fine constitution, inherited from her farmer grandparents," he said,
+smiling to see Mrs. Emery wince at this uncompromising statement of
+Lydia's ancestry, "but her nervous organization is too fine for her own
+good. And I warn you right now that if you get her nerves once really
+jangled, I shall take to the woods. You can just give the case to
+another doctor. It would be too much for _me_."
+
+The girl herself insisted that she felt perfectly well and able to stand
+more than when she first began going out. She affirmed this with some
+impatience, her eyes very bright, her cheeks flushed, whenever her
+godfather protested against a new undertaking. "When you get going, you
+_can't_ stop," she told him, shaking off his detaining hand. Mrs. Emery
+told the doctor that he'd forgotten the time when he was young or he'd
+remember that all girls who'd been popular at all--let alone a girl like
+Lydia--looked thin and worn by the end of the season; but during the
+last week of April, when the first hot days had arrived, a small
+incident surprised her into thinking that perhaps the doctor had some
+right on his side.
+
+Not that there was in itself anything so very alarming about a nervous
+explosion from a girl so high-strung and susceptible as Lydia. The
+startling thing was that this explosion proceeded, so far as her mother
+could see, from nothing at all, from the idlest of chance remarks by
+Mrs. Sandworth, as always, whitely innocent of the smallest intention to
+wound.
+
+She and Mrs. Emery were much given to watching Lydia dress for the
+innumerable engagements that took her away from the house. They made a
+pretext of helping her, but in truth they were carried away by the
+delight in another's beauty which is more common among women than is
+generally imagined. They took the profoundest interest in the selection
+of the toilet she should wear, and regarded with a charmed surprise the
+particular aspect of Lydia's slim comeliness which it brought out. They
+could not decide whether they liked her best in clinging, picture
+costumes, big hats, plumes, trailing draperies, and the like, or
+dashing, jaunty effects. Once in the winter, after she had left them on
+her way to an evening skating party and they had seen her from the
+window join Hollister and add her skates to those glittering on his
+shoulder, Mrs. Sandworth promulgated one of her unexpected apothegms:
+"Do you know what we are, Susan Emery? We're a couple of old children
+playing with a doll." Mrs. Emery protested with an instant, reproving
+self-justification: "_You_ may be--you're not her mother; but I
+understand Lydia through and through."
+
+Mrs. Emery felt that if Lydia had overheard that remark of her aunt's
+her excitement and resentment might have been natural; but the one which
+led to the distressing little scene in late April was as neutral as an
+ordinary morning salutation. The two were watching Lydia dress for a
+luncheon which Mrs. Hollister--_the_ Mrs. Hollister--was giving in her
+honor. It was about noon of a warm day, and the air that came in at the
+open windows was thrillingly alive with troubling, disquieting
+suggestions of the new life of spring. Lydia, however, showed none of
+the languor which the sudden heat had brought to the two elder women.
+She was a little late, and her hurry had sent a high color to her
+cheeks, the curves of which were refined to the most exquisite subtlety
+by the loss of flesh so deplored by Dr. Melton. She was used, by this
+time, to dressing in a hurry, but her fingers trembled a little, and she
+tried three times before she could coil her dark silky hair smoothly.
+She was frowning a little with the fixity of her concentration as she
+turned to snatch up her long gloves and she did not hear Mrs.
+Sandworth's question until it had been repeated,
+
+"I said, Lydia, is it to be bridge this afternoon?"
+
+"I don't know," said Lydia with the full stop of absent indifference.
+
+"Didn't Mrs. Hollister say?"
+
+"Maybe she did. I didn't notice." The girl was tugging at her glove.
+
+"Well, anyhow," said her mother, "since everybody's giving you
+card-parties, I should think you'd want to practice up and learn how to
+deal better. It's queer," she went on to Mrs. Sandworth, "Lydia's so
+deft about so many things, that she should deal cards so badly."
+
+"Oh, goodness! As if there was nothing better to do than that!" cried
+Lydia, beginning on the other glove.
+
+"Well, what _have_ you to do that's better?" asked her aunt in some
+astonishment. "Lydia, my dear, your collar is pinned the least bit
+crooked. Here, just let me--"
+
+Lydia had stopped short, her glove dangling from her wrist. "Why, what a
+horrible thing to say!" She brought this out with a tragic emphasis,
+immensely disconcerting to her two elders.
+
+"Horrible!" protested Mrs. Sandworth.
+
+"Yes, horrible," insisted the girl. She had turned very pale. "The very
+way you say it and don't think anything about it, _makes_ it horrible."
+
+Mrs. Sandworth began to doubt her own senses. "Why, what did I say?" she
+appealed to Mrs. Emery in bewildered interrogation, but before the
+latter could answer Lydia broke out: "If I really believed that, why,
+I'd--I'd--" She hesitated, obviously between tragic consequences, and
+then, to the great dismay of her companions, began to cry, still
+standing in the middle of the floor, her glove dangling from her slim,
+white wrist.
+
+"Don't Lydia! Oh, don't, dear! You'll make yourself look like a fright
+for the luncheon." Mrs. Emery ran to her daughter with a solicitude in
+which there was considerable irritation. "You're perfectly exhausting,
+taking everything that deadly serious way. Don't be so _morbid_! You
+know your Aunt Julia didn't mean anything. She never does!"
+
+Lydia pulled away and threw herself on the bed, still sobbing, and
+protesting that she could not go to the luncheon; and in the end Mrs.
+Emery was obliged to make the profoundest apologies over the telephone
+to a justly indignant hostess.
+
+In the meantime Lydia was undressed and put to bed by Mrs. Sandworth,
+who dared not open her mouth. The girl still drew long, sobbing breaths,
+but before her aunt left the room she lay quiet, her eyes closed. The
+other was struck by the way her pallor brought out the thinness of her
+lovely face. She hovered helplessly for a moment over the bed. "Is there
+anything I can do for you, dearie?" she asked humbly.
+
+Lydia shook her head. "Just let me be quiet," she murmured.
+
+At this, Mrs. Sandworth retreated to the door, from which she ventured a
+last "Lydia darling, you know I'm sorry if I said anything to hurt--"
+
+Lydia raised herself on her elbow and looked at her solemnly. "It wasn't
+what you _said_; it was what it _meant_!" she said tragically.
+
+With this cryptic utterance in her ears, Mrs. Sandworth fled downstairs,
+to find her sister-in-law turning away from the telephone with a frown.
+"Mrs. Hollister was very much provoked about it, and I don't blame her.
+It's hard to make her understand we couldn't have given her a _little_
+warning. And--that's the most provoking part--I didn't dare say Lydia is
+really sick, when, as like as not, she'll be receiving company this
+evening."
+
+"You wouldn't want her sick, just so it would be easier to explain,
+would you?" asked Mrs. Sandworth with her eternal disconcerting
+innocence.
+
+Mrs. Emery relieved her mind by snapping at her sister-in-law with the
+violence allowed to an intimate of many years' standing, "Good gracious,
+Julia! you're as bad as Lydia! Turning everything people say into
+something quite different--"
+
+Mrs. Sandworth interrupted hastily, "Susan, tell me, for mercy's sake,
+what did I say? The last thing I remember passing my lips was about her
+collar's being a little crooked,--and just now she told me, as though it
+was the crack of Doom, that it wasn't what I said, but what it meant,
+that was so awful. What in the world does she mean?"
+
+Mrs. Emery sank into a seat with a gesture of utter impatience. "Mean?
+Mean nothing! Didn't you ever know an engaged girl before?"
+
+"Well, I'm sure when I was engaged I never--"
+
+"Oh, yes, you did; you _must_ have. They all do. It's nerves."
+
+But a moment later she contradicted her own assurance with a sigh of
+unresignation. "Oh, dear! why can't Lydia be just bright and wholesome
+and fun-loving and _natural_ like Madeleine Hollister!" She added
+darkly, "I just feel in my bones that this has something to do with that
+Rankin and his morbid ideas."
+
+Mrs. Sandworth was startled. "Good gracious! You don't suppose she--"
+
+"No; of course I don't! I never thought of such a thing. You ought to
+see her when she is with Paul. She's just _fascinated_ by him! But you
+know as well as I do that ideas go right on underneath all that!" Her
+tone implied a disapproval of their tenacity of life. "And yet, Lydia's
+really nothing unusual! Before they get married and into social life,
+and settled down and too busy to think, most girls have a queer spell.
+Only most of them take it out on religion. Oh, why couldn't she have met
+that nice young rector--if she had to meet somebody to put ideas into
+her head--instead of an anarchist."
+
+"Well, it's certainly all past now," Mrs. Sandworth reassured her.
+
+"Yes; hasn't it been a lovely winter! Everybody's been so good to Lydia.
+Everything's succeeded so! But I suppose Dr. Melton's right. We ought to
+call her season over, except for the announcement party--and the
+wedding, of course--and oh, dear! There are so many things I'd planned
+to do I can't possibly get in now. It seems strange a child of mine
+should be so queer and have such notions."
+
+However, after the two had talked over the plans for a great evening
+garden-party in the Emery "grounds" and Mrs. Emery's creative eye had
+seen the affair in a vista of brilliant pictures, she felt more
+composed. She went up quietly to Lydia's door and looked in.
+
+The girl was lying on her back, her wide, dark eyes fixed on the
+ceiling. Something in the expression of her face gave her mother a throb
+of pain. She yearned over the foolish, unbalanced young thing, and her
+heart failed her, in that universal mother's fear for her child of the
+roughnesses of life, through which she herself has passed safely and
+which have given savor to her existence. In her incapacity to conceive
+other roughnesses than those she could feel herself, she was, it is
+probable, much like the rest of humankind. She advanced to the bed, her
+tenderest mother-look on her face, and cut Lydia off from speech with
+gentle wisdom. "No, no, dear; don't try to talk. You're all tired out
+and nervous and don't know--"
+
+Lydia had begun excitedly: "I've been feeling it for a long time, but
+when Aunt Julia said right out that I didn't know how to do anything
+better than--that I was only good to--"
+
+Her mother laid a firm, gentle hand over the quivering mouth, and said
+in a soothing murmur, "Hush, hush! darling. It wasn't anything your poor
+foolish Aunt Julia said. It isn't anything, anyhow, but being up too
+much and having too much excitement. People get to thinking all kinds of
+queer things when they're tired. Mother knows. Mother knows best."
+
+She had prepared a glass of bromide, and now, lifting Lydia as though
+she were still the child she felt her to be, she held it to her lips.
+"Here, Mother's poor, tired little girl--take this and go to sleep;
+that's all you need. Just trust Mother now."
+
+Lydia took the draught obediently, but she sighed deeply, and fixed her
+mother with eyes that were unrelentingly serious.
+
+When Mrs. Emery looked in after half an hour, she saw that Lydia was
+still awake, but later she fell asleep, and slept heavily until late in
+the afternoon.
+
+On her appearance at the dinner-table, still languid and heavy-eyed, she
+was met with gentle, amused triumph. "There, you dear. Didn't I tell you
+what you needed was sleep. There never was a girl who didn't think a
+sick headache meant there was something wrong with her soul or
+something."
+
+Judge Emery laughed good-naturedly, as he sliced the roast beef, and
+said, with admiration for his wife, "It's a good thing my high-strung
+little girl has such a levelheaded mother to look after her. Mother
+knows all about nerves and things. She's had 'em--all kinds--and come
+out on top. Look at her now."
+
+Lydia took him at his word, and bestowed on her mother a long look. She
+said nothing, and after a moment dropped her eyes listlessly again to
+her plate. It was this occasion which Mrs. Emery chose to present to the
+Judge her plans for the expensive garden-party, so that in the animated
+and, at times, slightly embittered discussion that followed, Lydia's
+silence was overlooked.
+
+For the next few days she stayed quietly indoors, refusing and canceling
+engagements. Mrs. Emery said it was "only decent to do that much after
+playing Mrs. Hollister such a trick," and Lydia did not seem averse. She
+sewed a little, fitfully, tried to play on the piano and turned away
+disheartened at the results of the long neglect--there had been no time
+in the season for practice--and wandered about the library, taking out
+first one book then another, reading a little and then sitting with
+brooding eyes, staring unseeingly at the page. Once her mother, finding
+her thus, inquired with some sharpness what book she was reading to set
+her off like that. "It's a book by Maeterlinck," said Lydia, "that
+Godfather gave me ever so long ago, and I've never had time to read it."
+
+"Do you like it? What's it about?" asked her mother, suspiciously.
+
+"I can't understand it," said Lydia, "when I'm reading it. But when I
+look away and think, I can, a little bit. I love it. It makes me feel
+like crying. It's all about our inner life."
+
+"My dear Lydia, you put your hat right on and go over to have a little
+visit with Marietta. What you need is a little fresh air and some
+sensible talk. I've been too busy with my invitation list to visit with
+you as I ought. Marietta'll be real glad to see you. Here's your hat.
+Now, you run right along, and stop at Hallam's on the way and get
+yourself an ice-cream soda. It's hot, and that'll do you good."
+
+As Lydia was disappearing docilely out of the door, her mother stopped
+before going back to her desk and the list of guests for the
+garden-party, which had been torturing her with perplexity, to say, "Oh,
+Lydia, don't forget to ask Marietta to order the perforated candles."
+
+"Perforated--!" said Lydia blankly, pausing at the door.
+
+"Yes; don't you remember, the last time Mrs. Hollister called here she
+told us all about them."
+
+"No, I don't remember," said Lydia, with no shade of apology in her
+tone.
+
+"Why, my dear! You're getting so absent-minded! Do you mean to say you
+didn't take in anything of what she was talking about? It's a new kind,
+that has holes running through it so the melted wax runs down the
+inside! Why, we were talking about them the whole time she was here that
+last call."
+
+Lydia opened the door, observing vaguely, "Oh, yes; I do seem to
+remember something. It was a very dull visit, anyhow."
+
+Mrs. Emery returned to her list, pursing up her lips and wagging her
+head. "You'll have to learn, dearie, that it's little details like that
+that make the difference between success and failure."
+
+"We have electric light and gas," said Lydia.
+
+Mrs. Emery looked up in astonishment and a little vexation. She, too,
+had nerves these days. "Why, Lydia, what's the matter with you? You know
+nobody uses those for table decoration."
+
+"_We_ could," said Lydia.
+
+"Why, my dear child, I never knew before there was a contrary streak in
+you, like your father. What in the world possesses you all of a sudden
+to object to candles?"
+
+"It's not candles--it's the idea of--Oh, all the fuss and bother, when
+everybody's so tired, and the weather's so hot, and it's going to cost
+too much anyhow."
+
+"Well, what would you have us fuss and bother about, if not over having
+everything nice when we entertain?" Mrs. Emery's air of enforced
+patience was strained.
+
+Lydia surveyed her from the hall in silence. "That's just it--that's
+just it," she said finally, and went away.
+
+Mrs. Emery laid down her pen to laugh to herself over the queer ways of
+children. "They begin to have notions with their first teeth, and I
+suppose they don't get over them till _their_ first baby begins to
+teethe."
+
+When Lydia arrived at her sister's house, she found that competent
+housekeeper engaged in mending the lace curtains of her parlor. She had
+about her a battery of little ingenious devices to which she called
+Lydia's attention with pride. "I've taught myself lace-mending just by
+main strength and awkwardness," she observed, fitting a hoop over a torn
+place, "and it's not because I have any natural knack, either. If
+there's anything I hate to do, it's to sew. But these curtains do go to
+pieces so. I wash them myself, to be careful, but they are so fine.
+Still," she cast a calculating eye on the work before her, "I'll be
+through by the end of this week, anyhow--if that new Swede will only
+stay in the kitchen that long!"
+
+She bent her head over her work again, holding it up to the light from
+time to time and straining her eyes to catch the exact thread with her
+almost impalpably fine needle. Lydia sat and fanned herself, looking
+flushed and tired from the walk in the heat, and listening in silence to
+Mrs. Mortimer's account of the various happenings of her household:
+"And didn't I find that good-for-nothing negro wench had been having
+that man--and goodness knows how many others--right here in the house. I
+told Ralph I never would have another nigger--but I shall. You can't get
+anything else half the time. I tell you, Lydia, the servant problem is
+getting to be something perfectly terrible--it's--"
+
+Lydia broke in to say, "Why don't you buy new ones?"
+
+Mrs. Mortimer paused with uplifted needle to inquire wildly, "New
+_what_?"
+
+"New curtains, instead of spending a whole week in hot weather mending
+those."
+
+"Good gracious, child! Will you ever learn anything about the cost of
+living! I think it's awful, the way Father and Mother have let you grow
+up! Why, it would take half a month's salary to reproduce these
+curtains. I got them at a great bargain--but even then I couldn't afford
+them. Ralph was furious."
+
+"You could buy muslin curtains that would be just as pretty," suggested
+Lydia.
+
+"Why, those curtains are the only things with the least distinction in
+my whole parlor! They _save_ the room."
+
+"From what?"
+
+"From showing that there's almost nothing in it that cost anything, to
+be sure! With them at the window, it would never enter people's heads to
+think that I upholstered the furniture myself, or that the pictures
+are--"
+
+"Why shouldn't they think so, if you did?" Lydia proffered this
+suggestion with an air of fatigued listlessness, which, her sister
+thought, showed that she made it "simply to be contrary." Acting on this
+theory, she answered it with a dignified silence.
+
+There was a pause. Lydia tilted her head back against the chair, and
+looked out of the window at the new green leaves of the piazza vine.
+Mrs. Mortimer's thin, white, rather large hands drew the shining little
+needle back and forth with a steady, hurrying industry. It came into her
+mind that their respective attitudes were symbolical of their lives,
+and she thought, glancing at Lydia's drooping depression, that it would
+be better for her if she were obliged to work more. "Work," of course,
+meant to Marietta those forms of activity which filled her own life.
+"_I_ never have any time for notions," she thought, the desperate,
+hurrying, straining routine of her days rising before her and moving
+her, as always, to rebellion and yet to a martyr's pride.
+
+Lydia stirred from her listless pose and came over to her sister,
+sitting down on a stool at her feet. "Marietta, dear, please let me talk
+to you. I'm so miserable these days--and Mother won't let me say a word
+to her. She says it's spring fever, and being engaged, and the end of
+the season, and everything. Please, _please_ be serious, and let me tell
+you about it, and see if you can't help me."
+
+Her tone was so broken and imploring that Mrs. Mortimer was startled.
+She was, moreover, flattered that Lydia should come to her for advice
+rather than to her parents. She put her arm around her sister's
+shoulders, and said gently, "Why, yes, dear; of course; anything--"
+
+"Then stop sewing and listen to me--"
+
+"But I can sew and listen, too."
+
+"Oh, Etta, _please_! That's just the kind of thing that gets me so wild.
+Just a little while!"
+
+The harassed housekeeper cast an anxious eye on the clock, but loyally
+stifled the sigh with which she laid her work aside. Lydia apologized
+for interrupting her. "But I do want you to really think of what I am
+saying. Everybody's always so busy thinking about _things_! Oh, Etta,
+I'm just as unhappy as I can be--and so scared when I think about--about
+the future."
+
+Mrs. Mortimer's face softened wonderfully. She stroked Lydia's dark
+hair. "Why, poor dear little sister! Yes, yes, darling, I know all about
+it. I felt just so myself the month before I was married, and Mother
+couldn't help me a bit. Either she had forgotten all about it, or else
+she never had the feeling. I just had to struggle along through without
+anybody to help me or to say a word. Oh, I'm so glad I can help my
+little sister. _Don't_ be afraid, dear! There's nothing so terrible
+about it; nothing to be scared of. Why, once you get used to it you find
+it doesn't make a bit of difference to you. Everything's just the same
+as before."
+
+Lydia lifted a wrinkled brow of perplexity to this soothing view of
+matrimony. "I don't know what you're talking about, Etta!" she cried in
+a bewilderment that seemed to strike her as tragic.
+
+"Why--why, being married! Wasn't that what you meant?"
+
+"Oh, no! _No!_ Nothing so definite as that! I couldn't be afraid of
+Paul--why should I be? I'm just frightened of--everything--what
+everybody expects me to do, and to go on doing all my life, and never
+have any time but to just hurry faster and faster, so there'll be more
+things to hurry about, and never talk about anything but _things_!" She
+began to tremble and look white, and stopped with a desperate effort to
+control herself, though she burst out at the sight of Mrs. Mortimer's
+face of despairing bewilderment, "Oh, don't tell me you don't see at all
+what I mean. I can't say it! But you _must_ understand! Can't we somehow
+all stop--_now_! And start over again! You get muslin curtains and not
+mend your lace ones, and Mother stop fussing about whom to invite to
+that party--that's going to cost more than he can afford, Father
+says--it makes me _sick_ to be costing him so much. And not fuss about
+having clothes just so--and Paul have our house built little and plain,
+so it won't be so much work to take care of it and keep it clean. I
+would so much rather look after it myself than to have him kill himself
+making money so I can hire maids that you _can't_--you say yourself you
+can't--and never having any time to see him. Perhaps if we did, other
+people might, and we'd all have more time to like things that make us
+nicer to like--"
+
+At this perturbing jumble of suggestions, Mrs. Mortimer's head whirled.
+She took hold of the arms of her chair as if to steady herself, but,
+conscientiously afraid of discouraging the girl's confidence, she nodded
+gravely at her, as if she were considering the matter. Lydia sprang up,
+her eyes shining. "Oh, you dear! You _do_ see what I mean! You see how
+dreadful it is to look forward to just that--being so desperately
+troubled over things that don't really matter--and--and perhaps having
+children, and bringing them up to the same thing--when there must be so
+many things that do matter!"
+
+To each of these impassioned statements her sister had returned an
+automatic nod. "I see what you mean," she now put in, a statement which
+was the outward expression of a thought running, "Mercy! Dr. Melton's
+right! She's perfectly wild with nerves! We must get her married as soon
+as ever we can!"
+
+Lydia went over to the window, and stood looking out as she talked, now
+with an excited haste, now with a dragging note of fatigue in her voice.
+Her need of sympathy was so great that she did a violence to the
+reticence she had always kept, even with herself. She wondered aloud if
+it were not perhaps Daniel Rankin and his queer ideas that lay at the
+bottom of her trouble. She added, whirling about from the window, "For
+mercy's sake! don't go and think I am in love with him, or anything! I
+haven't so much as thought of him all winter! I see, now that Mother's
+pointed it out to me, how domineering he really was to me last autumn.
+I'm just crazy about Paul, too! When I'm with him he takes my breath
+away! But maybe--maybe I can't forget Mr. Rankin's _ideas_! You know he
+talked to me so much when I was first back--and if somebody would just
+argue me out of them, the way he did into them! I don't believe I'd ever
+have thought it queer to live the way we do, just to have more things
+and get ahead of other people--if he hadn't put the idea into my head.
+But nobody else will even _talk_ about it! They laugh when I try to."
+
+She came over closer to the matron, and said imploringly, her voice
+trembling, "I don't _want_ to be queer, Marietta! What makes me? I
+don't like to have queer ideas, different from other people's--but every
+once in a while it all comes over me with a rush--what's the _good_ of
+all we do?"
+
+Poor Lydia propounded this question as though it were the first time in
+the world's history that it had passed the lips of humanity. Her
+curious, puzzled distress rose up in a choking flood to her throat, and
+she stopped, looking desperately at her sister.
+
+Mrs. Mortimer nodded again, calmly, drew a long breath, and seemed about
+to speak. Lydia gazed at her, her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright with
+unshed tears--all one eager expectancy. The older woman's eyes wandered
+suddenly for an instant. She darted forward, clapped her hands together
+once, and then in rapid succession three or four times. Then rolling
+triumphantly something between her thumb and forefinger, she turned to
+Lydia. The little operation had not taken the third of a moment, but the
+change in the girl's face was so great that Mrs. Mortimer was moved to
+hasty, half-shamefaced, half-defiant apology. "I _was_ listening to you,
+Lydia! I _was_ listening! But it's just the time of year when they lay
+their eggs, and I have to fight them. Last year my best furs and Ralph's
+dress suit were perfectly _riddled_! You know we can't afford new."
+
+Lydia rose in silence and began pinning on her hat. Her sister, for all
+her vexation over the ending of the interview, could hardly repress a
+smile of superior wisdom at the other's face of tragedy. "Don't go,
+Lyddie, don't go!" She tried to put her arms around the flighty young
+thing. "Oh, dear Lydia, cultivate your sense of humor! That's all that's
+the matter with you. There's nothing else! Look here, dear, there _are_
+moths as well as souls in the world. People have to be on the lookout
+for them,--for everything, don't you see?"
+
+"They look out for _moths_, all right," said Lydia in a low tone. She
+submitted, except for this one speech, in a passive silence to her
+sister's combination of petting and exhortation, moving quietly toward
+the door, and stepping evenly forward down the walk.
+
+She had gone down to the street, leaving Mrs. Mortimer still calling
+remorseful apologies, practical suggestions, and laughing comments on
+her "tragedy way of taking the world." At the gate, she paused, and then
+came back, her face like a mask under the shadow of her hat.
+
+Marietta stood waiting for her with a quizzical expression. Under her
+appearance of lightly estimating Lydia's depression as superficial, she
+had been sensible of a not unfamiliar qualm of doubt as to her own
+manner of life, an uneasy heaving of a subconscious self not always
+possible to ignore; but, as was her resolute custom, she forced to the
+front that perception of the ridiculous which she had urged on her
+sister. She bit her lips, to conceal a smile at Lydia's mournful
+emphasis as she went on: "I forgot to tell you, Marietta, what I was
+sent over for. You're to be sure to order the perforated candles. It's
+the kind that has holes down the middle, so the wax doesn't look mussy
+on the outside, and it's very, very important to have the right kind of
+candles."
+
+Mrs. Mortimer, willfully amused, looked with an obstinate smile into her
+sister's troubled eyes as Lydia hesitated, waiting, in spite of herself,
+for the understanding word.
+
+"You're a darling, Lyddie," said the elder woman, kissing her again;
+"but you are certainly _too_ absurd!"
+
+- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
+
+                                BOOK III
+
+                          A SUITABLE MARRIAGE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+TWO SIDES TO THE QUESTION
+
+
+Lydia's unmarried life had given her but few abstract ideas for the
+regulation of conduct, and fewer still ideals of self-discipline, but
+chief among the small assortment that she took away from her mother's
+house had been the high morality of keeping one's husband unworried by
+one's domestic difficulties. "Domestic difficulties" meant, apparently,
+anything disagreeable that happened to one. Not only her mother, but all
+the matrons of her acquaintance had concentrated on the extreme
+desirability of this wifely virtue. "It pays! It pays!" Mrs. Emery had
+often thus chanted the praises of this quality in her daughter's
+presence. "I've noticed ever so many times that men who have to worry
+about domestic machinery and their children don't get on so well. Their
+minds are distracted. Their thoughts _can't_ be, in the nature of
+things, all on their business." She was wont to go on, to whatever
+mother she was addressing, "We know, my dear Mrs. Blank, don't we, how
+perfectly distracting the problems are in bringing up children--to say
+nothing of servants. How much energy would men have for their own
+affairs if they had to struggle as we do, I'd like to know! Besides, if
+one person's got to be bothered with such things, she might as well do
+it all and be done with it. It's easier, besides, to have only one head.
+Men that interfere about things in the house are an abomination. You
+can't keep from quarreling with them--angels couldn't."
+
+She had once voiced this universally recognized maxim before Dr. Melton,
+who had cut in briskly with a warm seconding of her theory. "Yes,
+indeed; in the course of my practice I have often thought, as you do,
+that it would be easier all around if husbands didn't board with their
+wives at all."
+
+Mrs. Emery had stared almost as blankly as Mrs. Sandworth herself might
+have done. "I never said such a crazy thing," she protested.
+
+"Didn't you? Perhaps I don't catch your idea then. It seemed to be that
+every point of contact was sure to be an occasion for friction between
+husband and wife, and so, of course, the fewer they were--"
+
+"Oh, bother take you, Marius Melton!" Mrs. Emery had quite lost patience
+with him. "I was just saying something that's so old, and has been said
+so often, that it's a bromide, actually. And that is that it's a poor
+wife who greets her tired husband in the evening with a long string of
+tales about how the children have been naughty and the cook--"
+
+"Oh, yes, yes; now I see. Of course. The happiest ideal of American
+life, a peaceful exterior presented to the husband at all costs, and the
+real state of things kept from him because it might interfere with his
+capacity to pull off a big deal the next day."
+
+Mrs. Emery had boggled suspiciously at this version of her statement,
+but finding, on the whole, that it represented fairly enough her idea,
+had given a qualified assent in the shape of silence and a turning of
+the subject.
+
+Lydia had not happened to hear that conversation, but she heard
+innumerable ones like it without Dr. Melton's footnotes. On her wedding
+day, therefore, she conceived it an essential feature of her duty toward
+Paul to keep entirely to herself all of the dismaying difficulties of
+housekeeping and keeping up a social position in America. She knew, as a
+matter of course, that they would be dismaying. The talk of all her
+married friends was full of the tragedies of domestic life. It had
+occurred to her once or twice that it was an odd, almost a pathetic,
+convention that they tried to maintain about their social existence--a
+picture of their lives as running smoothly with self-adjusting machinery
+of long-established servants and old social traditions; when their every
+word tragically proclaimed the exhausting and never-ending personal
+effort that was required to give even the most temporary appearance of
+that kind. "We all know what a fearful time everybody has trying to give
+course dinners--why need we pretend we don't?" she had thought on
+several painful occasions; but this, like many of her fancies, was a
+fleeting one. There had been as little time since her wedding day as
+before it for leisurely speculation. The business of being _the_ bride
+of a season had been quite as exciting and absorbing as being _the_
+débutante.
+
+The first of February, six months after her marriage, found her as thin
+and restlessly active as she had been on that date a year before. It was
+at that time that she had the first intimation of a great change in her
+life, and since the one or two obscure and futile revolts of her
+girlhood, nothing had moved her to more rebellious unresignation than
+the fact that her life left her no time to take in the significance of
+what was coming to her.
+
+"Oh, my dear! Isn't it too good!" said her mother, clasping her for a
+moment as they stood, after removing their wraps, in the dressing-room
+of a common acquaintance. "Aren't you the lucky, lucky thing!"
+
+"I don't know. I don't know a thing about it," Lydia returned
+unexpectedly, though her face had turned a deep rose, and she had smiled
+tremulously. "Ever since Dr. Melton told me it was probably so, I've
+been trying to get a moment's time to think it over, but you--"
+
+"It's something to _feel_, not to think about!" cried her mother. "You
+don't need time to feel."
+
+"But I'd like to think about everything!" cried Lydia, as they moved
+down the stairs. "I get things wrong just feeling about them. But I'm
+not quick to think, and I never have any time--they're always so many
+other things to do and to think about--the dinner, getting Paul off in
+time in the morning, how badly the washwoman does up the table linen--"
+
+"Oh, Lydia! Why will you be so contrary? Everybody says _laundress_
+now!"
+
+"--And however Paul and I can pay back all the social debts we've
+incurred this winter. Everybody's invited us. It makes me wild to think
+of how we owe everybody."
+
+"Oh, you can give two or three big receptions this spring and clear
+millions off the list. And then a dinner party or two for the more
+exclusives. You won't need to be out of things till June--with the
+fashion for loose-fitting evening gowns; you're so slender. And you'll
+be out again long before Christmas. It's very fortunate having it come
+at this time of year."
+
+Lydia looked rather dazed at this brisk and matter-of-fact disposing of
+the matter, and seemed about to make a comment, but the bell rang for
+card-playing to begin and Mrs. Emery hurried to her table.
+
+Lydia had meant to ask her mother's sympathy about another matter that
+for the time was occupying her own thoughts, but there was no other
+opportunity for further speech between them during the card party--Mrs.
+Emery devoting herself with her usual competent energy to playing a good
+game. She played much better bridge than did either of her daughters.
+She liked cards, liked to excel and always found easy to accomplish what
+seemed to her worth doing. Marietta also felt that to avoid being
+"queer" and "different" one had to play a good hand, but, as she herself
+confessed, it made her "sick" to give up to it the necessary time and
+thought. As for Lydia, she got rid of her cards as fast as possible, as
+if with the deluded hope that when they were all played, she might find
+time for something else. On the afternoon in question her game was more
+unscientific than usual. Criticism was deterred from articulate
+expression by the common feeling in regard to her, assiduously fostered
+by Flora Burgess' continuous references to her in _Society Notes_ as
+the coming social ruler of Endbury's smart set. There was as yet, to be
+sure, no visible indication whatever of such a capacity on Lydia's part,
+but the printed word--particularly Miss Burgess' printed word--was not
+to be doubted. Madeleine Hollister, however (now soon to be Madeleine
+Lowdor), was no respecter of personages, past or future. At the
+appearance of an especially unexpected and disappointing card from her
+sister-in-law's hand, she pounced upon her with: "Lydia, what _are_ you
+thinking about?"
+
+"My washwoman's grandson," burst out Lydia, laying down her cards with a
+careless negligence, so that everyone could see the contents of her
+hand. "Oh, Madeleine! I'm so worried about her, and I wish you'd--"
+
+She got no further. Madeleine's shriek of good-natured laughter cut her
+short like a blow in the face. The other ladies were laughing, too.
+
+"Oh, Lydia! You are the most original, unexpected piece in the world!"
+cried her sister-in-law. "You'll be the death of me!" She appealed to
+the other players at their table: "Did you ever hear anything come out
+funnier?"
+
+To the players at the next tables, who were looking with vague,
+reflected smiles at this burst of merriment, she called: "Oh, it's too
+killing! Lydia Hollister just played a trump on a trick her partner had
+already taken, and when I asked what in the world she was thinking
+about--meaning, of course--"
+
+Lydia sat silent, looking at her useless cards during the rest of the
+narration of her comic speech. She was reflecting rather sadly that she
+had been very foolish to think, even in a thoughtless impulse, of
+telling Madeleine the story she had so impetuously begun. After a time
+it came to her, as a commentary of the little incident, that neither
+could she get anything from Marietta in the matter. At the end of the
+party, she and her mother walked together to the street-cars, but she
+still said nothing of what was in her mind. She would not admit to
+herself that her mother would receive it as she felt sure Marietta and
+Madeleine would, but--she dared not risk putting her to the test. It was
+a period in Lydia's life when she was constantly in fear of tests
+applied to the people she loved and longed to admire.
+
+During the half-hour's noisy journey out to Bellevue--the unhackneyed
+name that had been selected for the new and fashionable suburb she
+inhabited--she had eliminated from this crisis in her mind, one by one,
+all the people in her circle. Dr. Melton was out of town. Otherwise she
+would have gone to him at once. Mrs. Sandworth without her brother was a
+cipher with no figure before it. Her father?--she realized suddenly that
+it was the first time she had ever thought of going to her father with a
+perplexity. No; she knew too little about his view of things. She had
+never talked with him of anything but the happenings of the day. Flora
+Burgess--devoted Flora? Lydia smiled ruefully as she thought of the
+attitude Flora Burgess would be sure to take.
+
+It finally came to the point where there was no one left but Paul; and
+Paul ought not to be worried with domestic questions lest his capacity
+for business be impaired. She had a deep inculcated sense of the
+necessity and duty of "doing her share," as the phrase had gone in the
+various exhortations addressed to her before her marriage. The next few
+years would be critical ones in Paul's career, and the road must be
+straight and clear before his feet--the road that led to Success. No one
+had voiced a doubt that this road was not coincident with all other
+desirable ones; no one had suggested that the same years would be
+critical in other directions and would be certain to be terribly and
+irrevocably determinative of his future relation to his wife.
+
+Lydia, ardently and naïvely anxious to find something "worth doing,"
+therefore had settled on this one definite duty. She had wrestled in a
+determined silence with the many incompetent and degenerate negresses,
+with the few impertinent Americans, with the drunken Irish and insolent
+Swedes, who had filed in and out of her kitchen ever since her
+marriage. Suburban life was a new thing in Endbury, and "help" could see
+no advantages in it. She had strained every nerve to make them appear to
+Paul, as well as to the rest of the world, the opposite of what they
+were; and to do herself, furtively, when Paul was not there, those of
+their tasks they refused or neglected. Every effort was concentrated, as
+in her mother's and sister's households, on keeping a maid presentable
+to open the door and to wait on the table, rather than to perform the
+heavier parts of the daily round. Those Lydia could do herself, or she
+could hire an unpresentable older scrubwoman to do them. She often
+thought that if she could but employ scrubwomen all the time, the
+problem would be half solved. But the achievement of each day was,
+according to Endbury standards, to keep or get somebody into the kitchen
+who could serve a course dinner, even if the mistress of the house was
+obliged to prepare it.
+
+She had never dreamed of feeling herself aggrieved, or even surprised,
+by this curious reverse side to her outward brilliant life. All her
+married friends went through the same experience. Madeleine, it is true,
+announced that she was going to make Lowdor import two Japanese servants
+a year, and dismiss them when they began to get American ideas; but
+Madeleine was quite openly marrying Lowdor for the sake of this and
+similar advantages. Lydia felt that her own problems were only the usual
+lot of her kind, and though she was nearly always sick at heart over
+them, she did not feel justified in complaining--least of all to Paul.
+
+But this present trouble--this was not just a question of help. For the
+last month they had been floating in the most unexpected lull of the
+domestic whirlwind. The intelligence office had sent out Ellen--Ellen,
+the deft-handed cook, the silent, self-effacing, competent servant of
+every housekeeper's dreams. Her good luck seemed incredible. Ellen was
+perfection, was middle-aged and settled, never went out in the evenings,
+kept her kitchen spotlessly clean, trained the rattle-headed second
+girls who came and went, to be good waitresses and made pastry that
+moved Paul, usually little preoccupied about his food provided there was
+plenty of meat, to lyric raptures. The difference she made in Lydia's
+life was inconceivable. It was as though some burdensome law of nature
+had been miraculously suspended for her benefit. She gauged her past
+discomfort by her present comfort.
+
+And yet--
+
+From the first Lydia had had an uneasy feeling in the presence of her
+new servant, a haunting impression when her back was turned to Ellen
+that if she could turn quickly enough, she would see her cook with some
+sinister aspect quite other than the decent, respectful mask she
+presented to her mistress. The second girl of the present was a
+fresh-faced, lively young country lass, whom Ellen herself had secured,
+and whose rosy child's face had been at first innocence itself; but now
+sometimes Lydia overheard them laughing together, a laughter which gave
+her the oddest inward revulsion, and when she came into the kitchen
+quickly she often found them looking at books which were quickly whisked
+out of sight.
+
+And then, a day or so before, old Mrs. O'Hern, her washwoman, had come
+directly to her with that revolting revelation of Ellen's influence on
+her grandson, little Patsy. At the recollection of the old woman's face
+of embittered anguish, Lydia shuddered. Oh, if she could only tell Paul!
+He was so loving and caressing to her--perhaps he would not mind being
+bothered this once--she did not know what to think of such things--she
+did not know what to do, which way to turn. She was startled beyond
+measure at having real moral responsibility put on her.
+
+Perhaps Paul could think of something to do.
+
+He was waiting for her when she entered the house, having come in from
+an out-of-town trip on an earlier train than he had expected to catch.
+He dropped his newspaper and sprang up from his chair to put his arms
+about her and gloat over her beauty. "You're getting prettier every day
+of your life, Lydia," he told her, ruffling her soft hair, and kissing
+her very energetically a great many times. "But pale! I must get some
+color into your cheeks, Melton says--how's this for a way?"
+
+He seemed to Lydia very boyish and gay and vital. She caught at him
+eagerly--he had been away from home three days--and clung to him. "Oh,
+Paul! How much good it does me to have you here, close! You are _so_
+much nicer than a room of women playing the same game of cards they
+began last September!"
+
+Paul shouted with laughter--his pleasant, hearty mirth. "I'm appreciated
+at my full worth," he cried.
+
+"Oh, how I loathe cards!" cried Lydia, taking off her hat.
+
+"It's better than the talk you'd get from most of the people there, I
+bet," conjectured Paul, taking up his newspaper again. "Cards are a
+blessing _that_ way, compared with conversation."
+
+"Oh, dear, I suppose so!" Lydia stopped a moment in the doorway. "But
+doesn't it seem a pity that you never see anybody but people who'd bore
+you to death if you didn't stop their mouth with cards?"
+
+"That's the way of the world," remarked Paul comfortably, returning to
+the news of the day.
+
+The little friendly chat gave Lydia courage for her plan of asking her
+husband's advice about her perplexity, but, mindful of traditional
+wisdom, she decided, as she thriftily changed her silk "party dress" for
+a house-gown of soft wool, that she would wait until the mollifying
+influence of dinner had time to assert itself. She wondered fearfully,
+with a quick throb of her heart, how he would receive her confidence.
+When she called him to the table she looked searchingly into his strong,
+resolute, good-natured face, and then, dropping her eyes, with an
+indrawn breath, began her usual fruitless endeavors to learn from him a
+little of what had occupied his day--his long, mysterious day, spent in
+a world of which he brought back but the scantiest tidings to her.
+
+As usual, to-night he shook his shoulders impatiently at her
+questioning. "Oh, Lydia darling, don't talk shop! I'm sick and tired of
+it after three days of nothing else. I want to leave all that behind me
+when I come home. That's what a home is for!"
+
+Lydia did not openly dissent from this axiom, though she murmured
+helplessly: "I feel so awfully shut out. It is what you think about most
+of the time, and I do not know enough about it even to imagine--"
+
+Paul leaned across the table to lay an affectionate hand on his wife's
+slim fingers. "Count your mercies, my dear. It's all grab, and snap, and
+cutting somebody's throat before he has a chance to cut yours. It
+wouldn't please you if you did know anything about it--the business
+world." He drew a long breath, and went on appreciatively with his
+cutlet--Lydia had learned something about meats since the year
+before--"You are a very good provider, little girl; do you know it?"
+
+"Oh, I love to," said Lydia. She added reflectively: "Wouldn't it be
+nice if things were so I could do the cooking myself and not have to
+bother with these horrible creatures that are all you can get usually?"
+
+Paul laughed at the fancy. "That's a high ambition for my wife, I must
+say!"
+
+"We'd have better things to eat even than Ellen gives us," said Lydia
+pensively. "If I had a little more time to put on it, I could do
+wonders, I'm sure of it."
+
+"I don't doubt that," said her husband gallantly; "but did you ever know
+anybody who _was_ her own cook?"
+
+"Well, not except in between times, when they couldn't get anybody
+else," confessed Lydia. "But lots of people I know who do go through the
+motions of keeping one would be better off without one. They can't
+afford it, and--Oh, I wish we were poorer!"
+
+Paul was highly amused by this flight of fancy. "But we're as poor as
+poverty already," he reminded her.
+
+"We're poor for buying hundred-dollar broadcloth tailor-made suits for
+me, and cut glass for the table, but we'd have plenty if I could wear
+ready-made serge at--"
+
+Paul laughed outright. "Haven't you ever noticed, my dear, that the
+people who wear ready-made serge are the ones who could really
+comfortably afford to wear calico wrappers? It goes right up and down
+the scale that way. Everybody is trying to sing a note above what he
+can."
+
+"I know it does--but does it _have_ to? Wouldn't it be better if
+everybody just--why doesn't somebody begin--"
+
+"It's the law of progress, of upward growth," pronounced Paul.
+
+Lydia was impressed by the pontifical sound of this, though she ventured
+faintly: "Well, but does progress always mean broadcloth and cut glass?"
+
+"_We_ have the wherewithal to cultivate our minds!" said Paul, laughing
+again. "Weren't the complete works of the American essayists among our
+wedding presents!" He referred to an old joke between them, at which
+Lydia laughed loyally, and the talk went on lightly until the meal was
+over.
+
+As they walked away from the table together Lydia said to herself,
+"Now--now--" but Paul began to laugh as he told an incident of
+Madeleine's light-hearted, high-handed tyranny over her elderly fiancé,
+and it seemed impossible for Lydia to bring out her story of mean and
+ugly tragedy.
+
+As usual the evening was a lively one. Some acquaintances from the
+"younger married set" of Bellevue dropped in for a game of cards,
+Madeleine and "old Pete" Lowdor came out to talk over the plans for
+their new handsome house at the end of the street and at Paul's
+suggestion Lydia hastily got together a chafing-dish supper for the
+impromptu party which prolonged itself with much laughter and many
+friendly wranglings over trumps and "post-mortems" until after midnight.
+Paul was in the highest of gay spirits as he stood with his pretty wife
+on the porch, calling good-nights to his guests disappearing down the
+starlit driveway. He inhaled the odor of success sweet and strong in his
+nostrils.
+
+As they looked back into the house, they saw the faithful Ellen clearing
+away the soiled dishes, her large, white, disease-scarred face
+impassive over her immaculate and correct maid's dress.
+
+"Isn't she a treasure!" cried the master of the house. "To sit up to
+this hour!" He started, "What's that?"
+
+From the shadow of the house a slim lad's figure shambled out into the
+driveway. As he passed the porch where Paul stood, one strong arm
+protectingly about Lydia, he looked up and the light from the open door
+struck full on a white, purposeless, vacant smile. The upward glance
+lost for him the uncertain balance of his wavering feet. He reeled,
+flung up his arms and pitched with drunken soddenness full length upon
+the gravel, picking himself up clumsily with a sound of incoherent, weak
+lament. "Why, it's a drunken man--in _our driveway_!" cried Paul, with
+proprietary indignation. "Get out of here!" he yelled angrily at the
+intruder's retreating back. When he turned again to Lydia he saw that
+one of her lightning-swift changes of mood had swept over her. He was
+startled at her pale face and burning, horrified eyes, and remembering
+her condition with apprehension, picked her up bodily and carried her up
+the stairs to their bedroom, soothing her with reassuring caresses.
+
+There, sitting on the edge of their bed, her loosened hair falling about
+her white face, holding fast to her husband's hands, Lydia told him at
+last; hesitating and stumbling because in her blank ignorance she knew
+no words even to hint at what she feared--she told him who Patsy was,
+the blue-eyed, fifteen-year-old boy, just over from Ireland, ignorant of
+the world as a child of five, easily led, easily shamed, by his fear of
+appearing rustic, into any excess--and then she told him what the boy's
+grandmother had told her about Ellen. It was a milestone in their
+married life, her turning to him more intimately than she would have
+done to her mother, her breaking down the walls of her lifelong
+maiden's reserve and ignorance. She finished with her face hidden in his
+breast. What should she do? What _could_ she do?
+
+Paul took her into the closest embrace, kissed her shut eyes in a
+passion of regret that she should have learned the evil in the world, of
+relieved belittling of the story, Lydia's portentous beginning of which
+had quite startled him, and of indignation at "Mrs. O'Hern's foul
+mouth--for you can just be sure, darling Lydia, that it's all nothing
+but rowings among the servants. Probably Ellen won't let Mrs. O'Hern
+take her usual weekly perquisite of sugar and tea. Servants are always
+quarreling and the only way to do is to keep out of their lies about
+each other and let them fight it out themselves. You never can have any
+idea of who's telling the truth if you butt in and try to straighten it,
+and the Lord knows that Ellen's too good a cook and too much needed in
+this family until the new member arrives safely, to hurt her feelings
+with investigating any of Mrs. O'Hern's yarns. Just you refuse to listen
+to servants' gossip. If you'd been a little less of a darling,
+inexperienced school-girl, you'd have cut off such talk at the first
+words. Just you take my word for it, you dear, you sweetheart, you best
+of--" he ran on into ardent endearments, forgetting the story himself,
+blinding and dazzling Lydia with the excitement which always swept her
+away in those moments when Paul was her passionate, youthful lover.
+
+She tried to revert to the question once or twice later, but now Paul
+alternated between shaming her laughingly for her gullibility and making
+fun of her "countrified" interest in the affairs of her servants. "But,
+Paul, Mrs. O'Hern says that Patsy doesn't _want_ to drink and--and go to
+those awful houses--his father died of it--only Ellen makes him, by--"
+
+Paul tried to close the discussion with a little impatience at her
+attempt to press the matter. "Every Irish boy drinks more or less, you
+little goose. That's nothing! Of course it's too bad to have you _see_ a
+drunken man, but it's nothing so tragic. If he didn't drink here, he
+would somewhere else. The only thing we have to complain about that I
+can see, is having the cook's followers drunk--but Ellen's such a
+miracle of competence we must overlook that. As for the rest of Mrs.
+O'Hern's dirty stories, they're spite work evidently." As Lydia looked
+up at him, her face still anxious and drawn, he ended finally, "Good
+gracious, Lydia, don't you suppose I know--that my experience of the
+world has taught me more about human nature than you know? You act to me
+as though you trusted your washwoman's view of things more than your
+husband's. And now what you want to do, anyhow, is to get some rest. You
+hop into bed, little rabbit, and go to sleep. Don't wait for me; I've
+got a lot of figuring to do."
+
+When he went to bed, a couple of hours later, Lydia was lying quietly
+with closed eyes, and he did not disturb her; but afterward he woke out
+of a sound sleep and sat up with a sense that something was wrong. He
+listened. There was not a sound in the room or in the house. Apparently
+Lydia was not wakened by his startled movement. She lay in a profound
+immobility.
+
+But something about her very motionlessness struck a chill to his heart.
+Women in her condition sometimes had seizures in the night, he had
+heard. With a shaking hand, he struck a match and leaned over her. He
+gave a loud, shocked exclamation to see that her eyes were open, steady
+and fixed, like wide, dark pools. He threw the match away, and took her
+in his arms with a fond murmur of endearments. "Why, poor little girl!
+Do you lie awake and worry about what's to come?"
+
+Lydia drew a painful breath. "Yes," she said; "I worry a great deal
+about what's to come."
+
+He kissed her gently, ardently, gently again. "You mustn't do that,
+darling! You're all right! Melton said there wasn't one chance in a
+thousand of anything but just the most temporary illness, without any
+complications. It won't be so bad--it'll be soon over, and think what it
+means to us--dearest--dearest--dearest!"
+
+Lydia lay quiet in his arms. She had been still so long that he thought
+her asleep, when she said, in a whisper: "I hope it won't be a girl!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+LYDIA'S NEW MOTTO
+
+
+Lydia's two or three big receptions, of which her mother had spoken with
+so casual a confidence, came off, while not exactly with nonchalant
+ease, still, on the whole, creditably. It is true that Dr. Melton had
+stormed at Lydia one sunny day in spring, finding her bent over her
+desk, addressing invitations.
+
+"It's April, child!" he cried, "April! The crocuses are out and the
+violets are almost here--and, what is more important, your day of trial
+gets closer with every tick of the clock. Come outdoors and take a walk
+with me."
+
+"Oh, I can't!" Lydia was aghast at the idea, looking at a mountain of
+envelopes before her.
+
+"Here! I'll help you finish those, and then we'll--"
+
+"No, no, _no_!" In Lydia's negation was a touch of the irritation that
+was often during these days in her attitude toward her godfather. "I
+can't! Please don't tease me to! The curtains to the spare room have to
+be put up, and the bed draperies somehow fixed. A stray dog got in there
+when he was wet and muddy and went to sleep on my best lace bedspread."
+
+Dr. Melton had not practiced for years among Endbury ladies without
+having some knowledge of them and a corresponding readiness of mind in
+meeting the difficulties they declared insurmountable. "I'll buy you a
+white marseilles bedspread on our way back from the walk," he offered
+gravely.
+
+"Oh, I've got plenty of plain white ones," she admitted incautiously,
+"but they don't go with the scheme of the room--and the first
+reception's only two days off."
+
+Dr. Melton fixed her with an ironical and melancholy smile: "Now,
+Lydia, I did think you had it in you to realize that your health and the
+strength of your child are worth more than--"
+
+Lydia sprang up and confronted him with an apparent anger of face and
+accent that was contradicted by her trembling chin and suffused eyes.
+"Oh, go away!" she commanded him, shaking her head and motioning him
+off. "Don't talk so to me! I can't help it--what I do! Everything's a
+part of the whole system, and I'm in that up to my neck--you know I am.
+If that's right, why, everything's all right, just the way everybody
+thinks it is. And if it's wrong--" She caught her breath, and turned
+back to her desk. "If it's wrong, what good would be done by little
+dribbling compromises of an occasional walk." She sat down wearily, and
+leaned her head on her hand. "I just wish you wouldn't keep me so
+stirred up--when I'm trying so _hard_ to settle down!"
+
+Dr. Melton seemed to divine perfectly the significance of this
+incoherent outbreak. He thrust out his lips in his old grimace that
+denoted emotion, and observed the speaker in a frowning silence. When
+she finished, he nodded: "You are right, Lydia, I do no good." He
+twirled his hat about between his fingers, looking absently into the
+crown, and added, "But you must forgive me, I love you very dearly."
+
+Lydia ran over to him, conscience-stricken. He took her embrace and
+remorseful kiss quietly. "Don't be sorry, Lydia dear. You have just
+shown me, as in a flash of lightning, how much more powerful a grasp on
+reality you have than I."
+
+Lydia recoiled from him with an outcry of exasperation. "I! Why, I'm
+almost an idiot! I haven't a grasp on anything! I can't see an inch
+before my nose. I'm in a perfect nightmare of perplexity all the time
+because I can't make out what I'm driving at--or ought to--"
+
+She went on more quietly, with a reasoning air: "Only look here,
+Godfather, it came over me the other night, when I couldn't sleep, that
+perhaps what's the trouble with me is that I'm _lazy_! I believe that's
+it! I don't want to work the way Marietta does, and Mother does, and
+even Madeleine does over her dresses and parties and things. It must be
+I'm a shirk, and expect to have an easier time than most people. That
+_must_ be it. What else can it be?"
+
+The doctor made no protest against this theory, taking himself off in a
+silence most unusual with him. Lydia did not notice this; nor did she in
+the next two or three months remark that her godfather took quite
+literally and obeyed scrupulously her exhortation to leave her in peace.
+
+She was in the grasp of this new idea. It seemed to her that in phrasing
+it she had hit upon the explanation of her situation which she had been
+so long seeking, and it was with a resolve to scourge this weakness out
+of her life that she now faced the future.
+
+She found a satisfaction in the sweeping manner in which this new maxim
+could be applied to all the hesitations that had confused her. All her
+meditations heretofore had brought her nothing but uncertainty, but this
+new catchword of incessant activity drove her forward too resistlessly
+to allow any reflections as to whether she were going in the right
+direction. She yielded herself absolutely to that ideal of conduct which
+had been urged upon her all her life, and she found, as so many others
+find, oblivion to the problems of the spirit in this resolute refusal to
+recognize the spirit. It was perhaps during these next months of her
+life that she most nearly approximated the Endbury notion of what she
+should be.
+
+She had yielded to Paul on the subject of the cook not only because of
+her timid distrust of her own inexperienced judgment but because of her
+intense reaction from the usual Endbury motto of "Husbands, hands off!"
+She had wanted Paul to be interested in the details of the house as she
+hoped to know and be interested in what concerned him, and when he
+showed his interest in a request she could not refuse it. She hoped that
+she had made a good beginning for the habit of taking counsel with each
+other on all matters. But she thought and hoped and reflected very
+little during these days. She was enormously, incredibly busy, and on
+the whole, she hoped, successfully so. The receptions, at least, went
+off very well, everybody said.
+
+Dr. Melton did not see his goddaughter again until he came with Mrs.
+Sandworth to the last of these events. She was looking singularly
+handsome at that time, her color high, her eyes very large and dark,
+almost black, so dilated were the pupils. With the nicety of observation
+of a man who has lived much among women, the doctor noticed that her
+costume, while effective, was not adjusted with the exquisite feeling
+for finish that always pervaded the toilets of her mother and sister.
+Lydia was trying with all her might to make herself over, but with the
+best will in the world she could not attain the prayerful concentration
+on the process of attiring herself, characteristic of the other women of
+her family.
+
+"She forgot to put the barrette in her back hair," murmured Mrs.
+Sandworth mournfully, as she and her brother emerged from the hand-shake
+of the last of the ladies assisting in receiving, "and there are two
+hooks of her cuff unfastened, and her collar's crooked. But I don't dare
+breathe a word to her about it. Since that time before her marriage when
+she--"
+
+"Yes, yes, yes," her brother cut her short; "don't bring up that tragic
+episode again. I'd succeeded in forgetting it."
+
+"You can call it tragic if you like," commented Mrs. Sandworth, looking
+about for an escape from the stranded isolation of guests who have just
+been passed along from the receiving line; "but what it was all about
+was more than I ever could--" Her eyes fell again on Lydia, and she lost
+herself in a sweet passion of admiration and pride. "Oh, isn't she the
+loveliest thing that ever drew the breath of life! Was there ever
+anybody else that could look so as though--as though they still had dew
+on them!"
+
+She went on, with her bold inconsequence: "There is a queer streak in
+her. Sometimes I think she doesn't care--" She stopped to gaze at a
+striking costume just entering the room.
+
+"What doesn't she care about?" asked the doctor.
+
+Mrs. Sandworth was concentrating on sartorial details as much of her
+mind as was ever under control at one time, and, called upon for a
+development of her theory, was even more vague than usual. "Oh, I don't
+know--about what everybody cares about."
+
+"She's likely to learn, if it's at all catching," conjectured the doctor
+grimly, looking around the large, handsome room. An impalpable effluvium
+was in the air, composed of the scent of flowers, the odor of delicate
+food, the sounds of a discreetly small orchestra behind palms in the
+hallway, the rustling of silks, and the pleasurable excitement of the
+crowd of prosperous-looking women, pleasantly elated by the opportunity
+for exhibiting their best toilets.
+
+"To think of its being our little Lydia who's the center of all this!"
+murmured Mrs. Sandworth, her loving eyes glistening with affectionate
+pride. "It really is a splendid scene, isn't it, Marius?"
+
+"If they were all gagged, it might be. Lord! how they yell!"
+
+"Oh, at a _reception_!" Mrs. Sandworth's accent denoted that the word
+was an explanation. "People have to, to make themselves heard."
+
+"And why should they be so eager to accomplish that?" inquired the
+doctor. "Listen!"
+
+Standing as they were, tightly pressed in between a number of different
+groups, their ears were assaulted by a disjointed mass of stentorian
+conversation that gave a singular illusion as if it all came from one
+inconceivably voluble source, the individuality of the voices being lost
+in the screaming enunciation which, as Mrs. Sandworth had pointed out,
+was a prerequisite of self-expression under the circumstances.
+
+They heard: "--_For over a month and the sleeves were too see you again
+at Mrs. Elliott's I'm pouring there from four I've got to dismiss one
+with little plum-colored bows all along five dollars a week and the
+washing out, and still impossible! I was there myself all the time and
+they neither of thirty-five cents a pound for the most ordinary ferns
+and red carnations was all they had, and we thought it rather skimpy
+under the brought up in one big braid and caught down with at the
+Peterson's they were pink and white with_--"
+
+"_Oh, no, Madeleine! that was at the Burlingame's_." Mrs. Sandworth took
+a running jump into the din and sank from her brother's sight,
+vociferating: "_The Petersons had them of old-gold, don't you remember,
+with little_--"
+
+The doctor, worming his way desperately through the masses of
+femininity, and resisting all attempts to engage him in the vocal fray,
+emerged at length into the darkened hall where the air was, as he told
+himself in a frenzied flight of the imagination, less like a combination
+of a menagerie and a perfume shop. Here, in a quiet corner, sat Lydia's
+father, alone. He held in one hand a large platter piled high with
+wafer-like sandwiches, which he was consuming at a Gargantuan rate, and
+as he ate he smiled to himself.
+
+"Well, Mr. Ogre," said the doctor, sitting down beside him with a gasp
+of relief; "let a wave-worn mariner into your den, will you?"
+
+Provided with an auditor, Judge Emery's smile broke into an open laugh.
+He waved the platter toward the uproar in the next rooms: "A boiler
+factory ain't in it with woman, lovely woman, is it?" he put it to his
+old friend.
+
+"Gracious powers! There's nothing to laugh at in that exhibition!" the
+doctor reproved him, with an acrimonious savagery. "I don't know which
+makes me sicker; to stay in there and listen to them, or come out here
+and find you thinking they're _funny_!"
+
+"They _are_ funny!" insisted the Judge tranquilly. "I stood by the door
+and listened to the scraps of talk I could catch, till I thought I
+should have a fit. I never heard anything funnier on the stage."
+
+"Look-y here, Nat," the doctor stared up at him angrily, "they're not
+monkeys in a zoo, to be looked at only on holidays and then laughed at!
+They're the other half of a whole that we're half of, and don't you
+forget it! Why in the world should you think it funny for them to do
+this tomfool trick all winter and have nervous prostration all summer to
+pay for it? You'd lock up a _man_ as a dangerous lunatic if he spent his
+life so. What they're like, and what they do with their time and
+strength concerns us enough sight more than what the tariff is, let me
+tell you!"
+
+"I admit that what your wife is like concerns you a whole lot!" The
+Judge laughed good-naturedly in the face of the little old bachelor.
+"Don't commence jumping on the American woman now! I won't stand it!
+She's the noblest of her sex!"
+
+"Do you know why I am bald?" said Dr. Melton, rubbing his hand over his
+shining dome.
+
+"If I did, I wouldn't admit it," the Judge put up a cautious guard,
+"because I foresee that whatever I say will be used as evidence against
+me."
+
+"I've torn out all my hair in desperation at hearing such men as you
+claim to admire and respect and wish to advance the American woman. You
+don't give enough thought to her--real thought--from one year's end to
+another to know whether you think she has an immortal soul or not!"
+
+"Oh, you can't get anywhere, trying to reason about those sort of
+things. You have to take souls for granted. Besides, I give her as fair
+a deal in that respect as I give myself," protested Lydia's father
+reasonably, smiling and eating.
+
+"There's something in _that_, now!" cried his interlocutor, with an odd
+Celtic lilt which sometimes invaded his speech; "but she _has_ an
+immortal soul, and I'm by no means sure that yours is still inside you."
+
+The Judge stood up, brushed the crumbs of his stolen feast from his
+well-fitting broadcloth, and smiled down indulgently at the unquiet
+little doctor. "She's all right, Melton, the American woman, and you're
+an unconscionably tiresome old fanatic. That's what _you_ are! Come
+along and have a glass of punch with me. Lydia's cook has a genius for
+punch--and for sandwiches!" he added reflectively, setting down the
+empty platter.
+
+Dr. Melton apparently was off on another tangent of excitability. "Did
+you ever see her?" he demanded with a fiercely significant accent.
+
+The Judge made a humorous wry mouth. "Yes, I have; but what concern is a
+cook's moral character to her employer any more than an engineer's to
+the railroad--"
+
+"Well, it mightn't hurt the railroad any if it took more cognizance of
+its engineers' morals--" began the doctor dryly.
+
+The Judge cut him short with a great laugh. "Oh, Melton! Melton! You
+bilious sophomore! Take a vacation from finding everything so damn
+tragic. Take a drink on me. You're all right! Everybody's all right!"
+
+The doctor nodded. "And the reception is the success of the season," he
+said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+AN EVENING'S ENTERTAINMENT
+
+
+The dinner parties, so Paul told Lydia one evening a few days later,
+would certainly be as successful and with but little more trouble. "Just
+think of the dinners Ellen's been giving us for the last two months! I
+don't believe there's another such cook in Ohio--within our purse, of
+course."
+
+Lydia did not visibly respond to this enthusiasm. Indeed, she walked
+away from the last half of it, and leaned out of a window to look up at
+the stars. When she came back to take up the tiny dress on which she was
+sewing, she said: "I don't think I can stand more than this one dinner
+party, Paul. I'm sorry, but I don't feel at all well, and this dreadful
+nausea troubles me a good deal."
+
+"Well, you look lovelier than ever before in your life," Paul reassured
+her tenderly, and felt a moment's pique that her face did not entirely
+clear at this all-important announcement. "Come, let's go over to the
+Derby's for a game of bridge, will you, Lydia?"
+
+This conversation took place on a Tuesday late in May. The dinner party
+was set for Thursday. On Wednesday morning, after Paul's usual early
+departure, Lydia went to her writing desk to send a note to Madeleine
+Hollister. Paul had intimated that she and Madeleine were seeing less of
+each other than he had expected from their girlhood acquaintance, and
+Lydia, in her anxiety to induce Paul to talk over with her and plan with
+her the growth of their home life, was eager to adopt every casual
+suggestion he threw out. She began, therefore, a cordial invitation to
+Madeleine to spend several days with them. She would try again to be
+more intimate with her husband's sister.
+
+She had not inherited her mother's housekeeping eye, and was never
+extremely observant of details. Being more than usually preoccupied this
+morning, she had no suspicion that someone else had been using the
+conveniences for writing on her desk until she turned over the sheet of
+paper on which she had begun her note, and saw with surprise that the
+other side was already covered with a coarse handwriting, unfamiliar to
+her.
+
+As she looked at this in the blankest astonishment, a phrase leaped out
+at her comprehension, like a serpent striking. And then another. And
+another.
+
+She tried to push back her chair to escape, but she was like a person
+paralyzed.
+
+With returning strength to move came an overwhelming wave of nausea. She
+crept up to her own room and lay motionless and soundless for hour after
+hour, until presently it was noon, and the pleasant tinkling of gongs
+announced that lunch was served.
+
+Lydia rose, and made her way down the stairs to the well-ordered table,
+set with the daintiest of perfectly prepared food, and stood, holding on
+to the back of a chair, while she rang the bell. The little second girl
+answered it--one of the flitting, worthless, temporary occupants of that
+position.
+
+"Tell Ellen to come here," said her mistress.
+
+At the appearance of the cook, Lydia's white face went a little whiter.
+"Did you use my writing desk last evening?" she asked.
+
+Ellen looked up, her large, square-jawed face like a mask through which
+her eyes probed her mistress' expression. "Yes, Mrs. Hollister; I did,"
+she said in the admirable "servant's manner" she possessed to
+perfection. "I ought to ask your pardon for doing it without permission,
+but someone was wanting Mr. Hollister on the telephone, and I thought
+best to sit within hearing of the bell until you and Mr. Hollister
+should return, and as--"
+
+"You left part of your letter to Patsy O'Hern," said Lydia, and sat
+down suddenly, as though her strength were spent.
+
+The woman opposite her flushed a purplish red. There was a long silence.
+Lydia looked at her servant with a face before which Ellen finally
+lowered her eyes.
+
+"I am sure, Mrs. Hollister, if you don't think I'm worth the place, and
+if you think you can manage without me to-morrow night, I'll go this
+minute," she said coolly.
+
+Lydia did not remove her eyes from the other's flushed face. "You must
+go far away from Bellevue," she said. "You must not take a place
+anywhere near here."
+
+Ellen looked up quickly, and down again. The color slowly died out of
+her face. After a sullen silence, "Yes," she said.
+
+"That is all," said Lydia.
+
+                 *       *       *       *       *
+
+Paul found his wife that evening still very white. She explained Ellen's
+disappearance with a dry brevity. "That we should have continued to give
+that--that awful--to give her opportunity to work upon a boy of--" she
+ended brokenly. "Suppose he had been my brother!"
+
+Paul was aghast. "But, my _dear_! To-morrow is the night of the dinner!
+Couldn't you have put off a few days this sudden fit of--"
+
+Lydia broke from her white stillness with a wild outcry. She flung
+herself on her husband, pressing her hands on his mouth and crying out
+fiercely: "No, no, Paul! Not that! I can't bear to have you say that! I
+hoped--I hoped you wouldn't think of--"
+
+Paul was fresh from an interview with Dr. Melton, and in his ears rang
+innumerable cautions against excitement or violent emotions. With his
+usual competent grasp on the essentials of a situation that he could not
+understand at all, he put aside for the time his exasperated
+apprehensions about the next day's event, and picking Lydia up bodily he
+carried her to a couch, closing her lips with gentle hands and soothing
+her with caresses, like a frightened child.
+
+"Oh, you are good to me!" she murmured finally, quieted. "I must try
+not to get so excited. But, Paul--I _can't_ tell you--about--about that
+letter--and later, when I saw Ellen, it was as though we fought hand to
+hand for Patsy, though she never--"
+
+"There, there, dearest! Don't talk about it--just rest. You've worked
+yourself into a perfect fever." If there was latent in the indulgent
+accent of this speech the coda, "All about nothing," it escaped Lydia's
+ear. She only knew that the long nightmare of her lonely, horrified day
+was over. She clung to her husband, and thanked heaven for his pure,
+clean manliness.
+
+But in a vastly different way the next day was almost as much of a
+nightmare. Lydia's father and mother were temporarily out of town and
+their at least fairly satisfactory cook was enjoying her vacation at an
+undiscoverable address. Lydia was cut off from asking her sister to come
+to her aid by the fact that Paul had prevailed upon her to omit Marietta
+and her husband from her guests. "If you won't give but one, we've just
+_got_ to invite the important ones," he had said. "Your sister can take
+dinner with us any day, and you know her husband _isn't_ the most--"
+
+Lydia had picked up in the school of necessity a fair knowledge of
+cooking, for which she had discovered in herself quite a liking; but she
+had been too constantly in social demand to have the leisure for
+advancing far into culinary lore, and she now found herself dismayed
+before the elaborate menu that Ellen had planned, for which the
+materials were gathered together. She was still shaken with the emotions
+of the day before, and subject to sudden giddy, sick turns, which,
+although lasting but an instant, left her enormously fatigued.
+
+She went furiously at the task before her, beginning by simplifying the
+dinner as much as she dared and could with the materials at hand, and
+struggling with the dishes she was obliged to retain. For years
+afterward, the sight of chicken salad affected her to acute nausea. The
+inexperienced and careless little second girl lost her head in the
+crisis, and had to be repeatedly calmed and assured that all that would
+be asked of her would be to serve the dinner to the waiters for whom
+Lydia had arranged hastily by telephone with Endbury's leading caterer.
+Ellen had planned to serve the meal with the help of a waitress friend
+or two, without other outside help; a feature of the occasion that had
+met with Paul's hearty approval. He told Lydia that those palpably
+hired-for-the-occasion nigger waiters were very bad form, and belonged
+to a phase of Endbury's social gaucheries as outgrown now as charade
+parties. But now, of course, nothing else was possible.
+
+In the intervals of cooking, Lydia left her makeshift help in the
+kitchen, to see that nothing burned, and in a frenzy of activity flew at
+some of the manifold things to be done to prepare the house for the
+festivity. She swept and wiped up herself the expansive floors of the
+two large parlors, set the rooms in order, dusted the innumerable
+wedding present knickknacks, cleaned the stairs, wiped free from dust
+the carved balustrades, ordered the bedrooms that were to serve as
+dressing rooms in the evening, answered the 'phone a thousand times,
+arranged flowers in the vases, received a reportorial call from Miss
+Burgess, gave cut glass and china its final polish, laid out Paul's
+evening clothes and arranged her own toilet ready--it was five o'clock!
+There were innumerable other tasks to accomplish, but she dared no
+longer put off setting the table.
+
+It was to be a large dinner--large, that is, for Endbury--of twenty
+covers, and Lydia had never prepared a table for so many guests. The
+number of objects necessary for the conventional setting of a dinner
+table appalled her. She was so tired, and her attention was so fixed on
+the complicated processes going on uncertainly in the kitchen, that her
+brain reeled over the vast quantity of knives and forks and plates and
+glasses needed to convey food to twenty mouths on a festal occasion.
+They persistently eluded her attempts to marshal them into order. She
+discovered that she had put forks for the soup--that in some
+inexplicable way at the plate destined for an important guest there was
+a large kitchen spoon of iron--a wild sort of whimsical humor rose in
+her from the ferment of utter fatigue and anxiety. When Paul came in,
+looking very grave, she told him with a wavering laugh, "If I tried as
+hard for ten minutes to go to Heaven as I've tried all day to have this
+dinner right, I'd certainly have a front seat in the angel choir. If
+anybody here to-night is not satisfied, it'll be because he's harder to
+please than St. Peter himself."
+
+"My Aunt Alexandra will be here," said Paul, the humorous side of her
+speech escaping him.
+
+Lydia set down a tray of glasses, and broke into open, shaking,
+hysterical laughter. Paul surveyed her grimly. Her excitement had
+flushed her cheeks and darkened her eyes, and her sudden, apparently
+light-hearted, mirth put the finishing touch to a picture that could
+seem to her husband nothing but a care-free, not to say childish,
+attitude toward a situation of grave concern to him and his prospects
+and ambitions in the world. His inborn and highly cultivated regard for
+competence and success in any enterprise undertaken, drowned out, as was
+by no means infrequent with him, any judicial inquiry into the innate
+importance of the enterprise. He had an instant of bitter impatience
+with Lydia. He felt that he had a right to hold her to account for the
+outcome of events. If she were well enough to have rosy cheeks and to
+laugh at nothing, she was well enough to have satisfactory results
+expected from her efforts.
+
+"I hope very much that everything will go well," he said curtly, turning
+away. "Our first dinner party means a good deal."
+
+But everything did not go well. Indeed, it is scarcely too much to say
+that nothing went well. From the over-peppered soup (Lydia had forgotten
+to caution her rattle-brained assistant that she had already seasoned
+the bouillon) to the salad which, although excellent, gave out frankly,
+beyond any possibility of disguise, while five people were still
+unserved, the meal was a long procession of mishaps. Paul took up
+sorrily his wife's rather hysterical note of self-mockery, and laughed
+and joked over the varied eccentricities of the pretentious menu. But
+there was no laughter in his heart.
+
+Never before, in all his life, from babyhood up, had he been forced to
+know the acrid taste of failure, and the dose was not sweetened by his
+intense consciousness that he was not in any way responsible. No such
+fiasco had ever resulted from anything he _had_ been responsible for, he
+thought fiercely to himself, leaning forward smilingly to talk to the
+president of the street-railway company, who, having nothing in the
+shape of silverware left before his place but a knife and spoon, was
+eating his salad with the latter implement. "Lydia has no right to act
+so," he thought.
+
+The hostess gave the effect of flushed, bright-eyed animation usual with
+her on exciting occasions.
+
+"Your wife is a beauty," said the street-railway magnate, looking down
+the disorganized table toward her.
+
+Paul received this assurance with the proper enthusiastic assent, but
+something else gleamed hotly in his face as he looked at her. "I have
+_some_ rights," thought the young husband. "Lydia owes me something!" He
+never before had been moved to pity for himself.
+
+Lydia seemed to herself to be in an endless bad dream. The exhausting
+efforts of the day had reduced her to a sort of coma of fatigue through
+which she felt but dully the successive stabs of the ill-served,
+unsuccessful dinner. At times, the table, the guests, the room itself,
+wavered before her, and she clutched at her chair to keep her balance.
+She did not know that she was laughing and talking gaily and eating
+nothing. She was only conscious of an intense longing for the end of
+things, and darkness and quiet.
+
+After the meal the company moved into the double parlor. The plan had
+been to serve coffee there, but as people stood about waiting and this
+did not appear, Paul drew Lydia to one side to ask her about it. She
+looked at him with bright, blank eyes, and spoke in an expressionless
+voice: "The grocery boy forgot to deliver the coffee," she said. "There
+isn't any, I remember now."
+
+He turned away silently, and the later part of the entertainment began.
+
+There was to be music, one of the guests being Endbury's favorite
+amateur soprano, another a pianist much thought of. The singer took her
+place by the piano, assuming carefully the correct position. Lydia
+watched her balance on the balls of her feet, lean forward a little,
+throw up her chest and draw in her abdomen. As the preliminary chords of
+the accompaniment sounded, she was almost visibly concentrating her
+thoughts on the tension of her vocal chords, on the position of the soft
+palate and the resonance of the nasal cavities. The thoughts of her
+auditors followed her own. It came to Lydia some time after the
+performance was over that the words of the song told of love and life
+and tragic betrayal.
+
+A near-by guest leaned to her and said, during the hand-clapping: "I
+couldn't make out what it was all about--never can understand a
+song--but, say! can't she put it all over the soprano that sings in the
+First Methodist."
+
+His hostess gave the speaker a rather disconcerting stare, hardly
+explained, he thought, by the enigmatical statement that came after it:
+"Why, that is how we are living, all of us!"
+
+The pianist was an old German, considered eccentric by Endbury. He had a
+social position on account of his son, a prosperous German-American
+manufacturer of buggies, and was invited because of his readiness to
+play on any occasion. The old man looked about him at the company with a
+fatherly smile, and, sitting down to his instrument, waited pointedly
+until all the cheerful hum of conversation had died away. The room was
+profoundly silent as he brought his hands down on the keys in a
+startling, thrilling chord. Lydia's heart began to beat fast. She felt a
+chill run among the roots of her hair. She was so moved she could have
+wept aloud, and yet, almost at once, as the musician passed on to the
+rich elaboration of his theme, she lost herself in a groping
+bewilderment. She had heard so little music! Her straining attention
+mocked her with its futility.
+
+She and Paul had been married for eight months, but they had found no
+time for the serious study of music from which she had hoped so much.
+When Paul was at home for an evening he was too tired and worn for
+anything very deep, he said, and preferred to anything else the lighter
+pieces of Nevin. She now gave ear despairingly to the mighty utterance
+of a master, catching only now and then a tantalizing glimpse of what it
+might mean to her. At times, there emerged from the glorious tumult of
+sound some grave, earnest chord, some quick, piercing melody, some
+exquisite sudden cadence, which reached her heart intelligibly; but
+through most of it she felt herself to be listening with heartsick
+yearning to a lovely message in an unknown tongue. Her feeling of
+desolate exile from a realm of beauty she longed to enter, was
+intensified, as was natural in so sensitive a nature, by the strange
+power of music to heighten in its listeners whatever is, for the time,
+their predominant emotion. She felt like crying out, like beating her
+hands against the prison bars suddenly revealed to her. She was almost
+intolerably affected before the end of the selection.
+
+"That's an awfully long piece for anybody to learn by heart!" commented
+her neighbor admiringly, as the old pianist finished, and stood up
+wiping his forehead. "Say, Mr. Burkhardt, what's the name of that
+selection?" he went on, leaning forward.
+
+The old German turned toward him, and answered gravely: "That is the
+feerst mofement of Beethoven's Opus Von Hundred and Elefen."
+
+"Oh, it is, is it?" said Lydia's guest, with a facetious intonation.
+"All of that?"
+
+After that the soprano sang again, someone else sang a humorous negro
+song, there was more piano music, rendered by the prosperous son of the
+old pianist, who played dashingly some bright comic-opera airs. The
+furniture was pushed back and a few dancers whirled over the costly,
+hardwood waxed floors, which Lydia had cleaned that morning. She felt
+vaguely that everyone was being most kind and that her good-natured
+guests were trying to make up for the failure of the dinner by unusual
+efforts to have the evening pass off well. She was very grateful for
+this humane disposition of theirs. It was the bright spot of the
+experience.
+
+But Paul, who also saw the kindly efforts of his guests, felt that this
+was the last intolerable dagger-thrust. Their amused compassion
+suffocated him. He wanted people to envy him, not pity him, he thought
+in mortified chagrin.
+
+After an eternity, the hour of departure arrived. As the door shut out
+the last of the smiling, lying guests, the host and hostess turned to
+face each other.
+
+Paul spoke first, in an even, restrained tone: "You would better go to
+bed, Lydia; you must be very tired."
+
+With this, he turned away to shut up the house. He had determined to
+preserve at all costs the appearance of the indulgent, non-critical,
+over-patient husband that he intensely felt himself to be. No force, he
+thought grimly, shutting his jaws hard, should drag from him a word of
+his real sentiments. Fanned by the wind of this virtuous resolution, his
+sentiments grew hotter and hotter as he walked about, locking doors and
+windows, and reviewing bitterly the events of the evening. If he was to
+restrain himself from saying anything, he would at least allow himself
+the privilege of feeling all that was possible to a man so deeply
+injured.
+
+Lydia sat quietly waiting for him to finish, her face in her hands,
+conscious of nothing but fatigue, in her ears a wild echo of the
+inexplicable, haunting Beethoven chords.
+
+Suddenly she started and raised her head, her face transfigured. Her
+eyes shone, a smile was on her lips like that of someone who hears from
+afar the sound of a beloved voice. She made a gesture of yearning toward
+her husband. "Oh, Paul--Paul!" she cried to him softly, in a tremulous
+voice of wonder.
+
+He turned, the light for the first time on his black, loveless face.
+"What is it?" he enunciated distinctly, looking at her hard.
+
+Before his eyes Lydia shrank back. She put up her hands instinctively to
+hide her face from him. Finally, "Nothing--nothing--" she murmured.
+
+Without comment, Paul went back to his conscientious round of the house.
+
+Lydia had felt for the first time the quickening to life of her child.
+And during all that day, until then, she had forgotten that she was to
+know motherhood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+AN ELEMENT OF SOLIDITY
+
+
+Lydia dated the estrangement from Marietta, which grew so rapidly during
+the next year, from the conversation on the day after the dinner party.
+She was cruelly wounded by her sister's attack on her, but she could
+never remember the scene without one of her involuntary laughs so
+disconcerting to Paul, who only laughed when he felt gay, certainly at
+nothing which affected him seriously. But Lydia's sense of humor was so
+tickled at the grotesque contrast between Marietta's injured conception
+of the brilliant social event from which she had been excluded and the
+leaden fiasco which it had really been, that even at the time, in the
+midst of denying hotly her sister's charges of snobbishness and social
+ambition, she was unable to keep back a shaky laugh or two as she cried
+out: "Oh, Etta! If you could know how things went, you'd be too thankful
+to have escaped it. It was awful beyond words!"
+
+Marietta answered her by handing her with a grim silence a copy of that
+morning's paper, open at _Society Notes_. Loyal Flora Burgess had
+lavished on "Miss Lydia's" first dinner party her entire vocabulary of
+deferential, not to say reverential, encomiums. The "function had
+inaugurated a new era of cosmopolitan amplitude of social life in
+Endbury," was the ending of the lengthy paragraph that described the
+table decorations, the menu, the costume of the hostess, the names of
+the music-makers afterward.
+
+Lydia burst into a hysterical laugh. "Flora Burgess is too killing!" she
+cried. "She was here in the afternoon to get details, and I just let her
+wander around and see what she could make out. I was too busy to pay any
+attention to her--Oh, Etta! I was dead and buried with fatigue before
+the people even began to come. I can't even remember much about it
+except that every single thing was wrong. That about 'cosmopolitan
+amplitude--' Oh, isn't Flora too funny!--means having music after
+dinner, I suppose. I don't know what else."
+
+"Of course," said Marietta, rising to go, "it doesn't make any
+difference what it was really like! Only the people that were there know
+that. The report in the paper--"
+
+"Oh, Marietta, what a thing to say--that it's all pretense, every
+bit--and not--"
+
+Marietta went on steadily and mordantly: "I don't know how you feel
+about it, but _I_ shouldn't be very easy in my mind to have my only
+sister's name not on the list of guests at my most exclusive social
+function."
+
+Dr. Melton, who made Lydia a professional call that morning, found her
+with reddened eyes, slowly washing and putting away innumerable dirty
+dishes. She told him that the second girl, apparently overcome by the
+events of the day before, had disappeared during the night. Dr. Melton
+thrust out his lips and said nothing, but he took off his coat, put on
+an apron, and, pushing his patient away from the dishpan, attacked a
+huge pile of sticky plates. He worked rapidly and silently, with a
+surgeon's deftness. Lydia sat quiet for some time, looking at him.
+Finally, "I hadn't been crying because of dirty dishes," she told him;
+"I'm not such a child as that. Marietta has been here. She said some
+things pretty hard to bear about her not having been invited to that
+awful dinner party. I didn't know what she was talking about a good deal
+of the time--it was all about what a snob and traitor to my family I was
+growing to be."
+
+"You mustn't blame Marietta too much," said the doctor, rinsing and
+beginning to dry the plates with what seemed to Lydia's fatigued languor
+really miraculous speed. "It's true that she watches your social advance
+with the calm disinterestedness of a cat watching somebody pour cream
+out of a jug. She wants her saucerful. But look here. Did I ever tell
+you about the man Montaigne speaks of who spent all his life to acquire
+the skill necessary to throw a grain of millet through the eye of a
+needle? Well, that man was proud of it, but poor Marietta's haunted by
+doubts as to whether in her case it's been worth while. It makes her
+naturally inclined to be snappy."
+
+He was so used to delighting in Lydia's understanding of his perversely
+obscure figures of speech that he turned about, surprised to hear no
+appreciative comment. She was looking away with troubled eyes.
+
+"Paul will think I ought not to have let Marietta talk to me like
+that--that I ought to have resented it. I never can remember to resent
+things."
+
+The doctor began setting out polished water glasses on a tray. "It is
+the glory of a man to pass by an offense," he quoted. "Ah, don't you
+suppose if we knew all about things we'd feel as relieved at not having
+resented an injury as if we had held our hands from striking a blind man
+who had inadvertently run against us?"
+
+There was no response. It was the second time that one of his metaphors,
+far-fetched as he loved them, but usually intelligible to Lydia, had
+missed fire. He turned on her sharply. "What are you thinking about?" he
+asked.
+
+She raised her tragic eyes to his. "About the mashed potatoes last
+night--they didn't have a bit of salt in them--they were too nasty
+for--"
+
+"Oh, pshaw! It makes no difference whether your dinner party was a
+success or not! You know that as well as I do. A dinner party is a relic
+of the Dark Ages, anyhow--if not of the Stone Age! As a physician, I
+shudder to see people sitting down to gorge themselves on the richest
+possible food, all carefully rendered extra palatable in order that they
+may put upon their bodies the burden of throwing off an enormous amount
+of superfluous food. A hundred years from now people will be as ashamed
+of us for our piggishness as we are of our eighteenth-century forbears
+for their wine-swilling to the detriment of their descendants. A dinner
+party of to-day bears no more relation to a rational gathering of
+rational people for the purpose of rational social intercourse than--"
+
+He had run on with his usual astonishing loquacity without drawing
+breath, overwhelming Lydia with a fresh flood of words when she tried to
+break in; but she now sprang up and motioned him peremptorily to
+silence.
+
+"Please, please, Godfather, don't! I asked you not to unsettle
+me--you're not kind to do it! You're not kind! I must think it's
+important and, and--the necessary thing to do. I _must_!" She put her
+hands over her eyes as she spoke. She was trying to shut out a vision of
+Paul's embittered face of wrathful chagrin. "That's the trouble with
+me," she went on. "Something in me makes it hard for me to think it
+important enough to give up everything else for it--and I--"
+
+"Why '_must_' you?" asked the doctor bluntly, crumpling his damp
+dishcloth into a ball.
+
+Lydia looked at him and saw Paul so evidently that the doctor saw with
+her. "I must! I _must_!" she only repeated.
+
+Dr. Melton opened his mouth wide, closed it again with a snap, and threw
+the tightly wadded ball in his hand passionately upon the floor with the
+gesture of an angry child. Lydia was standing now, looking down at the
+red-faced little man as he peered up at her after his silent outbreak.
+His attitude of fury so contrasted with the pacific white apron which
+enveloped him, that she broke out into a laugh. Even as she laughed and
+turned away to answer a knock at the door, she was acutely thankful that
+it was not with Paul that she had been set upon by that swiftly mobile
+change of humor, that it was not at Paul that she had launched that
+disrespectful mirth.
+
+The person who knocked proved to be a very large, rosy-cheeked female,
+who might be a big, overgrown child or a preposterously immature woman
+for all Lydia, looking at her in perplexity, could make out. She felt no
+thrill of premonition as this individual advanced into the kitchen, a
+pair of immense red hands folded before her.
+
+"I'm Anastasia O'Hern, ma'am," she announced with a thick accent of
+County Clare and a self-confident, good-humored smile, "though mostly
+I'm called 'Stashie--and I'm just over from th' old country to my Aunt
+Bridgie that washed for you till the rheumatism got her, and when she
+told me about what you'd done for her and Patsy--how you'd sent off that
+ould divil where she couldn't torment Patsy no more, and him as glad of
+it as Aunt Bridgie herself, just like she knew he would be, and what an
+awful time you do be havin' with gurrls, and a baby comin', I says to
+myself and to Aunt Bridgie, 'There's the lady I'm goin' to worrk for if
+she'll lave me do ut,' and Aunt Bridgie was readin' to me in the paper
+about your gran' dinner party last night and I says to her and to
+myself, 'There'll be a main lot of dishes to be washed th' day and I'd
+better step over and begin.'"
+
+She pulled off the shawl that had covered her head of flaming hair, and
+smiled broadly at her two interlocutors, who remained motionless,
+staring at her in an ecstasy of astonishment.
+
+As she looked into Lydia's pale face and reddened eyes, the smile died
+away. She clasped her big hands with a pitying gesture, and cried out a
+Gaelic exclamation of compassion with a much-moved accent; then, "It's
+time I was here," she told herself. She wiped her eyes, passed the back
+of her hand over her nose with a sniff, picked up the dishcloth from the
+floor, and advanced upon a pile of dirty silver. Her massive bulk shook
+the floor.
+
+"I don't know no more about housework than Casey's pig," she told them
+cheerfully, "but Aunt Bridgie says in America they don't none of the
+gurrls know nothing. They just hold their jobs because their ladies know
+they couldn't do no better to change, and maybe I can learn. I want to
+help."
+
+She emptied the silver into the dishwater with a splash, and set to
+work, turning her broad face to them to say familiarly over her
+shoulder to Lydia, "Now, just you go and lie down and send the little
+ould gentleman about his business. You need to be quiet--for the sake of
+the one that's coming; and don't you forget I'm here. I'm--_here_!"
+
+Dr. Melton drew Lydia away silently, and not until they had put two
+rooms between them and the kitchen did they dare face each other. With
+that first interchange of looks came peals of laughter--Lydia's light,
+ringing laughter--to hear which the doctor offered up heartfelt
+thanksgivings.
+
+"That is your fate, Lydia," he said finally, wiping his eyes.
+
+"Don't you just love her?" Lydia cried. "Isn't she the most _human_
+thing!"
+
+"Do you remember Maeterlinck's theory that every soul summons--"
+
+Lydia interrupted to say with a wry, humorous mouth, "You know I don't
+know anything. Don't ask me if I remember things."
+
+"Well, Maeterlinck has one of his fanciful theories that everybody calls
+to him from the unknown those elements that he most needs, which are
+most in harmony with--"
+
+"I caught a good solid element that time," cried Lydia, laughing again.
+
+"She's embodied Loyalty," said the doctor. "It breathes from every
+pore."
+
+"She's going to smash my cut glass and china something awful," Lydia
+foretold.
+
+Dr. Melton took his godchild by the shoulders and shook her. "Now, Lydia
+Emery, you listen to me! I don't often issue an absolute command, if I
+am your physician, but I do now. You _let_ her smash your china and cut
+glass, and all the rest of your devastating trash she can lay her hands
+on, rather than lose her--until after September, anyhow! It's a direct
+reward of virtue for your having shipped the 'ould divil'!"
+
+Lydia's face clouded. "I'm afraid Paul won't think her much of a
+substitute for Ellen," she murmured, "and we'll have to find a cook
+somehow even if this one learns enough to be second girl."
+
+"Second girl!" ejaculated the doctor. "She's a human being with a
+capacity for loyalty."
+
+"She's evidently awfully incompetent--"
+
+The doctor snorted. "Competence--I loathe the word! It's used now to
+cover all imaginable sins, as folks used to excuse all manner of
+rascality in a good swordsman. We're beyond the frontier period now when
+competence was a matter of life and death. We ought to begin to have
+some glimmering realization that there are other--"
+
+"_Oh_, what a hand for talk!" said Lydia.
+
+The doctor rejoiced at her laughing impatience. He thought to himself,
+as he looked at her standing in the doorway and waving good-by to him,
+that she seemed a very different creature from the drooping and
+tearful--he interrupted his chain of thought as he boarded his car, to
+exclaim, "May she live long, that heavy-handed, vivifying Celt!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+THE VOICES IN THE WOOD
+
+
+Lydia had not been mistaken in her premonition of Paul's attitude toward
+the new maid. He found her quite unendurable, but the direful stories
+told by their Bellevue acquaintances about the literal impossibility of
+keeping servants during the hot season induced him to postpone his wrath
+against the awkward, irreverent, too familiar Irishwoman until after
+Lydia should feel more herself. Paul's wrath lost nothing by keeping.
+
+To Lydia, on the contrary, Anastasia's loyalty and devotion were
+inexpressibly comforting during the trying days of that summer. Her
+servant's loving heart radiated warmth and cheer throughout all her
+life. One day, when her mother protested against 'Stashie's habit of
+familiar conversation with the family (they had all soon adopted the
+Irish diminutive of her name), Lydia said: "I can not be too thankful
+for 'Stashie's love and kindness."
+
+Mrs. Emery was outraged. "Good gracious, Lydia! What things you do say."
+
+"Why not? Because she hasn't been to college? Neither have I. She's as
+well educated as I am, and a great deal better woman."
+
+"Why, what are you talking about? She can't read!"
+
+"I don't," said Lydia. "That's worse."
+
+Her mother turned the conversation, thinking she would be glad when this
+period of high-strung nerves and fancies should be over. She told Dr.
+Melton that it seemed to her that "Lydia took it very hard," and she
+supposed they couldn't expect her to be herself until after September.
+
+The doctor answered: "Oh, there's a great deal of nonsense about that
+kind of talk. A normal woman--and, thank Heaven, Lydia's that to the
+last degree--has the whole universe back of her. Lydia's always balanced
+on a hair trigger, it's true, but she _is_ balanced! And now all nature
+is rallying to her like an army with banners."
+
+"Ah, you never went through it yourself!" Mrs. Emery retreated to the
+safe stronghold of matronhood. "You don't know! I had strange fancies,
+like Lydia's. Women always do."
+
+Another one of Lydia's fancies of that summer drove her to a strange
+disregard of caste rules. It came through a sudden impulse of compassion
+one hot midsummer day when Miss Burgess hobbled up the driveway in the
+hope of gleaning some Bellevue society notes.
+
+"It's a terrible time of year, Miss Lydia," she said, sinking into a
+chair with a long, quavering sigh. "One drops from thirty and sometimes
+forty dollars a week to twenty or less; and it's so hard on one's feet,
+being on them in hot weather. I assure you mine ache like the toothache.
+And expenses are as high as in winter, or worse, when you have an
+invalid to look out for. Out here in breezy Bellevue you've no
+conception how hot it is on Main Street. And Mother _feels_ the heat!"
+
+All this she said, not complainingly, but in her usual twittering manner
+of imparting information, as though it were an incident of a
+five-o'clock tea, but Lydia felt a pang of remorse for her usual
+thoughtless attitude of exasperated hilarity over Miss Burgess'
+peculiarities. She noticed that the kind, vacuous face was beginning to
+look more than middle-aged, and that the scanty hair above it was
+whitening rapidly.
+
+"Why, bring your mother out here for the day, why don't you, any time!"
+she said impulsively. "I can't have any social engagements, you know,
+the way I am, and Paul's away a good deal of the time, and 'Stashie and
+I can get you tea and eggs and toast, at least. I'd love to have her.
+Now, any morning that threatens heat, just you telephone you're both
+coming to spend the day."
+
+She felt quite strange at the thought that she had never seen the
+mother of this devoted, unselfish, affectionate, lifelong acquaintance.
+
+But Miss Burgess, though moved almost to tears at Lydia's "kind
+thoughtfulness," clung steadfastly to her standards. She had always
+known that she must not presume on her "exceptional opportunities for
+acquaintance with Endbury's social leaders," she told Lydia, nor take
+advantage of any inadvertent kindness of theirs. Her mother would be the
+first one to blame her if she did; her mother knew the world very well.
+She went away, murmuring broken thanks and protestations of devotion.
+
+Lydia looked after her, disappointed. She had been quite stirred by the
+hope of giving some pleasure. There was little to break the long,
+lonely, monotonous expectancy of her life. And yet nothing surprised
+those who knew her better than her equable physical poise during this
+time of trial and discomfort. Everyone had expected so high-strung a
+creature to be "half-wild with nerves." But Lydia, although she
+continued to say occasional disconcerting things, seemed on the whole to
+be gaining maturity and firmness of purpose. Paul was away a great deal
+that summer and she had many long, solitary hours to pass--a singular
+contrast to the feverish hurry of the winter "season." Her old habit of
+involuntary questioning scrutiny came back and it is possible that her
+motto of "action at all costs" was passed under a closer mental review
+than during the winter; but though she went frequently to see her
+godfather and Mrs. Sandworth, she did not break her silence on whatever
+thoughts were occupying her mind, except in one brief, questioning
+explosion. This was on the occasion of her last visit to Endbury before
+her confinement, a few days after her call from Flora Burgess. It had
+occurred to her that they might know something about the reporter's
+family and she stopped in after her shopping to inquire.
+
+She found her aunt and her godfather sitting in the deeply shaded, old
+grape arbor in their back yard; Dr. Melton with a book, as always, Mrs.
+Sandworth ungirdled and expansive, tinkling an ice-filled cup and crying
+out upon the weather.
+
+"Sit down, Lydia, for mercy's sake, and cool off. Yes; we know all about
+her; she's a patient of Marius'. Have some lemonade! Isn't it fearful!
+And Marius keeps reading improving books! It makes me so much hotter!
+She's English, you know."
+
+Dr. Melton looked up from his book to remark, with his usual judicial
+moderation, "I could strangle that old harridan with joy. She has been
+one of the most pernicious influences the women of this town have ever
+had."
+
+"Flora Burgess' mother? Why, I never heard of her in the world until the
+other day."
+
+"You can't smell sewer gas," said the doctor briefly.
+
+Mrs. Sandworth laughed. "Marius almost killed himself last winter to
+pull her through pneumonia. He worked over her night and day. Oh, Marius
+is a great deal better than he talks--strangle--!"
+
+"I'm a fool, if that's what you mean," said the doctor.
+
+"What is the matter with Flora Burgess' mother?" asked Lydia.
+
+"She's been a plague spot in this town for years--that
+lower-middle-class old Briton, with her beastly ideas of caste--ever
+since she began sending out her daughter to preach her damnable gospel
+to defenseless Endbury homes."
+
+"Marius--my _dear_!" chided Mrs. Sandworth--"The Gospel--damnable! You
+forget yourself!"
+
+The doctor did not laugh. "They're the ones," he went on, "who first
+started this idiotic idea of there being a social stigma attached to
+living in any but just such parts of town."
+
+"You live in just such a part of town yourself," said Lydia.
+
+"My good-for-nothing, pretentious, fashionable patients wouldn't come to
+me if I didn't."
+
+"Why do you have to have that kind of patients?"
+
+Occasionally, of late, with her godfather, Lydia had displayed a
+certain uncompromising directness, rather out of character with her
+usual gentleness, which the doctor found very disconcerting. He was
+silent now.
+
+Mrs. Sandworth's greater simplicity saw no difficulties in the way of an
+answer. "Because, Lydia, he's one of the Kentucky Meltons, and because,
+as I said, he talks a great deal worse than he is."
+
+"Because I am a fool," said the doctor again. This time he flushed as he
+spoke.
+
+"He doesn't like things common around him," went on Mrs. Sandworth, "any
+more than any gentleman does. And as for strangling old Mrs. Burgess,
+what good would that do? It can't be she who's influencing Endbury,
+because all it's trying to do is to be just like every other town in
+Ohio."
+
+"In the Union!" amended Dr. Melton grimly. He subsided after this into
+one of his fidgety, grimacing, finger-nail-gnawing reveries. He was
+wondering whether he dared tell Lydia of a talk he had had that morning
+with her father. After a look at Lydia's flushed, tired face, he decided
+that he would better not; but as the two women fell into a discussion of
+the layette, the conversation, Mr. Emery's nervous voice, his sharp,
+impatient gestures, came back to him vividly. He looked graver and
+graver, as he did after each visit to his old friend, and after each
+fruitless exhortation to "go slow and rest more." Mr. Emery was in the
+midst of a very important trial and, as he had very reasonably reminded
+his physician, this was not a good time to relax his grasp on things.
+"Now I'm back in practice, in competition with younger men, I _can't_
+sag back! It's absurd to ask it of me."
+
+"You were a fool to go back into practice at your age."
+
+"A fool! I've doubled my income."
+
+"Yes; and your arteries--look here, suppose you were dead. The bar would
+get along without you, wouldn't it?"
+
+"But I'm not dead," the other truthfully opposed to this fallacious
+supposition, and turned again to his papers.
+
+The doctor shut his medicine case with a spiteful snap. "Don't fool
+yourself that it's devotion to the common weal that drives you ahead!
+Don't make a pretty picture of yourself as working to the last in heroic
+service of your fellow-man! You know, as I know, that if you dropped out
+this minute, American jurisprudence would continue on its triumphant,
+misguided way quite as energetically as now."
+
+Mr. Emery looked up, dropping for once the mask of humorous tolerance
+with which he was accustomed to hide any real preoccupation of his own.
+"Look here, Melton, I'm too nervous to stand much fooling these days. If
+you want to know the reason why I'm going on, I'll tell you. I've got
+to. I need the money."
+
+"Gracious powers! Did you get caught in that B. and R. slump?"
+
+The Judge smiled a little bitterly. "No; I haven't lost any money--for a
+very good reason. I never was ahead enough to have any to lose. Haven't
+you any idea of what the cost of living the way we do--"
+
+Dr. Melton interrupted him, wild-eyed: "Why, Nat Emery! You have
+yourself and your wife to feed and clothe and shelter--and you tell me
+that costs so much that you can't stop working when there's--"
+
+"Oh, go away, Melton; you make me tired!" The Judge made a weary gesture
+of dismissal. "You're always talking like a child, or a preacher, about
+how things _might_ be! You know what an establishment like ours costs to
+keep up, as well as I do. I'm in it--we've sort of gradually got in
+deeper and deeper, the way folks do--and it would take a thousand times
+more out of me to break loose than to go on. You're an old fuss, anyhow.
+I'm all right. Only for the Lord's sake leave me quiet now."
+
+The doctor shivered and put his hand over his eyes as he remembered how,
+to his physician's eye, the increasing ill health of his old friend
+gleamed lividly from his white face.
+
+Mrs. Sandworth brought him back to the present with an astonished "Good
+gracious! how anybody can even _pretend_ to shiver on a day like this!"
+She added: "Look here, Marius, are you going to sit there and moon all
+the afternoon? Here's Lydia going already."
+
+Seasoned to his eccentricities as she was, she was startled by his
+answer. "Julia," he said solemnly, "did you ever consider how many kinds
+of murder aren't mentioned in the statute books?"
+
+"Marius! What ideas! Remember Lydia!"
+
+"Oh, I remember Lydia!" he said soberly. He went to lay a hand fondly on
+her shoulder. "Are you really going, my dear? I'll walk along to the
+waiting-room with you."
+
+"Don't talk her to death!" cried Mrs. Sandworth after them.
+
+"I won't say a word," he answered.
+
+It was a promise that he almost literally kept. He was in one of the
+exaggeratedly humble moods which alternated with his florid, talkative,
+cock-sure periods.
+
+Lydia, too, was quite thoughtful and subdued. They descended in a
+complete silence the dusty street, blazing in the late afternoon sun,
+and passed into the inferno of a crowded city square in midsummer. As
+they stood before the waiting-room, Lydia asked suddenly: "Godfather,
+how can we, any of us, do any better?"
+
+"God knows!" he said, with a gesture of impotence, and went his way.
+
+Lydia entered the waiting-room and went to ask a man in uniform when the
+next car left for Bellevue.
+
+"There's been an accident in the power-house, lady," he told her, "and
+that line ain't runnin'."
+
+Lydia gave an exclamation of dismay. "But I must get back to Bellevue
+to-night!"
+
+Paul was out of town, but she knew the agonies of anxiety 'Stashie would
+suffer if she did not appear. "Oh, but I can telephone," she reminded
+herself.
+
+"You kin get out there if you don't mind takin' the long way around,"
+the man explained with a friendly interest. "If you take the Garfield
+line and change at Ironton to the Onteora branch, it'll bring you back
+on the other side of Bellevue, and Bellevue ain't so big but what it
+won't be a very long walk to where you live."
+
+Lydia thanked him, touched, as she so often was, with the kind and, to
+her, welcome absence of impersonality in working people; and, assuring
+herself that she had time enough to eat something before her car's
+departure, betook herself to a dairy lunch-room where she ate a
+conscientiously substantial supper. The heat of the day had left her
+little appetite; but to "take care of herself" now seemed at last one of
+the worth-while things to do which she had always had so eager a
+longing.
+
+At seven o'clock she took the trolley pointed out to her by her friend,
+the starter, who noticed and remembered her when she returned to the
+waiting-room. The evening rush was over, and for some time she was the
+only passenger. Then a very tired-looking, middle-aged man, an
+accountant perhaps, in a shabby alpaca coat, boarded the car and sank at
+once into a restless doze, his heat-paled face nodding about like a
+broken-necked doll's. Lydia herself felt heavy on her the death-like
+fatigue which the last weeks had brought to her, but she was not sleepy.
+She looked out intently at the flat, fertile, kindly country, gradually
+darkening in the summer twilight. She was very fond of her home
+landscape. She had not taken so considerable a journey on a trolley for
+a long time--perhaps not since the trip to the Mallory house-party. That
+was a long time ago.
+
+At the edge of thick woods the car came to a sudden stop. The lights
+went out. The conductor disappeared, twitched at the trolley, and went
+around for a consultation with the motorman, who had at once
+philosophically pulled off his worn glove and sat down on the step.
+"Power's off!" he called back casually into the car to the accountant,
+who had started up wildly, with the idea, apparently, that he had been
+carried past his station. "We've got to wait till they turn her on
+again."
+
+"How long'll that be?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. The whole system is on the bum to-day. Maybe half an
+hour; maybe more. Better take another nap."
+
+The accountant looked around the car, encountered Lydia's eyes, and
+smiled sheepishly. After a time of silent waiting, enlivened only by the
+murmur of the conversation between the motorman and the conductor
+outside, the gray-haired man suggested to Lydia that it would be cooler
+out under the trees, and if she would like to go he would be glad to
+help her. When he had her established on a grassy bank he forbore
+further talk, and sat so still that, as the quiet moments slipped by,
+Lydia almost forgot him.
+
+It was singularly pleasant there, with the rustling blackness of the
+wood behind them, and before them the sweep of the open farming country,
+shimmering faintly in the light of the stars now beginning to show in
+the great unbroken arch of the heavens.
+
+Here the talk of the two men on the steps of the car was distinctly
+audible, and Lydia, with much interest, pieced together a character and
+life-history for each out of their desultory, friendly chat; but
+presently they too fell silent, listening to the stir of the night
+breezes in the forest. Lydia leaned her head against a tree and closed
+her eyes.
+
+She never knew if it were from a doze, or but from a reverie that she
+was aroused by a sudden thrilling sound back of her--the clear, deep
+voice of a distant 'cello. Her heart began to beat faster, as it always
+did at the sound of music, and she sat up amazed, looking back into the
+intense blackness of the wood. And then, like a waking dream, came a
+flood of melody from what seemed to her an angel choir--fresh young
+voices, throbbing and proclaiming through the summer night some joyous,
+ever-ascending message. Lydia felt her pulses loud at her temples.
+Almost a faintness of pleasure came over her. There was something
+ineffably sweet about the disembodied voices sending their triumphant
+chant up to the stars.
+
+The sound stopped as suddenly as it began. The motorman stirred and
+drew a long breath. "They do fine, don't they?" he said. "My oldest
+girl's learning to sing alto with them."
+
+"He ain't musical himself, is he?" asked the conductor.
+
+"No; _he_ ain't. It's some Dutch friends that does the playing. But he
+got the whole thing up, and runs the children. It's a nawful good thing
+for _them_, let me tell you."
+
+"What'd he do it for, I wonder," queried the conductor idly.
+
+"Aw, I don't know. He's kind o' funny, anyhow. Said he wanted to teach
+young folks how to enjoy 'emselves without spending money. That kind of
+talk hits their _folks_ in the right spot, you bet. He owns a slice of
+this farm, you know, and he's given some of the younger kids pieces of
+ground for gardens, and he's got up a night class in carpentering for
+young fellows that work in town all day. He's a crack-a-jack of a
+carpenter himself."
+
+"He'll run into the unions if he don't look out," prophesied the
+conductor.
+
+"I guess likely," assented the motorman. "They got after Dielman the
+other day, did you hear, because he--" The talk drifted to gossip of the
+world of work-people.
+
+It stopped short as the 'cello again sent out its rich, vibrant
+introduction to the peal of full-throated joy. There seemed to be no
+other sound in all the enchanted, starlit world than this fervid
+harmony.
+
+This time it did not stop, but went on and on, swelling and dying away
+and bursting out again into new ecstasies. In one of the pauses, when
+nothing but the 'cello's chant came to her ears, Lydia suddenly heard
+mingling with it the sweet, faint voice of a little stream whispering
+vaguely, near her. It sounded almost like rain on autumn leaves. The
+lights in the car flared up, blinding white, but the two men on the step
+did not stir. The conductor sat with his arms folded on his knees, his
+head on his arms. The motorman leaned against the end of the car. When
+the music finally died, after one long, ringing, exultant shout, no one
+moved for a time.
+
+Then the motorman stood up, drawing on his glove.
+
+"Quite a concert!" said the conductor, starting for the back platform.
+
+"They do _fine_!" repeated the motorman.
+
+The accountant came forward from the shadow and helped Lydia up the
+steps. There were traces of tears on his tired face.
+
+                 *       *       *       *       *
+
+In September, when her mother leaned over her to say in a joyful,
+trembling voice, "Oh, Lydia, it's a girl, a darling little girl!" Lydia
+opened her white lips to say, "She is Ariadne."
+
+"What did you say?" asked her mother.
+
+"We must see that she has the clue," said Lydia faintly.
+
+Mrs. Emery tiptoed to the doctor. "Keep her very quiet," she whispered;
+"she is a little out of her head."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+FOR ARIADNE'S SAKE
+
+
+Little Ariadne was six months old before Lydia could begin to make the
+slightest effort to resume the social routine of her life. This was not
+at all on account of ill health, for she had recovered her strength
+rapidly and completely, and, like a good many normal women, had found
+maternity a solvent of various slight physical disorders of her
+girlhood. She felt now a more assured physical poise than ever before,
+and could not attribute her disappearance from Endbury social life to
+weakness. The fact was that Dr. Melton had upheld her in her wish to
+nurse her baby herself, which limited her to very short absences from
+the house and to a very quiet life within doors. She also discovered
+that the servant problem was by no means simplified by the new member of
+the family. "Girls" had always been unwilling to come out to Bellevue
+because of the distance from their friends and followers, and they now
+put forth another universally recognized obstacle in the phrase, "I
+never work out where there is a baby. They make so much dirt." Anastasia
+O'Hern was there, to be sure--heavy-handed, warm-hearted 'Stashie, who
+took the new little girl to her loyal spinster heart and wept tears of
+joy over her safe arrival; but 'Stashie had proved, as Paul predicted
+from the first time he saw her, incorrigibly rattle-headed and
+loose-ended. She had learned to prepare a number of simple, homely
+dishes, quite enough to supply the actual needs of the everyday
+household, and what she cooked was unusually palatable. She had the
+Celtic feeling for savoriness. She had also managed, under Lydia's
+zealous tuition, to overcome the Celtic tolerance for dirt, and thanks
+to her square, powerful body, as strong as a ditch-digger's, she made
+light work of keeping the house in a most gratifying state of
+cleanliness.
+
+But there were gaps in her equipment that were not to be filled by any
+amount of tuition. In the first place, as Paul said of her, she was as
+much like the traditional trim maid as a hippopotamus is like a gazelle.
+Furthermore, as Dr. Melton summed up the matter in answer to one of
+Paul's outbreaks against her, she was utterly incapable of comprehending
+that satisfied vanity is the vital element in human life. For anything
+that pertained to the appearance of things, 'Stashie was deaf, dumb and
+blind. She would as soon as not put one of her savory stews on the table
+in an earthen crock, and she never could be trusted to set the table
+properly. There were always some kitchen spoons among the silver, and
+the dishes looked, as Paul said, "as though she had stood off and thrown
+them at a bull's-eye in the middle of the table." Moreover, she herself
+could not emancipate herself from the ideas of toilet gleaned in the
+little one-room cabin in County Clare. She was passionately devoted to
+Lydia, and took with the humblest gratitude any hints about the care of
+her person, but it was like trying to make a color-blind person into a
+painter! Anastasia could only love on her knees, and serve, and
+sympathize and cherish; she could not remember to comb her hair, or to
+put on a clean apron when she opened the door, even if it were Madame
+Hollister herself who rang. She had once opened to that important
+personage attired in a calico wrapper, a sweater, and a pair of rubber
+boots, having just come in from emptying the ashes--one of the heavy
+tasks, outside her regular work, which she took upon her strong, willing
+self. "But I was clane, and I got her into the house in two minutes from
+the time she rang, the poor old soul!" she protested to Lydia, who, at
+Paul's instance, had taken her to task.
+
+Lydia explained, "But Mr. Hollister's aunt is a person who would rather
+wait half an hour in the cold than see you without an apron."
+
+To which 'Stashie exclaimed, in awestruck wonder before the mysteries of
+creation, "Folks do be the beatin'est, don't they now, Mis' Hollister!"
+
+"And you must not speak of Mr. Hollister's aunt as a 'poor old soul,'"
+explained Lydia, apprehensive of Paul's wrath if he ever chanced to hear
+such a characterization.
+
+"But she is that," protested 'Stashie. "Anybody that's her age and
+hobbles around so crippled up with the rheumatism--my heart bleeds for
+'em."
+
+"She is very rich--" began Lydia, but after a moment's hesitation she
+had not continued her lesson in social value. She often found that
+'Stashie's questions brought her to a standstill.
+
+There was something lacking in the Irishwoman's mental outfit, namely,
+the capacity even to conceive that ideal of impersonal self-effacement,
+which, as Paul said truthfully, is the everywhere accepted standard for
+servants. Her loquacity was a never-ending joke to Madeleine Lowder and
+her husband, who were exulting in a couple of deft, silent, expensive
+Japanese "boys" and who, since Madeleine frankly expressed her horror at
+the bother of having children, seemed likely to continue ignorant,
+except at comfortable second-hand, of harassing domestic difficulties.
+
+If Lydia had not been in such dire need of another pair of hands than
+her own slender ones, or if the supply from Endbury intelligence offices
+had been a whit less unreliable and uncertain, she would not have felt
+justified in retaining the burly, uncouth Celt, in spite of her own
+affection, so intensely did Paul dislike her. As it was, she felt guilty
+for her presence and miserably responsible for her homeliness of
+conduct. 'Stashie was a constant point of friction between husband and
+wife, and Lydia was trying with desperate ingenuity to avoid points of
+friction by some other method than the usual Endbury one of divided
+interests. Many times she lay awake at night, convinced that her duty
+was to dismiss Anastasia; only to rise in the morning equally convinced
+that things without her would be in the long run even harder and more
+disagreeable for Paul than they were now. The upshot of the matter was
+that she herself was a very incompetent person, she was remorsefully
+sure of that; although her mother and Marietta and Paul's aunt all told
+her that she need expect nothing during the first year of a baby's life
+but one wretched round of domestic confusion.
+
+Lydia did not find it so. She was immensely occupied, it is true, for
+though Ariadne was a strong, healthy child, who spent most of her time,
+her grandmother complained, in sleeping, to Lydia's more intimate
+contact with the situation there seemed to be more things to be done for
+the baby, in addition to the usual cares of housekeeping, than could
+possibly be crowded into twenty-four hours. And yet she was happier
+during those six months than ever before in her life; happier than she
+had ever dreamed anyone could be. She stepped about incessantly from one
+task to another and was very tired at night, but there was no nervous
+strain on her, and she had no moments of blasting skepticism as to the
+value of her labors.
+
+Everything she did, even the most menial tasks connected with the baby,
+was dignified, to her mind, by its usefulness; and she so systematized
+and organized her busy days that she was always ahead of her work. Paul
+was obliged to alter his judgment of her as impractical and
+incapable--although of course the dearest and sweetest of little
+wives--for nothing could have been more competent than the way she
+managed her baby and her simple housekeeping. Indeed, there came to the
+young husband's mind not infrequently, and always with a slight aroma of
+bitterness, the conviction that Lydia was perfectly able to do whatever
+she really wished to do and considered important; and that previous
+conditions must have been due to her unwillingness to set herself
+seriously at the problems before her. It was a new theory about his
+wife's character, which the intelligent young man laid by on a mental
+shelf for future use after this period of intense domesticity should be
+past.
+
+At present, he accepted thankfully his clean house and his savory food,
+was not too much put out by 'Stashie's eccentricities, since there was
+no one but the immediate families to see them, and rejoiced with a
+whimsical tenderness in Lydia's passion of satisfaction with her baby.
+He saw so little of the droll, sleeping, eating little mite that he
+could not as yet take it very seriously as his baby. But it was, on the
+whole, a happy half-year for him too. He was much moved and pleased by
+Lydia's joy. He had meant to make his wife happy.
+
+Lydia herself was transported by the mere physical intoxication of new
+motherhood, a potion more exciting, so her much experienced physician
+said, than any wine ever fermented. She hung over her sleeping baby,
+poring upon the exquisite fineness of the skin, upon the rosy little
+mouth, still sucking comically at an imaginary meal, upon the dimpled,
+fragile hands, upon the peaceful relaxation of the body, till the very
+trusting, appealing essence of babyhood flooded her senses like a strong
+drug; and when the child was awake, and she could bathe the much creased
+little body, and handle the soft arms, and drop passionate kisses on the
+satin-smooth skin, and rub her cheek on the downy head, she found
+herself sometimes trembling and dizzy with emotion. She felt constantly
+buoyed up by a deep trust and belief in life which she had not known
+before. The huge and steadying continuity of existence was revealed to
+her in those days. It was a revelation that was never to leave her. She
+outgrew definitely the sense of the fragmentary futility of living which
+had always been, inarticulate, unvoiced, but intensely felt, the torment
+of her earlier life.
+
+It grieved her generous heart and her aspiration to share all with her
+husband that the exigences of his busy life deprived him of any
+knowledge of this newly-opened well of sweet waters, that he had
+nothing from his parenthood but an amused, half shame-faced pride in
+points about the baby which, he was informed, were creditable.
+
+At a faint hint of this feeling on Lydia's part, her sister-in-law broke
+into her good-natured laughter at Lydia's notions. "What can a man know
+about a baby?" she cried conclusively.
+
+"Why, I didn't know about one till Ariadne came. I learned on her.
+What's to hinder a man's doing the same thing?"
+
+Madeleine was so much amused by this fantastic idea that she repeated it
+to Dr. Melton, who came in just then.
+
+"Don't it take _Lydia_!" she appealed to him.
+
+The doctor considered the lovely, fair-haired creature in silence for a
+moment before answering. Then, "Yes; of course you're right," he
+assented. "It's a strictly feminine monopoly. It's as true that all men
+are incapable of understanding the significance of a baby in the
+universe and in their own lives, as it is true that all women love
+babies and desire them." His tone was full of a heavy significance. He
+could never keep his temper with Paul's sister.
+
+Madeleine received this without a quiver. She neither blushed nor looked
+in the least abashed, but there was an unnecessary firmness in her voice
+as she answered, looking him steadily in the eye: "Exactly! That's just
+what I've been telling Lydia." She often said that she was the only
+woman in Endbury who wasn't afraid of that impertinent little doctor.
+
+After Madeleine had gone away, Lydia looked at her godfather with
+shining eyes. "I am living! I am living!" she told him, holding up the
+baby to him with a gesture infinitely significant; "and I like it as
+well as I thought I should!"
+
+"Most people do," he informed her, "when they get a peck at it. It
+generally takes something cataclysmic, too, to tear them loose from
+their squirrel-cages--like babies, or getting converted."
+
+If he thought that early married life could also be classed among these
+beneficently uprooting agencies, he kept his thoughts to himself.
+Lydia's marriage had been eminently free from disagreeable shocks or
+surprises, and amply deserved to be called successful in the usual
+reasonable and moderate application of that adjective to matrimony; but
+there had been nothing in it, certainly, to destroy even temporarily
+anyone's grasp on what are known as the realities of life.
+
+The doctor considered, and added to his last speech: "Getting converted
+is surer. Babies grow up!"
+
+Lydia felt that her godfather was right, and that babies gave one only a
+short respite, when, toward spring, she observed in all the inhabitants
+of her world repeated signs of uneasy dissatisfaction with her
+"submergence in domesticity," as Mrs. Emery put it in a family council.
+Her father inquired mildly, one day in March, with the touchingly vague
+interest he took in his children's affairs, if it weren't about time she
+returned a few calls and accepted some invitations, and began "to live
+_like_ folks again." "Ariadne isn't the first baby in the world," he
+concluded.
+
+"She's the first one _I_ ever had," Lydia reminded him, with the
+humorous smile that was so like his own.
+
+"Well, you mustn't forget, as so many young mothers do, that you're a
+member of society and a wife, as well as a wet-nurse," he said.
+
+Marietta had never resumed an easy or genial intercourse with the
+Hollisters since the affair of the dinner party, but she came to call at
+not infrequent intervals, and Paul's sister dropped in often, to "keep
+an eye on Lydia," as she told her husband. She had an affection for her
+sister-in-law, in spite of an exasperated amusement over her liability
+to break out with new ideas at unexpected moments. Both these ladies
+were loud in their exhortations to Lydia not to let maternity be in her
+life the encumbering, unbeautifying, too lengthy episode it was to women
+with less force of character than their own. "You do get so _out_ of
+things," Madeleine told her with her usual breathless italicizing, "if
+you stay away too long. You just never can catch up! There's a
+behind-the-timesy _smell_ about your clothes--honest, there is--if you
+let them go too long."
+
+Marietta added her quota of experienced wisdom to the discussion. "If
+you just hang over a baby all the time, you get morbid, and queer, and
+different."
+
+Madeleine had laughed, and summed up the matter with a terse, "Worse
+than that! You get left!"
+
+Lydia's elder brother, George, the rich one, who lived in Cleveland and
+manufactured rakes and hoes, wrote her one of his rare letters to the
+same effect. Lydia thought it likely that he had been moved to this
+unusual show of interest in her affairs by proddings from her mother and
+Marietta. If this surmise was correct, and if a similar request had been
+sent to Henry, the other member of the Emery family, the one who had
+married the grocer's daughter, the appeal had a strikingly different
+effect. From Oregon came an impetuous, slangily-worded exhortation to
+Lydia not to make a fool of herself and miss the best of life to live up
+to the tommyrot standard of old dry-as-dust Endbury. The Emerys heard
+but seldom from this erring son, and Lydia, who had been but a child
+when he left home, had never before received a letter from him. He wrote
+from a fruit farm in Oregon, the description of which, on the
+grandiloquent letter-head, gave an impression of ampleness and
+prosperity which was not contradicted by the full-blooded satisfaction
+in life which breathed from every line of the breezy, good-natured
+letter.
+
+The incident stirred Lydia's imagination. It spoke of a wider
+horizon--of a fresher air than that about her. She tried to remember the
+loud-talking, much-laughing, easy-going young man as she had seen him
+last. They were too far apart in years to have had much companionship,
+but there had been between them an unspoken affection which had never
+died. People always said that George and Marietta were alike and Lydia
+and Harry. To this Mrs. Emery always protested that Lydia wasn't in the
+_least_ like Henry, and she didn't know what people were talking about;
+but the remark gave a secret pleasure to Lydia. She, too, was very fond
+of laughing, and her brother's vein of light-hearted nonsense had been a
+great delight to her. It was not present in any of the rest of the
+family, and certainly did not show itself in her at this period of her
+life.
+
+During this time Paul's attention was concentrated on bringing about a
+reallotment of American Electric territory in the Middle West, an
+arrangement that would add several busy cities to his district and make
+a decided difference in his salary and commissions. He worked early and
+late in the Endbury office, and made many trips into all parts of the
+field, to gather data conclusive of the value of his scheme. Lydia had
+tried hard to get from him information enough to understand what it was
+all about, but he put her off with vague, fatigued assurances that it
+was too complicated for her to grasp, or for him to go over without his
+papers; that it would take him too long to explain, and that, anyhow,
+she could be sure of one thing--it was all straight, clean business,
+designed entirely to give the public better service and more work from
+everybody all 'round. Lydia did not doubt this. It was always a great
+source of satisfaction to her to feel secure and unshaken trust in her
+father's and her husband's business integrity, and she was sorry for
+Marietta, who could not, she feared, count among her spiritual
+possessions any such faith in Ralph. It was, on the other hand, one of
+her most unresigned regrets, that she was not allowed to share in these
+ideals for public service of her husband and father--these ideals so
+distantly glimpsed by her, and perhaps not very consciously felt by
+them. It was not that they refused to answer any one of her questions,
+but they were so little in the habit of articulating this phase of their
+activities that their tongues balked stubbornly before her ignorant and
+fumbling attempts to enter this inner chamber.
+
+"Oh, it's all right, Lydia! Just you trust me!" Paul would cry, with a
+hint of vexation in his voice, as if he felt that questions could mean
+only suspicion.
+
+Lydia's tentative efforts to construct a bridge between her world and
+his met constantly with this ill success. She had had so little training
+in bridge-building, she thought sadly.
+
+One evening that spring, such a futile attempt of hers was interrupted
+by the son of one of their neighbors, a lad of eighteen, who had just
+been given a subordinate position in his father's business. As he
+strolled up to their veranda steps, Lydia looked up from the dress she
+was enlarging for the rapidly growing baby and reflected that
+astonishingly rapid growth is the law of all healthy youth. The tall boy
+looked almost ludicrous to her in his ultra-correct man's outfit, so
+vividly did she recall him, three or four years before, in short
+trousers and round-collared shirt-waist. His smooth, rosy face had still
+the downy bloom of adolescence.
+
+"Howd' do, Walter!" said Paul, glancing up from a pile of blue-prints
+over which he had been straining his eyes in the fading evening light.
+
+"Evening," answered the boy, nodding and sitting down on the top step
+with one knee up. "D'you mind if I smoke, Mrs. Hollister?"
+
+"Not at all," she answered gravely, tickled by the elaborate
+carelessness with which he handled his new pipe.
+
+"What you working on, Hollister?" he went on with the manner of one old
+business man to another.
+
+Lydia hid a smile. She found him delicious. She began to think how she
+could make Dr. Melton laugh with her account of Walter the Man.
+
+"The lay-out of the new power-house--Elliott-Gridley works in Urbana,"
+answered Paul, in a straightforward, reasonable tone, a little absent.
+
+Lydia stopped smiling. It was a tone he had never used to answer any
+business question she had ever put to him. "I'm figuring on their
+generators," he went on in explanation.
+
+"Big contract?" asked Walter.
+
+"Two thousand kilowatt turbo generator," answered Paul.
+
+The other whistled. "Whew! I didn't know they had the cash!"
+
+"They haven't," said Paul briefly.
+
+"Oh, chattel-mortgage?" surmised the other.
+
+"Lease-contract," Paul corrected. "That doesn't have to be recorded."
+
+"What's the matter with recording it?"
+
+"Afraid of their credit. They don't want Dunn's sending all over
+creation that they've put chattel-mortgages on their equipment, do
+they?"
+
+"No; sure! I see." The boy grasped instantly, with a quick nod, the
+other's meaning. "Well, that's _one_ way of gettin' 'round it!" he added
+admiringly after an instant's pause.
+
+Lydia had laid down her work and was looking intently at her two
+companions. At this she gave a stifled exclamation which made the boy
+turn his head. "Say, Mrs. Hollister, aren't you looking kind of pale
+this evening?" he asked. "These first hot nights do take it out of a
+person, don't they? Mr. Hollister ought to take you to Put-in-Bay for a
+holiday. Momma'd take care of the baby for you and welcome. She's crazy
+about babies." He was again the overgrown school-boy that Lydia knew.
+The conversation drifted to indifferent topics. Lydia did not take her
+usual share in it, and when their caller had gone Paul inquired if she
+really were exhausted by the heat.
+
+"Oh, no," she said; "you know I don't mind the heat."
+
+"You didn't say much when Walter was here, and I--"
+
+"I was thinking," Lydia broke in. "I was thinking that I couldn't
+understand a word you and Walter were saying any more than if you were
+talking Hebrew. I was thinking that that little boy knows more about
+your business than I do."
+
+Paul did not attempt to deny this, but he laughed at her dramatic
+accent. "Sure, he does! And about how to tie a four-in-hand, and what's
+the best stud to wear at the back of a collar, and where to buy socks.
+What's that to you?"
+
+Lydia looked at him with quivering, silent lips.
+
+He answered, with a little heat: "Why, look-y here, Lydia, suppose I
+were a doctor. You wouldn't expect to know how many grains of morphine
+or what d'you call 'em I was going to use in--"
+
+"But Dr. Melton _is_ a doctor, and I know lots about what he thinks of
+as he lives day after day--there are other things besides technical
+details and grains of morphine--other problems--human things--Why, for
+instance, there's one question that torments him all the time--how much
+it's right to humor people who aren't sick but think they are. He talks
+to me a great deal about such--"
+
+Paul laughed, rising and gathering up his blue-prints. "Well, I can't
+think of any problem that torments me but the everlasting one of how to
+sell more generators and motors than my competitors. Come on indoors,
+Honey; I've got to have some light if I finish going over these
+to-night."
+
+His accent was evidently intended to end the discussion, and Lydia
+allowed it to do so, although the incident was one she could not put out
+of her mind. She watched Walter going back and forth to Endbury with a
+jealousy the absurdity of which she herself realized, and she listened
+with a painful intentness to the boy's talk during his occasional idle
+sojourns on their veranda steps. Yet she had been used to hearing Paul
+talk unintelligibly to the business associates whom, from time to time,
+he brought out to the house to dine and to talk business afterward.
+Somehow, she said to herself, it's being just _Walter_ seemed to bring
+it home to her. To have that boy--and yet she liked him, too, she
+thought. She looked sometimes into his fresh, innocently keen face with
+a yearning apprehension. Paul was amused at his precocious airs, and yet
+was not without respect for his rapidly developing business capacity. He
+said once, "Walter's a real nice boy. I shouldn't mind having a son like
+that myself!"
+
+The remark startled Lydia. If she were to have a son he _would_ be like
+that, she realized. And he would grow up and marry some--she sprang up
+and caught Ariadne to her in a sudden fierce embrace.
+
+"You'll break your back lifting that heavy baby 'round so," Paul
+remonstrated with justice.
+
+For all her aversion to the set forms of "society" as understood by
+Endbury, Lydia was fond of having people about her, "to try to get
+really acquainted with them" she said, and during that summer the
+Hollister veranda in the evening became a rendezvous for their Bellevue
+neighbors. Paul rather deplored the time wasted in this unprofitable
+variety of informal social life which, in his phrase, "counted for
+nothing" but he was always glad to see Walter. "At the rate he's going
+and the way he's taking hold, he'll be a valuable business friend in a
+few years," he said prophetically to Lydia, and he assumed more and more
+the airs of a comrade with the lad.
+
+One evening when Walter came lounging over to the veranda, Lydia was
+busy indoors, but later she stepped to the door in time to hear Paul
+say, laughing: "Well, for all that, he's not so good as Wellman Phelps'
+stenographer."
+
+"How so?" asked the boy, alert for a pleasantry from his elder.
+
+"Why, Phelps carries this fellow 'round with him everywhere he goes, has
+had him for years, and twice a week all he has to do is to say: 'Say,
+Fred; write my wife, will you?'"
+
+His listener broke out into a peal of boyish laughter. "Pretty good!" he
+applauded the joke.
+
+"It's a fact," Paul went on. "Fred writes it and signs it and sends it
+off, and Phelps never has to trouble his head about it."
+
+Lydia stepped back into the darkness of the hall.
+
+When she came out later, a misty figure in white, Paul rose, saying,
+"Well, Walter, I'll leave you to Mrs. Hollister now. I've got some work
+to do before I get to bed."
+
+Lydia sat silent, looking at the boy's face, clear and untarnished in
+the moonlight. He was looking dreamily away at the lawn, dappled with
+the shadow of the slender young trees. They seemed creatures scarcely
+more sylvan than he, sprawled, like a loitering faun with his hands
+clasped behind his head. His mouth had the pure, full outlines of a
+child's.
+
+"What are you thinking about, Walter?" Lydia asked him suddenly.
+
+He started, and brought his limpid gaze to hers. "About how to
+cross-index our follow-up letter catalogue better," he answered
+promptly.
+
+"Really? Really?" She leaned toward him, urging him to frankness.
+
+He was surprised at her tone. "Why, sure!" he told her. "Why not? What
+else?"
+
+Lydia said no more.
+
+She had never felt more helplessly her remoteness from her husband's
+world than during that spring. It was a sentiment that Paul, apparently,
+did not reciprocate. In spite of his frequent absences from home and his
+detached manner about most domestic questions, he had as definite ideas
+about his wife's resumption of her social duties as had everyone else.
+"It made him uneasy," as he put it, "to be losing so many points in the
+game."
+
+"Look here, my dear," he said one evening in spring when the question
+came up; "summer's almost here, and this winter's been as good as
+dropped right out. Can't you just pick up a few threads and make a
+beginning? It'll make it easier in the fall." He added, uneasily, "We
+don't want old Lowder and Madeleine to get ahead of us entirely, you
+know. You can leave the kid with 'Stashie, can't you, once in a while?
+She ought to be able to do _that_ much, I should think." He spoke as
+though he had assigned to her the simplest possible of all domestic
+undertakings. As Lydia made no response, he said finally, before
+attacking a pile of papers, "If I'm going to earn a lot more money, what
+good'll it do us if you don't do your share? Besides, we owe it to the
+kid. You want to do your best by your little girl, don't you?"
+
+As always, Lydia responded with a helpless alacrity to that appeal.
+"Oh, yes! Oh, yes! We must do our best for her." This phrase summed up
+the religion she had at last found after so much fervent, undirected
+search. The church, as she knew it, was chiefly the social center of
+various fashionable activities which differed from ordinary fashionable
+enterprises only in being used to bring in money, which money, handed
+over to the rector, disappeared into the maw of some unknown, voracious,
+charitable institution. And beyond the church there had been no element
+in the life she knew, that was not frankly materialistic. But now, as
+the miracle of awakening consciousness took place daily in her very
+sight, and as the first dawnings of a personality began to look out of
+her child's eyes, all Lydia's vague spiritual cravings, all the groping
+tendrils of her aspirations, clung about the conviction more and more
+summing up her inner life, that she must do her best for Ariadne, must
+make the world, into which that little new soul had come, a better place
+than she herself had found it. She felt as naïvely and passionately that
+her child must be saved the mistakes that she had made, as though she
+were the first mother who ever sent up over her baby's head that
+pitiful, universal prayer.
+
+The matter of the social duty of the young Hollisters was finally
+compromised by Lydia's accepting a number of invitations for the latter
+part of the season, and giving a series of big receptions in May. They
+were not by a hair nor a jot nor a tittle to be distinguished from their
+predecessors of the year before. As they seemed hardly adequate, Lydia
+suggested half-heartedly that they give a dinner party, but Paul
+replied, "With 'Stashie to pour soup down people's backs and ask them
+how their baby's whooping cough is, as she passes the potatoes?"
+
+The hot weather came with the rush that was always so unexpected and so
+invariable, and another season was over. It was a busy, silent,
+thoughtful summer for Lydia. Of course (much to Lydia's distress),
+Ariadne had been weaned when her mother had been forced to leave her to
+"go out" again, and this necessitated such anxious attention to her
+diet and general regimen during the hot weather that Lydia was very
+grateful to have little to interfere with her.
+
+The General Office had accepted provisionally Paul's redistributing
+plan, and in his anxiety to prove its value he was away from home more
+even than usual. The heat was terrible, but Lydia and he both knew no
+other climate, and Lydia loved the summer as the time of year when the
+fierceness of Nature forced on all her world a reluctant adjournment of
+their usual methods of spending their lives. She was absorbed in
+Ariadne, and the slow, blazing summer days were none too long for her.
+
+The child began to develop an individuality. She was a sensitive,
+quickly-responsive little thing; exactly, so Mrs. Emery said, like Lydia
+at her age, except that she seemed to have none of Lydia's native mirth,
+but, rather, a little pensive air that made her singularly appealing to
+all who saw her, and that pierced her mother's heart with an anguish of
+protecting love.
+
+Lydia said to her godfather one day, suddenly, "I wonder if people can
+be taught how to fight?"
+
+He had one of his flashes of intuition. "The baby, you mean?"
+
+Lydia evaded the directness of this. "Oh, in general, aren't folks
+better off if they like to fight for themselves? Don't they _have_ to?"
+
+He considered the question in one of his frowning silences, so long that
+Lydia started when he spoke again. "They don't need to fight with claws
+for their food, as they used to do. Things are arranged now so that the
+physically strong, who like such a life, are the ones who choose it.
+They get food for the others. Why shouldn't the morally strong fight for
+the weaker ones and make it possible for everyone to have a chance at
+developing the best of himself without having to battle with others to
+do it?"
+
+"That's pretty vague," said Lydia.
+
+"Why, look here," said the doctor. "You don't plow the field to plant
+the wheat that makes your bread. That's a man of a coarser physical
+fiber than yours, who is strengthened by the effort, and not exhausted
+as you would be. Why shouldn't the world be so organized that somebody
+of coarser moral texture than yours should do battle with the forces of
+materialism and tragic triviality that--"
+
+"But Ariadne's growing up! She will need all that so _soon_-- and the
+world won't be organized then, you know it won't--and she's no fighter
+by instinct, any more than--" She was silent. The doctor filled in her
+incomplete sentence mentally, and found no answer to make.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+"THROUGH PITY AND TERROR EFFECTING A PURIFICATION OF THE HEART"
+
+
+One hot day in August, Ariadne slept later than usual and when she woke
+was quite unlike her usual romping, active self. Her round face was
+deeply flushed, and she lay listlessly in her little bed, repulsing with
+a feeble fretfulness every attempt to give her food. Lydia's heart
+swelled so that she was choked with its palpitations. Paul was out of
+town. She was alone in the house except for her servant. To that
+ignorant warm heart she turned with an inexpressible thankfulness. "Oh,
+'Stashie! Stashie!" she called in a voice that brought the other
+clattering breathlessly up the stairs. "The baby! Look at the baby! And
+she won't touch her bottle."
+
+The tragic change in the Irishwoman's face as she looked at their
+darling, their anguished community of feeling--there was instantly a
+bond for the two women which wonderfully ignored all the dividing
+differences between them. Lydia felt herself--as she rarely did--not
+alone. It brought a wild comfort into her tumult. "'Stashie, you
+don't--you don't think she's--_sick?_" She brought the word out with
+horrified difficulty.
+
+'Stashie was running down the back stairs. "I'm 'phonin' to th' little
+ould doctor," she called over her shoulder.
+
+Lydia ran to catch up Ariadne. The child turned from her mother with a
+moan and closed her eyes heavily. A moment later, to Lydia's terror, she
+had sunk into a stupor.
+
+The doctor found mistress and maid hanging over the baby's bed with
+white faces and trembling lips, hand in hand, like sisters. He examined
+the child silently, swiftly, looking with a face of inscrutable
+blankness at the clinical thermometer with which he had taken her
+temperature. "Just turn her so she'll lie comfortably," he told
+'Stashie, "and then you stay with her a moment. I want a talk with your
+mistress."
+
+In the hall, he cast at Lydia a glance of almost angry exhortation to
+summon her strength. "Are you fit to be a mother?" he asked harshly.
+
+"Wait a minute," said Lydia; she drew a long breath and took hold of the
+balustrade. "Yes," she answered.
+
+"Ariadne's very sick. I oughtn't to have allowed you to wean her with
+hot weather coming on. You'd better wire Paul."
+
+"Yes," she said, not blenching. "What else can I do?"
+
+"'Phone to the hospital for a trained nurse, start some water boiling to
+sterilize things, and get somebody here in a hurry to go to the nearest
+drug store for me. I'll go back to her now."
+
+"Is she--is she--dangerously--?" asked Lydia in a low, steady voice.
+
+"Yes; she is," he said unsparingly.
+
+The telegram Lydia sent her husband read: "Ariadne suddenly taken very
+sick. Dr. Melton says dangerously. He thinks she does not suffer much,
+though she seems to. When shall I expect you?"
+
+The answer she received in a few hours read: "Have two nurses. Get
+Jones, Cleveland, consultation. Impossible to leave."
+
+It was handed her as she was running up the stairs with a pitcher of hot
+water. She read it, as she did everything that day, in a dreamlike
+rapidity and quietness, and showed it to Dr. Melton without comment. He
+handed it back without a word. Later, he turned for an instant from the
+little bed to say, irrelevantly, "Peterson, of Toledo, would be better
+than Jones, if I have to have anybody. But so far, it's simple
+enough--damnably simple."
+
+He was obliged to leave for a time after this, called by a patient at
+the point of death. That seemed quite natural to Lydia. Death was thick
+in the air. He left the baby to a clear-eyed, deft-handed, impersonal
+trained nurse, on whom Lydia waited slavishly, sitting motionless in a
+corner of the room until she was sent for something, then flying
+noiselessly upon her errand.
+
+Her mother and father were out of town, and Marietta limited herself to
+telephoning frequent inquiries. She told 'Stashie to tell her sister she
+knew she would be only in the way, with two nurses in the house. Lydia
+made 'Stashie answer all the telephone calls. She felt that if she broke
+her silence, if she tried to speak--and then she could not bear to be
+out of the sight of the little figure with the flushed cheeks, moving
+her head back and forth on the pillow and gazing about with bright,
+unseeing eyes. As night came on, she began to give, in a voice not her
+own, little piteous cries of suffering, or strange delirious mockeries
+of her pretty laughter and quaint, unintelligible, prattling talk. Once,
+as the long, hot night stood still, the baby called out, quite clearly:
+"Mamma! Mamma!" It was the first time she had ever said it.
+
+Lydia sprang up and rushed toward the bed like an insane person, her
+arms outstretched, her eyes glittering. Dr. Melton did not forbid her to
+take up her child, but he said in a neutral tone, "It would be better
+for her to lie perfectly quiet."
+
+Lydia stopped short, shuddering. The doctor did not take his eyes from
+his little patient. After a moment the mother went slowly back to her
+seat. "Hand me the thermometer," said the doctor to the nurse.
+
+In the early morning came a telegram from Paul. "Wire me frequently
+baby's condition. Spare no expense in treatment."
+
+Lydia answered: "Ariadne slightly worse. Doctor says crisis in three
+days."
+
+This time she put in no extra information as to the baby's suffering,
+and her message was under ten words, like his own. She despatched him
+thereafter a bulletin every four or five hours. They ran mostly to the
+effect that Ariadne was about the same.
+
+The doctor came and went, the nurses relieved each other, the telephone
+rang for Marietta's inquiries, Flora Burgess called once a day to get
+the news from 'Stashie. Lydia was slave to the nurses, alert for the
+slightest service she could render them, divining, with a desperate
+intuition, their needs before they were formulated. 'Stashie was the
+only person who paid the least attention to her, 'Stashie the only
+phenomena to break in on the solitude that surrounded her like an
+illimitable plain. 'Stashie made her eat. 'Stashie saw to it that once
+or twice she lay down. 'Stashie combed her hair, and bathed her white
+face--most of all, 'Stashie went about with eyes that reflected
+faithfully the suffering in Lydia's own. She said very little, but as
+they passed, the two women sometimes exchanged brief words: "Niver you
+think it possible, Mis' Hollister!"
+
+"No," Lydia would answer resolutely; "it's not possible."
+
+But as the hours slowly filed past the doctor assured her bluntly that
+it would be quite possible. "There's a fighting chance," he said, "and
+nothing more." He added relentlessly, "If I hadn't been such a fool as
+to let you wean her--"
+
+There was in his manner none of his usual tenderness to his godchild.
+One would have thought he scarcely saw her. He was the physician wholly.
+Lydia was grateful to him for this. She could not have borne his
+tenderness then, but his professional concentration left her horribly
+alone.
+
+No, not alone! There was always 'Stashie--silent 'Stashie, with red
+eyes, her heart bleeding. But even 'Stashie's loyal heart could not know
+all the bitterness of Lydia's. 'Stashie's breasts did not swell and
+throb, as if in mockery. 'Stashie did not hear, over and over, "If she
+had not been weaned--"
+
+On the night and near the hour when the crisis was expected, Lydia was
+at the end of the hall, where she had installed an oil-stove. She was
+heating water needed for some of the processes of the sick room. It had
+begun to steam up in the thick, hot night air, was singing loudly, and
+would boil in an instant. She sat looking at it in her tense, trembling
+quiet. There was no light but the blue flame of the stove.
+
+Suddenly there rang loudly in her ears the question to which she had
+deafened herself with such crucifying effort--"What if Ariadne should
+die?" It was as though someone had called to her. She looked down into
+the black abyss from which she had willfully turned away her eyes, and
+saw that it was fathomless. A throe of revolt and hatred shook her. She
+bowed her head to her knees, racked by an anguish compared with which
+the torture of childbirth was nothing; and out of this deadly pain came
+forth, as in childbirth, something alive--a vision as swift, as passing
+as a glimpse into the gates of Paradise; a blinding certainty of
+immensity, of the hugeness of the whole of which she and Ariadne were a
+part; of the sacredness of life, which was to be lived sacredly, even
+if-- She raised her head, living a more exalted instant than she had
+ever dreamed she would know.
+
+The water broke into quick, dancing bubbles. In a period of time
+incalculably short, transfiguration had come to her.
+
+The door at the other end of the hall opened and Dr. Melton's light,
+uneven footstep echoed back of her. She did not turn. He laid a hand on
+her shoulder. It was trembling, and with a wonderful consciousness of
+endless courage she turned to comfort him. His lips were twitching so
+that for an instant he could not speak. Then, "She'll pull through. I'm
+pretty sure now, she'll--" he got out and leaned against the wall.
+
+Lydia took him into a protecting embrace as though it were his baby who
+had turned back from the gates of death. She had come into a larger
+heritage. She was mother to all that suffered. Looking down on the head
+which, for an instant, lay on her bosom, she noticed how white the hair
+was. He was an old man, her godfather, he had been on a long strain--.
+He looked up at her. And then in an instant it was over. He had mastered
+himself and had grasped the handle of the basin.
+
+"How long has this been boiling?" he asked.
+
+Lydia pointed to her watch, hanging on the wall. "Three minutes by
+that," she said. "May I leave to tell 'Stashie?"
+
+The doctor nodded absently.
+
+Neither spoke of Paul.
+
+Lydia hurried across the dark, silent house with swift sureness. The
+happiness she was about to confer cast a radiance upon her. She touched
+the door to the servant's room, and ran her fingers lightly over it to
+find the knob. Faint as the noise was, it was answered instantly by a
+stir inside. There was a thud of bare feet and a quick rush. Lydia felt
+the door swing open before her in the darkness and spoke quickly to the
+trembling, breathing form she divined there, "The doctor says she's
+safe."
+
+Strong arms were about her, hot tears not her own rained down on her
+face. Before she knew it, she was swept to her knees, where, locked in
+the other's close embrace, she felt the big heart thump loud against her
+own and heard go up above her head a wild "Oh, God! Oh, Mary Mother! Oh,
+Christ! Oh, Mary Mother! Glory be to God! Hail, Mary, Mother of God!
+Thanks be to God! Thanks be--"
+
+Kneeling there in the blackness, with her servant's arms around her,
+Lydia thought it the first prayer she had ever heard.
+
+                 *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ariadne grew well with the miraculous rapidity of children, and when
+Paul came back was almost herself again, if a little thinner.
+
+It was upon Lydia that Paul's eyes fastened, Lydia very white, her face
+almost translucent, her starry eyes contradicting the tremor of her
+lips. He drew her to him, crying out: "Why, Lydia darling, you look as
+though you'd been drawn through a knot-hole! This has been enough sight
+harder on you than on the baby! What in the world wore _you_ out so? I
+thought you had two nurses!"
+
+He looked closely into her face, seeing more changes: "Why, you poor,
+poor, poor thing!" he said compassionately. "You look positively years
+older."
+
+"Oh, I am that," she told him, seeming to speak, oddly enough, he
+thought, exultantly.
+
+"You just shouldn't allow yourself to get so wrought up over Ariadne,"
+he expostulated affectionately. "You'll wear yourself out! What earthly
+good did it do the baby? Sickness is a matter for professionals, I tell
+you what! You had the two nurses and your precious old Dr. Melton that
+you swear by! What more could be done? That's the reason I didn't come
+back. I knew well enough that there wasn't an earthly thing I could do
+to help."
+
+Lydia looked at him so strangely that he noticed it. "Oh, of course I
+could have been company for you. But that was the _only_ thing! Getting
+the baby well was the business of the hour, _wasn't_ it now? And the
+doctor and nurses were looking out for that. Besides, you had 'Stashie
+to wait on you."
+
+"Yes; I had 'Stashie," admitted Lydia.
+
+Paul perceived uneasily some enigmatic quality in her quiet answer, and
+went on reasonably: "Now, Lydia, don't go making yourself out a martyr
+because I didn't come back. You know I'd have come if there was anything
+to be done! I'd have come from the ends of the earth to help you nurse
+her if we'd had to do that! But, thank the Lord, I make enough money so
+we could do better by the little tad than that!"
+
+"Suppose I had gone to the theater that night," asked Lydia slowly.
+"There was nothing I could do here."
+
+Paul was justifiably aggrieved. "Good Lord, Lydia! I wasn't off amusing
+myself! I was doing _business!_"
+
+His special accent for the word was never more pronounced.
+
+"Making money to pay for the trained nurses that saved her life," he
+ended. His conviction of the unanswerable force of this statement put
+him again in good humor. "Now, little madame, you listen to me. You're
+going to take a junketing honeymoon off with me, or I'll know the reason
+why! I'm going to take you up to Put-in-Bay for a vacation! Pretty near
+all our card-club gang are there now, and we'll have a gay old time and
+cheer you up! I bet you just let yourself go, and worried yourself into
+a fever, didn't you?"
+
+During this speech Lydia stood leaning against him, feeling the cloth of
+his sleeve rough on her bare forearm, feeling the stir and life of his
+body, the warmth of his breath on her face. She had an impulse to scream
+wildly to him, as though to make him hear and stop and turn, before he
+finally disappeared from her sight; and she faced him dumbly. There were
+no words to tell him--she tried to speak, but before his absent, kind,
+wandering eyes, a foreknowledge of her own inarticulateness closed her
+lips. He had not been there, and so he would never know. She stirred,
+moved away, and rearranged the flowers in a vase. "Oh, yes; I worried,
+of course," she said. "The baby was awfully sick for three days."
+
+She felt desperately that she was failing in the most obvious duty not
+to try to make him understand what had happened in his absence. She
+bethought herself of one fact, the mere statement of which should tell
+him a thousand times more eloquently than words, something of what she
+had suffered. "The doctor told me twice that she wouldn't have been sick
+if she hadn't been weaned." She said this with an accent of immense
+significance, clasping her hands together hard.
+
+Paul was unpacking his suit-case. "Great Scott! You nursed her six
+months!" he said conclusively, over his shoulder. "Besides, you _had_ to
+wean her--don't you remember?"
+
+"Oh, yes; I remember," said Lydia. Her hands dropped to her sides.
+
+"Don't they get over things quickly?" commented Paul, looking around at
+the baby. "To see her creeping around like a little hop-toad and
+squeaking that rubber bunny--why, I declare, I don't believe that
+anything's been the matter with her at all. You and the doctor lost your
+nerve, I guess."
+
+Three or four days later he was called away again. Their regular routine
+began. The long, slow days, slid past the house in Bellevue in endless,
+dreamy procession. Ariadne grew fast, developing constantly new
+faculties, new powers. By the end of the summer she was no longer a
+baby, but a person. The young mother felt the same mysterious forces of
+change and growth working irresistibly in herself. The long summer,
+thoughtful and solitary, marked the end of one period in her life.
+
+She looked forward shrinkingly to the winter. What would happen to this
+new self whose growth in her was keeping pace with her child's? What
+would happen next?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+A BLACK MILESTONE
+
+
+What happened was, in the first week of October, the sudden death of her
+father. It was sudden only to his wife and daughter, whom, as always,
+the Judge had tried to spare, at all costs, the knowledge of anything
+unpleasant. Dr. Melton thought that perhaps the strong man's incredulity
+of anything for him to fear had a good deal to do with his repeated
+refusals to allow his wife or daughter to be warned of the danger of
+apoplexy. Without that hypothesis, it seemed incredible, he told Mrs.
+Sandworth, that so kind a man could be so cruel.
+
+"Everything's incredible," murmured Mrs. Sandworth, her handkerchief at
+her eyes, her loving heart aching for the newly-made widow, her lifelong
+friend.
+
+Her brother did not answer. He sat, gnawing savagely on his finger
+nails, his thoughts centered, as always, on his darling
+Lydia--fatherless.
+
+He had prided himself on his acute insight into human nature in general,
+and upon his specialized, intensified knowledge of those two women whom
+he had known so long and studied so minutely; but "I've been a conceited
+blockhead, and vanity's treacherous as well as damnable," he cried out
+to his sister some days later, amazed beyond expression at the way in
+which their loss affected Lydia and her mother.
+
+Mrs. Emery's attitude was a revelation to him, a revelation that left
+him almost as angrily full of grief as she herself. He had thought best
+on the whole not to disclose to her the substance of the several
+conversations he had had with his dead friend on the subject of
+finances. With two prosperous sons, the widow would be well taken care
+of, he thought, perhaps adding with a little acridity, "just as she
+always has been, without a thought on her part." But when Mrs. Emery,
+divining the truth with an awful intuition, came flying to him after the
+settlement, he was not proof against the fury of her interrogations. If
+she wanted to know, he would tell her, he thought grimly to himself.
+
+"There is nothing left," she began, bursting into his office, "but the
+house, which has a mortgage, and the insurance--nothing! Nothing!"
+
+It was rather soon for her to be resentful, the doctor thought bitterly,
+misreading the misery on her face. "No," he said.
+
+"Had the Judge lost any money--do you know?"
+
+"No; I think not."
+
+"But where--what--we had at one time five thousand dollars at least in
+the savings bank. I happened to know of that small account. I supposed
+of course there was more. There is no trace of even that, the
+administrator says."
+
+"That went into the extra expenses of the year Lydia made her début. And
+her wedding cost a great deal, he told me one day--and her
+trousseau--and other expenses at that time."
+
+Used as the doctor was to the universal custom of divided interests
+among his well-to-do patients, it did not seem too strange to him to be
+giving information about her own affairs to this gray-haired matron. She
+was not the first widow to whom he had been forced to break bad news of
+her husband's business.
+
+Mrs. Emery stared at him, her dry lips apart, a glaze over her eyes. He
+thought her expression strange. As she said nothing, he added, with a
+little sour pleasure in defending his dead friend, even if it should
+give a prick to a survivor, "The Judge was so scrupulously honest, you
+know." The widow sat down and laid her arms across the table, still
+staring hard at the doctor. It came to him that she was not looking at
+him at all, but at some devastating inner sight, which seared her
+heart, but from which she could not turn away her eyes. He himself
+turned away, beginning to be aware of some passion within her beyond his
+divination. There was a long silence.
+
+Finally, "That was the reason he would not stop working," said the woman
+in a voice which made the physician whirl about. He looked sharply into
+her face, and what he saw there took him in one stride to her side. She
+kept her stony eyes still on the place where he had been--eyes that saw
+only, as though for the first time, some long procession of past events.
+
+"I see everything now," she went on with the same flat intonation. "He
+_could_ not stop. That was the reason why he would never rest."
+
+She got slowly to her feet, smoothing over and over one side of her
+skirt with a strange automatic gesture. She was looking full into the
+doctor's face now. "I have killed him," she said quietly, and fell as
+though struck down by a blow from behind.
+
+Her long, long illness was spent in the Melton's home, with the doctor
+in attendance and Julia Sandworth, utterly devoted, constantly at hand.
+The old Emery house, the outward symbol of her married life, was sold,
+and the big "yard" cut up into building lots long before she was able to
+sit up. Lydia came frequently, but, acting on the doctor's express
+command, never brought Ariadne. The outbreaks of self-reproach and
+embittered grief that were likely to burst upon the widow, even in the
+midst of one of her quiet, listless days, were not, he said, for a child
+to see or hear, especially such a sensitive little thing as Ariadne.
+Those wild bursts of remorse were delirious, he told Lydia, but to his
+sister he said he wished they were. "I imagine they are the only times
+when she comes really to herself," he added sadly.
+
+[Illustration: "I see everything now," she went on. "He could not
+stop."]
+
+The especial agony for the sick woman was that nothing of what had
+happened seemed to her now in the least necessary. "Why, if I had only
+known--if I had only dreamed how things were--" she cried incessantly to
+those about her. "What did I care about anything compared with Nat! I
+loved my husband! What did I care--if I had only dreamed that--if I had
+only known what I was doing!"
+
+Dr. Melton labored in heartsick pity to remove her fixed idea, which
+soon became a monomania, that she alone was to blame for the Judge's
+death. It now seemed to him, in his sympathy with her grief, that she
+had been like a child entrusted with some frail, priceless object and
+not warned of its fragility. She herself cried out constantly with
+astonished hatred upon a world that had left her so.
+
+"If anyone had warned me--had given me the least idea that it was so
+serious--I could have lived in three rooms--we had been poor--what did I
+care for anything but Nathaniel! I only did all those things
+because--because there was nothing else to do!"
+
+Lydia tried to break the current with a reminder of the sweet memories
+of the past. "Father loved you so! He loved to give you what you wanted,
+Mother dear."
+
+"What I wanted! I wanted my husband. I want my husband!" the widow
+screamed like a person on the rack.
+
+The doctor sent Lydia away with a hasty gesture. "You must not see her
+when she is violent," he said. "You would never forget it."
+
+It was something he himself never forgot, used as he was to pitiful
+scenes in the life of suffering humanity. He was almost like a sick
+person himself, going about his practice with sunken eyes and gray face.
+His need for sympathy was so great that he abandoned the tacit silence
+about the Emerys which had existed between him and Rankin ever since
+Lydia's marriage, and, going out to the house in the Black Rock woods,
+unburdened to the younger man the horror of his heart.
+
+"She's suffering," he cried. "She's literally heartbroken! She is! It's
+real! And what has she had to make up for it? Oh, it's monstrous! One
+thing she says keeps ringing in my ears. That gray-haired woman, a human
+being my own age--the silly, tragic, childish thing she keeps
+saying--'I only did all those things--I only wanted all those
+things--because there was nothing else!' _Nothing else!_" He turned on
+his host with a fierce "Good God! She's right. What else was there ever
+for--for any woman of her class--"
+
+Rankin pushed his shivering, fidgeting visitor into a chair and, laying
+a big hand on his shoulder, said with a faint smile: "Maybe I can divert
+your mind for an instant with a story--another one of my great-aunt's,
+only it's an old one this time; you've probably heard it--about the old
+man who said to his wife on his death-bed, 'I've tried to be a good
+husband to you, dear. It's been hard on my teeth sometimes, but I've
+always eaten the crusts and let you have the soft bread.' You remember
+what the wife's answer was?"
+
+"No," said the doctor frowning.
+
+"It's the epitome of tragedy. She said, 'Oh, my dear, and I like crusts
+so!'"
+
+The doctor stared into the fire. "Do you mean--there's work for them?"
+
+"I mean work for them," repeated the younger man.
+
+The word echoed in a long silence.
+
+"It's the most precious possession we have," said Rankin finally. "We
+ought to share more evenly."
+
+The doctor rose to go. "Generally I forget that we're of different
+generations," he said with apparent irrelevance, "but there are times
+when I feel it keenly."
+
+"Why now especially?" Rankin wondered. "I've stated a doctrine that is
+yours, too."
+
+"No; you wouldn't see, of course. Yes; it's my doctrine--in theory. I
+believe it, as people believe in Christianity. I should be equally loath
+to see anybody doubt it, or practice it. Ah, I'm a fool! Besides, I was
+born in Kentucky. And I'm sixty-seven years old."
+
+He shut the door behind him with emphasis.
+
+He was on his way to Bellevue to see Lydia. Knowing her tender heart, he
+had expected to see her drowned in grief over her father's death. Her
+dry-eyed quiet made him uneasy. That morning, he found her holding
+Ariadne on her knees and telling her in a self-possessed, low tone,
+which did not tremble, some stories of "when grandfather was a little
+boy."
+
+"I don't want her to grow up without knowing something of my father,"
+she explained to the doctor.
+
+Her godfather laid a hand on her arm. "Don't keep the tears back so,
+Lydia," he implored.
+
+She gave him as great a shock of surprise as her mother had done.
+
+"If I could cry," she said quietly, "it would be because I feel so
+little sorrow. I do not miss my father at all--or hardly at all."
+
+The doctor caught at his chair and stared.
+
+"How should I?" she went on drearily. "I almost never saw him. I never
+spoke to him about anything that really mattered. I never let him know
+me--or anything I really felt."
+
+"What are you talking about?" cried the doctor. "You always lived at
+home."
+
+"I never lived with my father. He was always away in the morning before
+I was up. I was away, or busy, in the evening when he was there. On
+Sundays he never went to church as Mother and I did--I suppose now
+because he had some other religion of his own. But if he had I never
+knew what it was--or anything else that was in his mind or heart. It
+never occurred to me that I could. He tried to love me--I remember so
+many times now--and _that_ makes me cry!--how he tried to love me! He
+was so glad to see me when I got home from Europe--but he never knew
+anything that happened to me. I told you once before that when I had
+pneumonia and nearly died Mother kept it from him because he was on a
+big case. It was all like that--always. He never knew."
+
+Dr. Melton broke in, his voice uncertain, his face horrified: "Lydia, I
+cannot let you go on! you are unfair--you shock me. You are morbid! I
+knew your father intimately. He loved you beyond expression. He would
+have done anything for you. But his profession is an exacting one. Put
+yourself in his place a little. It is all or nothing in the law--as in
+business."
+
+"When you bring children into the world, you expect to have them cost
+you some money, don't you? You know you mustn't let them die of
+starvation. Why oughtn't you to expect to have them cost you thought,
+and some sharing of your life with them, and some time--real time, not
+just scraps that you can't use for business?"
+
+As the doctor faced her, open-mouthed and silent, she went on, still
+dry-eyed, but with a quaver in her voice that was like a sob: "But, oh,
+the worst of my blame is for myself! I was a blind, selfish,
+self-centered egotist. I could have changed things if I had only tried
+harder. I am paying for it now. I am paying for it!"
+
+She took her child up in her arms and bent over the dark silky hair. She
+whispered, "It's not that I have lost my father. I never had a
+father--but you!" She put out her hand and pressed the doctor's hard.
+"And my poor father had no daughter."
+
+She set the child on the floor with a gesture almost violent, and cried
+out loudly, breaking for the first time her cheerless calm, "And now it
+is too late!"
+
+Ariadne turned her rosy round face to her mother's, startled, almost
+frightened. Lydia knelt down and put her arms about the child. She
+looked solemnly into her godfather's eyes, and, as though she were
+taking a great and resolute oath, she said, "But it is not too late for
+Ariadne."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+A HINT FROM CHILDHOOD
+
+
+As the spring advanced and Judge Emery's widow recovered a little
+strength, it became apparent that life in Endbury, with its
+heartbreaking associations, would be intolerable to her. In anxious
+family councils many futile plans were suggested, but they were all
+brushed decisively away by the unexpected arrival from Oregon of the
+younger son of the family.
+
+One day in May, a throbbingly sunshiny day, full of a fierce hot vigor
+of vitality, Lydia was with her mother in the Melton's darkened parlor.
+As so often, the two women had been crying and now sat in a weary
+lethargy, hand in hand. There came a step on the porch, in the hall, and
+in the doorway stood a tall stranger. Lydia looked at him blankly, but
+her mother gave a cry and flung herself into his arms.
+
+"I've come to take you home with me, Momma dear," he said quietly, using
+the old name for her, which had been banished from the Emery household
+since Lydia's early childhood. The sound of it went to her heart.
+
+The newcomer smiled at her over his mother's head. It was her father's
+smile, the quaint, half-wistful, humorous smile, which had seemed so
+incongruous on the Judge's powerful face. "I'm your brother Harry,
+little Lyddie," he said, "and I've come to take care of poor Momma."
+
+During all that summer it was a bitter regret to Lydia that she had seen
+her brother so short a time. He had decreed that the sooner his mother
+was taken away from Endbury, the better for her, and Mrs. Emery had
+clung to him, assenting passively to all he said, and peering
+constantly, with tear-blurred eyes, into his face to see again his
+astonishing resemblance to his father. They had left the day after his
+arrival.
+
+He had found time, however, to go out to Bellevue for a brief visit, to
+see Lydia's home and her little daughter--Paul was away on a business
+trip--and the half-hour he spent there was one that Lydia never forgot.
+The tall, sunburned Westerner, with his kind, humorous eyes, his
+affectionate smile, his quaint, homely phrases, haunted the house for
+the rest of the summer. The time of his stay had been too breathlessly
+short for any serious talk. He had looked about at the big, handsome
+house with a half-mocking awe, inspected the "grounds" with a lively
+interest in the small horticultural beginnings Lydia had been able to
+achieve, told her she ought to see his two hundred acres of apple-trees;
+and for the time that was left before his trolley-car was due he played
+with his little niece and talked over her head to his sister.
+
+"She's a dandy, Lyddie! She's a jim-dandy of a little girl! She ought to
+come out and learn to ride straddle with her cousins. I got a boy about
+her age--say, they'd look fine together! He's a towhead, like all the
+rest of 'em--like their mother."
+
+For months afterward Lydia could close her eyes and see again the
+transfigured expression that had come over his face at the mention of
+his wife. "Talk about luck!" he said, after a moment's pause, "there
+never was such luck as my getting Annie. Say, I wish you could know her,
+Lyddie. I tell you what--shoulder to shoulder, every minute, she's stood
+up to things right there beside me for twelve years--Lord! It don't seem
+more than six months when I stop to think about it. We had some hard
+sledding along at the first, but with the two of us pulling together--.
+She's laughed at sickness and drought and bugs and floods. We're all
+through that now, we're doing fine; but, honest, it was worth it, to
+know Annie through and through as I do. There isn't a thing about the
+business she doesn't know as well as I do, and good reason why, too.
+We've worked it all out together. We've stuck close, we have. I've
+helped in the house and with the kids, and she's come right out into the
+orchards with me. Share and share alike--that's our motto."
+
+He was silent a moment, caressing Ariadne's dark hair gently, and
+reviewing the past with shining eyes. "Lord! Lord! It's been a good
+life!" He turned to his sister with a smile. "Well, Lyddie, I expect you
+know something about it, too. You certainly are fixed fine, and
+everybody says you've married a splendid fellow."
+
+Lydia leaned forward eagerly, the impulse to unburden herself
+overwhelming. "Oh, Paul is the best man--" she began, "so true and kind
+and--and--pure--but Harry, we don't--we can't--his business--" She
+turned away from her brother's too keen eyes and stared blindly at the
+wall, conscious of an ache in her heart like a physical hurt.
+
+Later, as they were talking of old memories, of Lydia's childhood, Harry
+asked suddenly: "How'd you happen to give your little girl such a funny
+name?"
+
+It was a question that had not been put to Lydia before. Her family had
+taken for granted that it was a feverish fancy of her sick-bed. She
+gazed at her brother earnestly, and was about to speak when he looked at
+his watch and stood up, glancing uneasily down toward the trolley track.
+It was too late--he would be gone so soon--like something she had
+dreamed. "Oh, I liked the name," she said vaguely; adding, "Harry! I
+wish you could stay longer! There's so much I should like to talk over
+with you. Oh, how I wish you'd never gone away."
+
+"You come out and see us," he urged. "It'd do you good to get away from
+this old hole-in-the-ground! We live six miles from a neighbor, so you'd
+have to get along without tea-parties, but I bet Annie and the kids
+would give you a good time all right."
+
+He kissed Lydia good-by, tossed Ariadne high in the air, and as he
+hurried down the driveway he called back over his shoulder: "Take good
+care of my little niece for me! I tell you it's the kids that count the
+most!" It was a saying that filled ringingly for Lydia the long, hot
+days of the quiet summer that ensued. As for Ariadne, she did not for
+months stop talking of "nice, laughy, Unkie Hawy." Her fluency of speech
+was increasing out of all proportion to her age.
+
+Whatever slow changes might be taking place in Lydia, went on silently
+and obscurely during that summer; but in the fall a new moral horizon
+burst upon her with the realization that she was again to become a
+mother. Another life was to be entrusted to her hands, to hers and
+Paul's, and with the knowledge came the certainty that she must now
+begin to take some action to place her outer life more in accord with
+her new inner self. It would be the worst moral cowardice longer to
+evade the issue.
+
+Thus bravely did she exhort herself, and, though shrinking with
+apprehension at the very thought of entering upon a combat, attempted to
+shame herself into a little courage.
+
+When Paul heard of his wife's hopes, he was enchanted. He cried out
+jubilantly: "I bet you it'll be a boy this time!" and caught her to him
+in an embrace of affection so ardent that for a moment she glowed like a
+bride. She clung to him, happy in the warmth of feeling that,
+responsive, as always, to his touch, sprang up in her; and when in his
+good-natured, half-laughing, dictatorial way he made her lie down at
+once and promise to rest and be quiet, the boyish absurdity of his
+solicitude was sweet to her.
+
+He disappeared in answer to a telephone call, and she closed her eyes,
+savoring the pleasure of the little scene. How she needed Paul to
+reconcile her to life! How kind he really was! How good! His was the
+clean, honorable affection he had promised her on their wedding day. If
+she were to have any faith in the novels she read (like most American
+women of the leisure class, her education after her marriage consisted
+principally in reading the novels people talked about), if there was any
+truth in what she read in these stories, she felt she was blest far
+above most women in that there had come to her since her marriage no
+revelation of a hidden, unclean side to her husband's nature.
+
+But Lydia had never felt herself closely touched by reading; it all
+seemed remote from her own life and problems. The sexual questions on
+which the plots invariably turned, which formed the very core and center
+of the lives of the various female characters, had, as a matter of fact,
+according to her honest observation of her acquaintances, a very
+subordinate place in the average American life about her. The marital
+unhappiness, estrangement, and fragmentary incompleteness in the circle
+she knew, over which she had grieved and puzzled, had nothing to do with
+what novels mean by "unfaithfulness." The women of Endbury, unlike the
+heroines of fiction, did not fear that their husbands would fall in love
+with other women. The men of Endbury spent as little time in
+sentimentalizing over other men's wives as they did over their own.
+
+She often wondered why writers did not treat of the other problems that
+beset her class--for instance, why it was only women in frontier
+conditions, like Harry's wife, who could share in their husband's lives;
+why nobody tried to change things so that they could do more of their
+part in the work of the world; why they could not have a share in the
+activities that gave other men, even little boys like Walter, so much
+closer knowledge of their husbands' characters than they, their wives,
+had. She had a dim notion, caught from stray indications in the
+magazines, that writers were considering such questions in books other
+than novels, but she had no idea how to search them out. The woman's
+club to which she belonged was occupied with the art of Masaccio, who
+was, so a visitor from Chicago's æsthetic circles informed them, the
+"latest thing" in art interests.
+
+She decided to ask Paul if he had heard of such books. She would ask him
+so many such questions in the new life that was to begin. They had been
+married more than three years and, so far as their relations to each
+other went, they were by no means inharmonious; but of the close-knit,
+deep-rooted intimacy of soul and mind that had been her dream of
+married life, there had not been even a beginning. Well, she told
+herself bravely, four years were but a short period in a lifetime. They
+were both so young yet. They could begin now.
+
+Paul came back from the telephone, note-book in hand, jotting down some
+figures. He smiled at her over the top of the book, and before he sat
+down to his desk he covered her carefully with a shawl, stroked her
+hair, and closed her eyes, saying with an absent tenderness: "There!
+take a nap, dear, while I finish these notes."
+
+He looked supremely satisfied with himself in the instant before he
+plunged into his calculations, and Lydia guessed that he was
+congratulating himself on having remembered her in the midst of
+absorbing business cares. She lay looking at him as he worked, her mind
+full of busy thoughts.
+
+Chiefly, as she went over their situation, she felt guilty to think how
+entirely apart from him all her real life was passed. The doubts, the
+racking spiritual changes, that had come to her, she had kept all to
+herself; and yet she could say honestly that her silence had been
+involuntary, instinctive, she fancied whimsically, like the reticence as
+to emotions that one keeps in the hurly-burly of a railway station. With
+tickets to be bought and trunks to be checked and time-tables to be
+consulted, it is absurd to try to communicate to a busy and preoccupied
+companion inexplicable qualms of soul-sickness. Any sensible woman--and
+Lydia, like most American women, had been trained by precept and example
+to desire above all things to be sensible and not emotionally
+troublesome to the men of her family--any sensible woman kept her
+thoughts to herself till the time came when she could talk them over
+without interfering with the business on hand.
+
+As she lay on the sofa and watched Paul's face sharpen in his
+concentration, it occurred to her that the point of the whole matter was
+that for her and Paul the suitable and leisurely time for mutual
+discussion had never come. That was all! That was the whole trouble! It
+was not any inherent lack of common feeling between them. Simply, there
+was always business on hand with which she must not interfere.
+
+Paul lifted his head, his eyes half closed in a narrowed, speculative
+gaze upon some knotty point in his calculation. This long, sideways look
+happened to fall upon Lydia, and she turned cold before the profound
+unconsciousness of her existence in those eyes apparently fixed so
+piercingly upon her. She had a quick fancy that the blank wall of
+abstraction at which that vacant stare was directed really and palpably
+separated her husband from her.
+
+For a moment she wondered if she were growing like the women she had
+heard her father so unsparingly condemn--silly, childish, egotistic
+women who could not bear to have their husbands think of anything but
+themselves, who were jealous of the very business which earned them and
+their children a living. She acquitted herself of this charge proudly.
+She did not want all of Paul's time; she wanted only some of it. And
+then, it was not to have him thinking of her, but with her about the
+common problems of their life; it was to think with him about the
+problems of his life; it was to have him help her by his sound,
+well-balanced, well-trained mind, which, so everyone said, worked such
+miracles in business; to have him help her through the thicket of
+confusion into which she was plunged by her inability to accept the
+plainly-marked road over which all of her world was pressing forward.
+Perhaps it was all right, she thought, the way Endbury people "did." She
+asked nothing better than to be convinced that it was; she longed for a
+satisfying answer. But Paul did not even know she had doubts! How could
+he, she asked herself, exonerating him from blame. He was away so many
+hours of the day and days of the year; and when he came home he was so
+tired!
+
+It was characteristic of her temper that she had learned quickly and
+without bitterness the lesson every wife must learn, that neither
+tenderness nor delicate perceptions of shades of feeling can be extorted
+from a very tired or very preoccupied man. Masculine fatigue brings with
+it a healthy bluntness as to what is being expected in the way of
+emotional responsiveness, and men will not allow their sense of duty to
+spur their jaded affection to the point of exhaustion. Lydia noted this,
+felt that she could not with any show of reason resent it, since it
+showed a state of things as hard for Paul as for her; but she could not
+blind herself to the fact that the inevitable result was Paul's complete
+ignorance of her real life. She felt herself to be so different from the
+girl he had married as scarcely to be recognizable, and yet there was no
+way by which he could have caught even a glimpse of the changes that had
+made her so. The short periods they spent with each other were
+necessarily more than filled by consultations about matters of household
+administration and plans for their social life, and about the way to
+spend the money that Paul earned. Paul was a very good-natured and
+consciously indulgent husband, but Lydia seldom emerged from an hour's
+conversation with him without an uneasy feeling that she was not by any
+means getting out of the money he furnished her the largest amount
+possible of what he wanted; and this sensation was scarcely conducive to
+an expression of what was, after all, on her part nothing but a vague
+aspiration toward an ideal--an aspiration that came to her clearly only
+at times of great tranquillity and peace, when her mind was quite at
+rest.
+
+She was going around and around the treadmill of her familiar
+perplexities when a trifling incident, so small, so dependent on its
+framing of situation, accent, expression and gesture as scarcely to be
+recordable, gave her a sudden glimpse of quite another side to the
+matter. She was shocked into realizing that just as their way of life
+hid from Paul what was going on in her mind, so he also, in all
+probability, was rapidly changing without her knowledge.
+
+Paul finished his figuring, pushed the papers to one side with a sigh of
+fatigue, and turned his eyes thoughtfully on his wife. "That's very good
+news of yours, Lydia dear, about the expected son and heir. But it's
+rather a pity it didn't come last winter, isn't it?"
+
+"How so?" she asked.
+
+"Why, you had to be out of things on account of being in mourning,
+anyhow. If this had happened the year your father died, you could have
+killed two birds with one stone, don't you see?"
+
+Lydia's perception of a thousand reasonable explanations and excuses for
+this speech was so quick that it was upon her almost before she was
+aware of her resentment. She hurried to shut the door on a blighting new
+vision of her husband, by telling herself loudly that it was to be
+expected Paul should feel so; but, rapid as her loyal, wifely movement
+had been, she had felt a gust of hot revulsion against something in her
+husband which her affection for him forbade her to name.
+
+She could not put out of her mind, his look, his accent, his air of
+taking for granted that the speech was a natural one. The knowledge that
+Marietta would be too bewildered by her dwelling on the incident even to
+laugh at her, did not avail to free her of the heavy doubts that filled
+her. Was she mistaken in feeling that it indicated an alarming increase
+of materialism in Paul? She was really too fanciful, she told herself
+many times a day, surprised to find herself going over it again. Was it
+a mere chance remark--a little stone in the garden path--or was it the
+first visible outcropping of a stratum of unconquerable granite which
+grimly underlay all the flower beds of his good nature?
+
+The final impression on her mind was of a new motive for coming to a
+better, closer understanding with Paul about the fundamentals of their
+life. It had not occurred to her before, in spite of all her struggles
+"to be good," as she put it to herself with her childlike naïveté, that
+Paul might be needing her as much as she needed him! Spurred on by this
+new reason for breaking through the impalpable wall that separated their
+inner lives, she resolved that she would no longer let herself be
+dominated by the inconsequent multiplicity of the trifling incidents
+that filled their days.
+
+If she could only get close to Paul she was sure that all would be well.
+She made herself hope, with a brave belittling of the tangle that
+baffled her, that perhaps just one long, serious talk with Paul would
+be all that was needed. If she could just make Paul see what she saw, he
+could tell her how to set to work to remedy things. Paul was so clever.
+Paul was always so kind--when he saw!
+
+She began watching for a favorable opportunity for this long, serious
+talk, and as day after day fled past with only a glimpse of Paul
+desperately in a hurry in the morning and desperately tired at night,
+she was aware that her idea of the shape their life was taking had not
+exaggerated the extent of the broad flood of trivialities that separated
+them. Although the light laugh of her girlhood was rarer than before her
+marriage, life had not proved it to be the result of mere animal
+spirits. She still saw a great deal to laugh at, though sometimes it was
+tremulous laughter, carrying her to the edge of tears. And she often
+laughed to herself during these days at the absurd incongruity of what
+her heart was swelling to utter and the occasions on which she would
+have to speak.
+
+'Stashie was away, tending her aunt who was ill, away for an indefinite
+period, for Patsy's steady wages quite sufficed to keep his cousin at
+home to care for his grandmother. Lydia sometimes feared the
+satisfaction she took in Patsy's exemplary career was tinctured with
+vainglory for her own share in it, but, if so, she was punished for it
+now, since it was his very prosperity that took away from her the only
+steady domestic help she had ever been able to keep. She had now only a
+cook, a slatternly negress, with a gift for frying chicken and making
+beaten biscuit, and a total incapacity to conceive of any other activity
+as possible for her. Lydia had telephoned to the two employment agencies
+in Endbury and had been informed, by no means for the first time, that
+the supply of girls willing to work in the suburbs had entirely given
+out. For the time being there was simply not one to be had, so for the
+next few days Lydia, as well as Paul, was more than usually occupied;
+but her fixed intention to "talk things over with him" was not shaken.
+And yet--day after day went by with the routine unvaried--there was no
+time in the morning; in the evening Paul was too tired, and on Sundays
+there was always "Company," it being practically their only time for
+daylight entertainment. Often Paul brought a business associate home for
+dinner; his family or hers came in; there were always callers in the
+afternoon; and they were usually invited out to supper or had guests
+themselves. It was the busiest day of the week.
+
+Ever since her father's death she had been reviving in her mind, shocked
+to find them so few, her positive, personal recollections of him, and
+one of them now came back to her with a symbolic meaning. It had been a
+not uncommon occurrence in her childhood--a school picnic in the Black
+Rock woods; but this one stood out from all the others because, by what
+freak of chance she never knew, her father had gone with her instead of
+her mother. How proud she had been to have him there! How eagerly she
+had done the honors of the "entertainment"! How anxiously she had hoped
+that he would be pleased with the recitations, the songs, the May-day
+dance!
+
+One of the events of the day was to be the recitation of a fairy poem by
+a boy in one of the upper grades. He was to step out of the bushes in
+the character of a Brownie. The child had but just thrust his head
+through the leaves and begun, "I come to tell ye of a world ye mortals
+wot not of," when a terrific clap of thunder overhead, followed by
+lightning, and rain in torrents, broke up the picnic and sent everyone
+flying for shelter to a near-by barn. Lydia had been very much afraid of
+thunderstorms, and she could still remember how, through all her
+confusion and terror, she had admired the fixity of purpose of the
+little Brownie, piteous in his drenched fairy costume, gasping out, as
+they ran along: "I come to tell ye--I come to tell ye, mortals--" to his
+scurrying audience.
+
+When they reached the barn and were huddled in the hay, wet and forlorn,
+and deafened by the peals of thunder, the determined little boy had
+stood up on a farm wagon on the barn floor, and the instant the storm
+abated began again with his insistent tidings of a world they wot not
+of. With her father's death fresh in her mind, Lydia could not without
+a throb of pain recall his rare outburst of hearty laughter at the
+child's perseverance. "I bet on that kid!" he had cried out, applauding
+vigorously at the end. "Who _is_ he?"
+
+"Paul Hollister," she had told him, proud to know the bigger children.
+"He's a very especial friend of mine."
+
+"Well, you can bet he'll get on," her father had assured her.
+
+The opening of the Brownie's speech had come to be one of the humorous
+catchwords of the Emery household, to express firmness of purpose, and
+it was now with a mixture of laughter and tears that Lydia recalled the
+scene--the dusky interior of the barn, the sweet, strong scent of the
+hay, the absurd little figure grimacing and squeaking on the farm wagon,
+and her big, little-known, all-powerful father, one strong arm around
+her, protecting her from all she feared, as nothing in the world could
+protect her now.
+
+She was grown up now, and must learn how to protect her own children
+against dangers less obvious than thunderstorms. It was her turn now to
+insist on making herself heard above uproar and confusion. Her little
+Brownie playmate shamed her into action. She would not wait for a pause
+in the clatter of small events about Paul and herself; she would raise
+her voice and shout to him, if necessary, overcoming the shy reluctance
+of the spirit to speak aloud of its life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+LYDIA REACHES HER GOAL AND HAS HER TALK WITH HER HUSBAND
+
+
+Paul was still asleep when Lydia opened her eyes one morning and said to
+herself with a little laugh, but quite resolutely: "I come to tell ye of
+a world ye mortals wot not of."
+
+As she dressed noiselessly, she fortified herself with the thought that
+she had, in her nervousness, greatly overestimated the seriousness of
+her undertaking. There was nothing so formidable in what she meant to
+do, after all. She only wished to talk reasonably with her husband about
+how to avoid having their life degenerate into a mere campaign for
+material advancement. She did not use this phrase in her thoughts about
+the matter. She thought more deeply, and perhaps more clearly, than
+during her confused girlhood, but she had no learned or dignified
+expressions for the new ideas dawning in her. As she coiled her dark
+hair above her face, rather pale these days, like a white flower instead
+of the glowing rose it had been, she said to herself, like a child:
+"Now, I mustn't get excited. I must remember that all I want is a chance
+for all of us, Paul and the children and me, to grow up as good as we
+can, and loving one another the most for the nicest things in us and not
+because we're handy stepping-stones to help one another get on. And we
+can't do that if we don't really put our minds to it and make that the
+thing we're trying hardest to do. The other things--the parties and
+making money and dressing better than we can really afford to--they're
+only all right if they don't get to seeming the things to look out for
+first. We must find out how to keep them second."
+
+A golden shaft of winter sunshine fell on Paul's face. He opened his
+eyes and yawned, smiling good-naturedly at his wife. Lydia summoned her
+courage and fairly ran to the bed, sitting down by him and taking his
+strong hand in hers.
+
+"Oh, you india-rubber ball!" he cried in humorous despair at her. "Don't
+you know a woman with your expectations oughtn't to go hurling herself
+around that way?"
+
+"I know--I'm too eager always," she apologized. "But, Paul, I've been
+waiting for a nice quiet time to have a long talk with you about
+something that's troubling me, and I just decided I wouldn't wait
+another minute."
+
+Paul patted her cheek. He was feeling very much refreshed by his night's
+sleep. He smiled at his young wife again. "Why, fire away, Lydia dear.
+I'm no ogre. You don't have to wait till I'm in a good temper, do you?
+What is it? More money?"
+
+"Oh, no, _no_!" She repudiated the idea so hotly that he laughed, "Well,
+you can't scare me with anything else. What's up?"
+
+Lydia hesitated, distracted, now that her chance had come, with the
+desire to speak clearly. "Paul dear, it's very serious, and I want you
+to take it seriously. It may take a great effort to change things, too.
+I'm very unhappy about the way we are--"
+
+A wail from Ariadne's room gave warning that the child had wakened, as
+she not infrequently did, terrified by a bad dream. Lydia fled in to
+comfort her, and later, when she came back, leading the droll little
+figure in its pink sleeping-drawers, Paul was dressing with his usual
+careful haste. He stopped an instant to laugh at Ariadne's face of
+determined woe and tossed her up until an unwilling smile broke through
+her pouting gloom. Then he turned to Lydia, as to another child, and
+rubbed his cheek on hers with a boyish gesture. "Now, you other little
+forlornity, what's the matter with you?"
+
+Lydia warmed, as always, at the tenderness of his tone, though she
+noticed with an inward laugh that he continued buttoning his vest as he
+caressed her and that his eyes wandered to the clock with a wary
+alertness. "Perhaps you'd better wait and tell me at the table," he went
+on briskly. "I'm all ready to go down." He pulled his coat on with his
+astonishing quickness, and ran downstairs.
+
+Lydia put Ariadne into her own bed, telling the docile little thing to
+stay there till Mother came back for her, and followed Paul, huddling
+together the remnants of her resolution which looked very wan in the
+morning light. Breakfast was not ready; the table was not even set, and
+when she went out into the kitchen she was met by a heavy-eyed cook,
+moving futilely about among dirty pots and pans and murmuring something
+about a headache. Lydia could not stop then to investigate further, but,
+hurrying about, managed to get a breakfast ready for Paul before his
+first interest in the morning paper had evaporated enough to make him
+impatient of the delay.
+
+He fell to with a hearty appetite as soon as the food was set before
+him, not noticing for several moments that Lydia's breakfast was not yet
+ready. When he did so, he spoke with a solicitous sharpness: "Lydia, you
+need a guardian! You ought to eat as a matter of duty! I bet half your
+queer notions come from your just pecking around at any old thing when
+I'm not here to keep track of you."
+
+He poured out another cup of coffee for himself as he spoke.
+
+"Yes, dear; I know, I do. I will," Lydia assured him, with her quick
+acquiescence to his wishes. "But this morning Mary is sick, or
+something, and I got yours first."
+
+Paul spoke briefly, with his mouth full of toast: "If you were more
+regular in the way you run the house, and insisted on never varying
+the--"
+
+"But I was afraid you would be late," said Lydia. It was the daily
+terror of her life.
+
+"I _am_ late now," he told her, with his good-humored insistence on
+facts. "I've missed the 7:40, and I've just time to catch the next one
+if I hurry. Do you happen to know, dear, where I put that catalogue
+from Elberstrom and Company? The big red book with the picture of a
+dynamo on the cover. I was looking over it last night, and Heaven knows
+where I may have dropped it."
+
+The opinion as to the proper answer to a speech like this was one of the
+sharply marked lines of divergence between Madeleine Lowder and her
+brother's wife. "Soak him one when you get a chance, Lydia," she was
+wont to urge facetiously, and her advice in the present case would
+unhesitatingly have been to answer as acrimoniously as possible that if
+he were more regular in the way he handled such things his wife would
+have to spend less time ransacking the house looking for them. But in
+spite of such practical and experienced counsel, Lydia was scarcely
+conscious of refraining from the entirely justifiable and entirely
+futile customary recriminations, and she was as unaware as Paul of the
+vast amount of embittering domestic friction which was spared them by
+her silence. She had some great natural advantages for the task of
+creating a better domestic life at which she was now so eagerly setting
+herself, and one of them was this incapacity to resent petty injustices
+done to herself. She was handicapped in any effort by her utter lack of
+intellectual training and by a natural tendency to mental confusion, but
+her lack of small vanities not only spared her untold suffering, but
+added much to her singleness of aim.
+
+She now went about searching for the catalogue, finally finding it in
+the library under the couch. When she came back to the dining-room she
+saw Paul standing up by the table, wiping his mouth. Evidently he was
+ready to start. How absurd she had been to think of talking seriously to
+him in the morning!
+
+"Mary brought your breakfast in," he said nodding toward an untidy tray.
+"I hate to seem to be finding fault all the time, but really her breath
+was enough to set the house on fire! Can't you keep her down to moderate
+drinking?"
+
+"I'll try," said Lydia.
+
+Paul took the catalogue from her hand and reached for his hat. They
+were in the hall now. "Good-by, Honey," he said, kissing her hastily and
+darting out of the house.
+
+Lydia had but just turned back to the dining-room when he opened the
+door and came in again, bringing a gust of fresh winter air with him.
+"Say, dear, you forgot about something you wanted to tell me about. I've
+got eight minutes before the trolley, so now's your chance. What is it?
+Something about the plumbing?"
+
+In the dusky hall Lydia faced him for a moment in silence, with so
+singular an expression on her face that he looked apprehensive of some
+sort of scene. Then she broke out into breathless, quavering laughter,
+whose uncertainty did not prevent Paul from great relief at her apparent
+change of mood. "Never mind," she said, leaning against the newel-post,
+"I'll tell you--I'll tell you some other time."
+
+He kissed her again, and she felt that it was with a greater tenderness
+now that he no longer feared a possibly disagreeable communication from
+her.
+
+After he had gone, she thought loyally, putting things in the order of
+importance she had been taught all her life, "Well, it _is_ hard for him
+to have perplexities at home and not to be able to give the freshest and
+best of himself to business." It was not until later, as she was
+dressing Ariadne, that she swung slowly back to her new doubt of that
+view of the problem.
+
+Ariadne was in one of her most talkative moods, and was describing at
+great length the dream that had frightened her so. There was a hen with
+six little chickens, she told her mother, and one of them was as big--as
+big--
+
+"Yes, dear; and what did the big little chicken do?" Lydia laced up the
+little shoes, on her knees before the small figure, her mind whirling.
+"That was just the trouble, she couldn't make it seem right any more,
+that Paul's best and freshest should _all_ go to making money and none
+to a consideration of why he wished to make it."
+
+"Yes, Ariadne, and it flew over the house, and then?"
+
+She began buttoning the child's dress, and lost herself in ecstasy over
+the wisps of soft curls at the back of the rosy neck. She dropped a
+sudden kiss on the spot, in the midst of Ariadne's narrative, and the
+child squealed in delighted surprise. Lydia was carried away by one of
+her own childlike impulses of gayety, and burrowed bear-like, growling
+savagely, in the soft flesh. Ariadne doubled up, shrieking with
+laughter, the irresistible laughter of childhood. Lydia laughed in
+response, and the two were off for one of their rollicking frolics. They
+were like a couple of kittens together. Finally, "Come, dear; we must
+get our breakfasts," said Lydia, leading along the little girl, still
+flushed and smiling from her play.
+
+Her passion for the child grew with Ariadne's growth, and there were
+times when she was tempted to agree in the unspoken axiom of those about
+her, that all she needed was enough children to fill her heart and hands
+too full for thought; but sometimes at night, when Paul was away and she
+had the little crib moved close to her bed, very different ideas came to
+her in the silent hours when she lay listening to the child's quick,
+regular breathing. At such times, when her mind grew very clear in the
+long pause between the hurry of one day and the next, she had rather a
+sort of horror in bringing any more lives into a world which she could
+do so little to make ready for them. Ariadne was here, and, oh! She must
+do something to make it better for her! Her desire that Ariadne should
+find it easier than she to know how to live well, rose to a fervor that
+was a prayer emanating from all her being. Perhaps she was not clever or
+strong enough to know how to make her own life and Paul's anything but a
+dreary struggle to get ahead of other people, but somehow--somehow,
+Ariadne must have a better chance.
+
+Something of all this came to her mind in the reaction from her frolic,
+as she established the child in her high-chair and sat down to her own
+cold breakfast; but she soon fell, instead, to pondering the question of
+Mary in the kitchen. She had not now that terror of a violent scene
+which had embittered the first year of her housekeeping, but she felt a
+qualm of revulsion from the dirty negress who, as she entered the
+kitchen, turned to face her with insolent eyes. It seemed a plague-spot
+in her life that in the center of her home, otherwise so carefully
+guarded, there should be this presence, come from she shuddered to think
+what evil haunts of that part of Endbury known as the "Black Hole." She
+thought, as so many women have thought, that there must be something
+wrong in a system that made her husband spend all his strength laboring
+to make money so much of which was paid, in one form or another, to this
+black incubus. She thought, as so many other women have thought, that
+there must be something wrong with a system of life that meant that,
+with rare exceptions, such help was all that could be coaxed into doing
+housework; but Lydia, unlike the other women she knew, did not--could
+not--stop at the realization that something was wrong. Some irresistible
+impulse moved her to try at least to set it right.
+
+On this occasion, however, as she faced the concrete result of the
+system, she was too languid, and felt too acutely the need for sparing
+her strength, to do more than tell her cook briefly that if she did not
+stop drinking she would be dismissed. Mary made no reply, looking down
+at her torn apron, her face heavy and sullen. She prepared some sort of
+luncheon, however, and by night had recovered enough so that with
+Lydia's help the dinner was eatable.
+
+Paul was late to dinner, and when he sat down heavily at the table
+Lydia's heart failed her at the sight of his face, fairly haggard with
+fatigue. She kept Ariadne quiet, the child having already learned that
+when Daddy came home from the city there must be no more noisy play; and
+she served Paul with a quickness that outstripped words. She longed
+unspeakably to put on one side forever all her vexing questions and
+simply to cherish and care for her husband physically. He had so much to
+burden him already--all he could carry. But she had been so long
+bringing herself to the point of resolution in the matter, she had so
+firmly convinced herself that her duty lay along that dark and obscure
+path, that she clung to her purpose.
+
+After dinner, when she came downstairs from putting Ariadne to bed, she
+found him already bent over the writing-table, covering a sheet of paper
+with figures. "You remember, Paul, I have something to talk over with
+you," she began, her mouth twitching in a nervous smile.
+
+He pushed the papers aside, and looked up at her with a weary
+tenderness. "Oh, yes; I do remember. We might as well have it over now,
+I suppose. Wait a minute, though." He went to the couch, piled the
+pillows at one end, and lay down, his hands clasped under his head. "I
+might as well rest myself while we talk, mightn't I?"
+
+"Oh, yes, yes, poor dear!" cried Lydia remorsefully. "I wish I didn't
+_have_ to bother you!"
+
+"I wish so, too," he said whimsically. "Sure it's nothing you can't
+settle yourself?" He closed his eyes and yawned.
+
+"I don't _want_ to settle it myself!" cried Lydia with a rush, seeing an
+opening ready-made. "That's the point. I want you to be in it! I want
+you to help me! Paul, I'm sure there's something the matter with the way
+we live--I don't like it! I don't see that it helps us a bit--or anyone
+else--you're just killing yourself to make money that goes to get us
+things we don't need nearly as much as we need more of each other! We're
+not getting a bit nearer to each other--actually further away, for we're
+both getting different from what we were without the other's knowing
+how! And we're not getting nicer--and what's the use of living if we
+don't do that? We're just getting more and more set on scrambling along
+ahead of other people. And we're not even having a good time out of it!
+And here is Ariadne--and another one coming--and we've nothing to give
+them but just this--this--this--"
+
+She had poured out her accumulated, pent-up convictions with passion,
+feeling an immense relief that she had at last expressed herself--that
+at last she had made a breach in the wall that separated her from Paul.
+At the end, as she hesitated for a phrase to sum up her indictment of
+their life, her eyes fell on Paul's face. Its expression turned her
+cold. She stopped short. He did not open his eyes, and the ensuing
+silence was filled with his regular, heavy breathing. He had fallen
+asleep.
+
+Lydia folded her hands in her lap and sat looking at him intently. In
+the tumult of her emotions there was neither bitterness nor resentment.
+But a cloud had passed between her and the sun. She sat there a long
+time, her face very pale and grave. After a time she laid her hand on
+her husband's shoulder. She felt an intolerable need to feel him at
+least physically near.
+
+The telephone bell rang distinctly in the hall. Paul bounded to his
+feet, wide awake.
+
+"I bet that's the Washburn superintendent!" he cried. "He said they
+might call me up here if they came to a decision." He had apparently
+forgotten Lydia's presence, or else the fact that she knew nothing of
+his affairs. He disappeared into the hall, his long, springy, active
+step resounding quickly as he hurried to the instrument. Lydia heard his
+voice, decisive, masterful, quiet, evidently dictating terms of some
+bargain that had been hanging in the balance. When he came back, his
+head was up, like a conqueror's. "I've got their contract!" he told her,
+and then, snatching her up, he whirled her about, shouting out a "yip!
+yip! yip!" of triumph.
+
+In spite of herself Lydia's chin began to tremble. She felt a stinging
+in her eyes. Paul saw these signs of emotion and was
+conscience-stricken. "Oh, I'm a black-hearted monster!" he cried, in
+burlesque contrition. "I must have dropped off just as you began your
+spiel. But, Lydia, if _you'd_ taken that West Virginia trip, you'd go to
+sleep if the Angel Gabriel were blowing his horn! I was gone three days,
+you know, and, honest, I didn't have three hours' consecutive sleep!
+Don't be too mad at me. Start over again. I'll listen to every word,
+honest to gracious I will. I feel as waked up as a fighting cock,
+anyhow, by this Washburn business! To think I've pulled that off at
+last!"
+
+"I'm not mad at _you_, Paul," said Lydia, trying to speak steadily, and
+holding with desperate resolution to her purpose of communicating with
+her husband. "I'm mad at the conditions that made you so sleepy you
+couldn't keep awake! All I had to say is that I don't like our way of
+life--I don't see that it's making us any better, and I want Ariadne--I
+want our children to have a better one. I want you to help me make it
+so."
+
+Paul stared at her, stupefied by this attack on axioms. "Good gracious,
+my dear! What are you talking about? 'Our way of life!' What do you
+mean? There's nothing peculiar about the way we live. Our life is just
+like everybody else's."
+
+Lydia burned with impatience at the appearance of this argument, beyond
+which she had never been able to induce her mother or Marietta to
+advance a step. She cried out passionately: "What if it is! If it's not
+the right kind of life, what difference does it make if everybody's life
+_is_ like it!"
+
+The idea which her excitement instantly suggested to Paul was
+reassuring. Before Ariadne came, he remembered, Lydia had had queer
+spells of nervous tension. He patted her on the shoulder and spoke in
+the tone used to soothe a nervous horse. "There, Lydia! There, dear!
+Don't get so wrought up! Remember you're not yourself. You do too much
+thinking. Come, now, just curl up here and put your head on my--"
+
+Lydia feared greatly the relaxing influence of his caressing touch. If
+once he put forth his personal magnetism, it would be so hard to go on.
+She drew away gently. "_Can_ anybody do too much thinking, Paul? The
+trouble must be that I'm not thinking right. And, oh, I want to, so!
+_Please_ help me! Everybody says you have such a wonderful head for
+organization and for science--if I were a dynamo that wasn't working,
+you could set me right!"
+
+Paul laughed, and made another attempt to divert her. "I couldn't if
+the dynamo looked as pretty and kissable as you do!" He was paying very
+little attention to what she said. He was only uncomfortable and uneasy
+to see her so white and trembling. He wished he had proposed taking her
+out for the evening. She had been having too dull a time. He ought to
+see that she got more amusement. They said that comic opera now running
+in town was very funny.
+
+"Paul, listen to me!" she was crying desperately as these thoughts went
+through his head. "Listen to me, and look honestly at the way we've been
+living since we were married, and you _must_ see that something's all
+wrong. I never see you--never, never, do you realize that? except when
+you're in a raging hurry in the morning or tired to death at night, and
+when I'm just as tired as you are, so all we can do is to go to bed so
+we can get up in the morning and begin it all over again. Or else we
+tire ourselves out one degree more by entertaining people we don't
+really like--or rather people about whose real selves we don't know
+enough to know whether we like them or not--we have them because they're
+influential, or because everybody else entertains them, or because they
+can help us to get on--or can be smoothed over so they won't hinder our
+getting on. And there's no prospect of doing anything different from
+this all the days of our life--"
+
+"But, look-y here, Lydia, that's the way things _are_ in this world! The
+men have to go away the first thing in the morning--and all the rest of
+what you say! _I_ can't help it! What do you come to me about it for?
+You might as well break out crying because I can't give you eyes in the
+back of your head. That's the way things are!"
+
+Lydia made a violent gesture of unbelief. "That's what everybody's been
+telling me all my life--but now I'm a grown woman, with eyes to see, and
+something inside me that won't let me say I see what I don't--_and I
+don't see that_! I don't _believe_ it has to be so. I can't believe it!"
+
+Paul laughed a little impatiently, irritated and uneasy, as he always
+was, at any attempt to examine too closely the foundations of existing
+ideas. "Why, Lydia, what's the matter with you? You sound as though
+you'd been reading some fool socialist literature or something."
+
+"You know I don't read anything, Paul. I never hear about anything but
+novels. I never have time for anything else, and very likely I couldn't
+understand it if I read it, not having any education. That's one thing I
+want you to help me with. All I want is a chance for us to live together
+a little more, to have a few more thoughts in common, and, oh! to be
+trying to be making something better out of ourselves for our children's
+sake. I can't see that we're learning to be anything but--you, to be an
+efficient machine for making money, I to think of how to entertain as
+though we had more money than we really have. I don't seem really to
+know you or live with you any more than if we were two guests stopping
+at the same hotel. If socialists are trying to fix things better, why
+shouldn't we have time--both of us--to read their books; and you could
+help me know what they mean?"
+
+Paul laughed again, a scornful, hateful laugh, which brought the color
+up to Lydia's pale face like a blow. "I gather, then, Lydia, that what
+you're asking me to do is to neglect my business in order to read
+socialist literature with you?"
+
+His wife's rare resentment rose. She spoke with dignity: "I begged you
+to be serious, Paul, and to try to understand what I mean, although I'm
+so fumbling, and say it so badly. As for its being impossible to change
+things, I've heard you say a great many times that there are no
+conditions that can't be changed if people would really try--"
+
+"Good heavens! I said that of _business_ conditions!" shouted Paul,
+outraged at being so misquoted.
+
+"Well, if it's true of them--No; I feel that things are the way they are
+because we don't really care enough to have them some other way. If you
+really cared as much about sharing a part of your life with me--really
+sharing--as you do about getting the Washburn contract--"
+
+Her indignant and angry tone, so entirely unusual, moved Paul, more than
+her words, to shocked protest. He looked deeply wounded, and his accent
+was that of a man righteously aggrieved. "Lydia, I lay most of this
+absurd outbreak to your nervous condition, and so I can't blame you for
+it. But I can't help pointing out to you that it is entirely uncalled
+for. There are few women who have a husband as absolutely devoted as
+yours. You grumble about my not sharing my life with you--why, I _give_
+it to you entire!" His astonished bitterness grew as he voiced it. "What
+am I working so hard for if not to provide for you and our child--our
+children! Good Heavens! What more _can_ I do for you than to keep my
+nose on the grindstone every minute. There are limits to even a
+husband's time and endurance and capacity for work."
+
+Lydia heard a frightened roaring in her ears at this unexpected turn to
+the conversation. Paul had never spoken so to her before. This was a
+very different tone from his irritation over defective housekeeping. She
+was as horrified as he over the picture that he held up with such
+apparently justified indignation, the picture of her as a querulous and
+ungrateful wife. Why, Paul was looking at her as though he hated her!
+For the first time in her married life, she conceived the possibility
+that she and Paul might quarrel, really seriously quarrel, about
+fundamental things. The idea terrified her beyond words. Her mind,
+undisciplined and never very clear, became quite confused, and only her
+long preparation and expectation of this talk enabled her to keep on at
+all, although now she could but falter ahead blindly. "Why, Paul
+dear--don't look at me so! I never dreamed of _blaming_ you for it! It's
+just because I want things better for you that I'm so anxious to--"
+
+"You haven't noticed me complaining any, have you?" put in Paul grimly,
+still looking at her coldly.
+
+"--It's because I can't bear to see you work so hard to get me things
+I'd ever so much rather go without than have you grow so you can't see
+anything but business--it seems all twisted! I'd rather you'd pay an
+assistant to go off on these out-of-town trips, and we'd get along on
+less money--live in a smaller house, and not entertain."
+
+"Oh, Lydia, you talk like a child! How can I talk business with you when
+you have such crazy, impractical ideas? It's not just the money an
+assistant would cost! Either he'd not be so good as I, and then I'd lose
+my reputation for efficiency and my chance for promotion, or else he
+_would_ be as good and he'd get the job permanently and divide the field
+with me. A man has to look a long way ahead in business!"
+
+"But, Paul, what if he _did_ divide the field with you? What if you
+don't get ahead of everybody else, if you'd have time and strength to
+think of other things more--you said the other day that you weren't
+sleeping well any more, and you're losing your taste for books and music
+and outdoors--why, I'd rather live in four rooms right over your office,
+so that you wouldn't have that hour lost going and coming--"
+
+Paul broke in with a curt scorn: "Oh, Lydia! What nonsense! Why don't
+you propose living in a tent, to save rent?"
+
+"Why I would--I would in a minute if I thought it would make things any
+better!" Lydia cried with a desperate simplicity.
+
+At this crowning absurdity, Paul began to laugh, his ill-humor actually
+swept away by his amusement at Lydia's preposterous fancies. It was too
+foolish to try to reason seriously with her. He put his hand on her
+shining dark hair, ruffling it up like a teasing boy. "I guess you'd
+better leave the economic status of society alone, Lydia. You might
+break something if you go charging around it so fierce."
+
+A call came from the darkness of the hall: "Mis' Hollister!"
+
+"It's Mary," said Paul; "probably you forgot to give her any
+instructions about breakfast, in your anxiety about the future of the
+world. If you can calm down enough for such prosaic details, do tell her
+for the Lord's sake not to put so much salt in the oatmeal as there was
+this morning."
+
+Lydia found the negress with her wraps on, glooming darkly, "Mis'
+Hollister, I'm gwine to leave," she announced briefly.
+
+Lydia felt for a chair. Mary had promised faithfully to stay through the
+winter, until after her confinement. "What's the matter, Mary?"
+
+"I cyant stay in no house wheah de lady says I drinks."
+
+"You will stay until--until I am able to be about, won't you?"
+
+"My things is gone aready," said Mary, moving heavily toward the door,
+"and I'm gwine now." As she disappeared, she remarked casually, "I
+didn't have no time to wash the supper dishes. Good-by."
+
+"What's the matter with Mary?" called Paul.
+
+Lydia went back to him, trying to smile. "She's gone--left," she
+announced.
+
+Paul opened his eyes with a look of keen annoyance. "You can't break in
+a new cook _now_!" he said. "She can't go now!"
+
+"She's gone," repeated Lydia wearily. "I don't know how anybody could
+make her stay."
+
+Paul got up from the couch with his lips closed tightly together, and,
+sitting down in a straight chair, took Lydia on his knee as though she
+were a child. "Now, see here, my wife, you mustn't get your feelings
+hurt if I do some plain talking for a minute. You've been telling me
+what you think about things, and now it's my turn. And what _I_ think is
+that if my dear young wife would spend more time looking after her own
+business she'd have fewer complaints to make about my doing the same.
+The thing for you to do is to accept conditions as they are and do your
+best in them--and, really, Lydia, make your best a little better."
+
+Lydia was on the point of nervous tears from sheer fatigue, but she
+clung to her point with a tenacity which in so yielding a nature was
+profoundly eloquent. "But, Paul, if everybody had always settled down
+and accepted conditions, and never tried to make them better--"
+
+"There's a difference between conditions that have to be accepted and
+those that can be changed," said Paul sententiously.
+
+Lydia tore herself away from him and stood up, trembling with
+excitement. She felt that they had stumbled upon the very root of the
+matter. "But who's to decide which our conditions are?"
+
+Paul caught at her, laughing. "I am, of course, you firebrand! Didn't
+you promise to honor and obey?" He went on with more seriousness, a
+tender, impatient, condescending seriousness: "Now, Lydia, just stop and
+think! Do you, can you, consider this a good time for you to try to
+settle the affairs of the universe--still all upset about your father's
+death, and goodness knows what crazy ideas it started in your head--and
+with an addition to the family expected! _And_ the cook just left!"
+
+"But that's the way things always are!" she protested. "That's life.
+There's never a time when something important hasn't just happened or
+isn't just going to happen, you have to go right ahead, or you
+never--why, Paul, I've waited for two years for a really good chance for
+this talk with you--"
+
+"Thank the Lord!" he ejaculated. "I hope it'll be another two before you
+treat me to another evening like this. Oh, pshaw, Lydia! You're morbid,
+moping around the house too much--and your condition and all. Wait till
+you've got another baby to play with--I don't remember you had any
+doubts of anything the first six months of Ariadne's life. You ought to
+have a baby a year to keep you out of mischief! Just you wait till you
+can entertain and live like folks again. In the meantime you hustle
+around and keep busy and you won't be so bothered with thinking and
+worrying."
+
+Unknowingly, they had drawn again near to the heart of their
+discussion. Unknowingly Lydia stood before the answer from her husband,
+the final statement that she wished to hear.
+
+"But to hustle and keep busy--that's good only so long as you keep at
+it. The minute you stop--"
+
+Paul's answer was an epoch in her thought.
+
+"_Don't stop!_" he cried, surprised at her overlooking so obvious a
+solution.
+
+At this bullet-like retort, Lydia shivered as though she had been
+struck. She turned away with a blind impulse for flight. Her gesture
+brought her husband flying to her. He took her forcibly in his arms.
+"What the devil--what is the matter _now_?" he asked, praying for
+patience. She hung unresponsive in his grasp. "What's the matter?" he
+repeated.
+
+"You've just told me a horrible thing," she whispered; "that life is so
+dreadful that the only way we can get through it at all is by never
+looking at--"
+
+Paul actually shook her in his exasperation. "Gee whiz, Lydia! you're
+enough to drive a man to drink! I never told you any such melodramatic
+nonsense. I told you straight horse sense, which is that if you took
+more interest in your work, in the work that every woman of your class
+and position has to do, you'd have less time to think foolishness--and
+your husband would have an easier life."
+
+Her trembling lips opened to speak again, but he closed them with a firm
+hand. "And now, as your natural guardian, I'm not going to let you say
+another word about it. You dear little silly! However did you get us so
+wound up! Blessed if I have any idea what it's all been about!"
+
+He was determined to end the discussion. He was relieved beyond
+expression that he had been able to get through it without saying
+anything unkind to his wife. He never meant to do that. He now went on,
+shaking a finger at her:
+
+"You listen to me, Lydia-Emery-that-was! Do you know what we are going
+to do? We're going out into that howling desolation that Mary has
+probably left in the kitchen, and we're going to see if we can find a
+couple of clean glasses, and we're going to have a glass of beer apiece
+and a ham sandwich and a piece of the pie that's left over from dinner.
+You don't know what's the matter with you, but I do! You're starved!
+You're as hungry as you can be, aren't you now?"
+
+Lydia had sunk into a chair during this speech and was now regarding him
+fixedly, her hands clasped between her knees. At his final appeal to
+her, she closed her eyes. "Yes," she said with a long breath; "yes, I
+am."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+"THE AMERICAN MAN"
+
+
+A ripple from the surging wave of culture which, for some years, had
+been sweeping over the women's clubs of the Middle West, began to
+agitate the extremely stationary waters of Endbury social life. The
+Women's Literary Club felt that, as the long-established intellectual
+authority of the town, it should somehow join in the new movement. The
+organization of this club dated back to a period now comparatively
+remote. Mrs. Emery, who had been a charter member, had never been more
+genuinely puzzled by Dr. Melton's eccentricities than when he had
+received with a yell of laughter her announcement that she had just
+helped to form a "literary club," which would be the "most exclusive
+social organization" in Endbury. It had lived up to this expectation. To
+belong to it meant much, and both Paul and Flora Burgess had been
+gratified when, on her mother's resignation, Lydia had been elected to
+the vacant place.
+
+This close corporation, composed of ladies in the very inner circle,
+felt keenly the stimulating consciousness of its importance in the
+higher life of the town, and had too much civic pride to allow Endbury
+to lag behind the other towns in Ohio. Columbus women, owing to the
+large German population of the city, were getting a reputation for being
+musical; Cincinnati had always been artistic; Toledo had literary
+aspirations; Cleveland went in for civic improvement. The leading
+spirits of the Woman's Literary Club of Endbury cast about for some
+other sphere of interest to annex as their very own property.
+
+They were hesitating whether to undertake a campaign of municipal
+house-cleaning, or to devote themselves to the study of the sonnet form
+in English verse, when an unusual opportunity for distinction opened
+before them. The daughter of the club's president was married to a
+professor in the State University of Michigan, and on one of her visits
+home she suggested that her mother's club invite to address it the
+Alliance Française lecturer of that year. He had to come out to Ann
+Arbor, anyhow--Ann Arbor was not very far from Endbury--not far, that
+is, as compared with the journey the lecturer would have made from
+Columbia and Harvard to "Michigan State." One of the club husbands was a
+railroad man and, maybe, could give them transportation. Frenchmen were
+always anxious to make all the money they could--she was sure that M.
+Buisine could be induced to come for a not extravagant honorarium. Why
+should not Endbury go in for cosmopolitanism? That certainly would be
+something new in Ohio.
+
+And so it was arranged for an afternoon for the first week in December,
+a very grand "house-darkened-and-candle-lighted performance," as
+Madeleine Lowder labeled this last degree of Endbury ceremonious
+elaboration. It was held at the house of Paul's aunt, so that,
+naturally, Lydia could by no means absent herself. Madeleine came for
+her, and together they took Ariadne to Marietta's house and left her
+there for safe-keeping. Lydia was intensely conscious, under her
+sister's forbearing silence, that Marietta had never been asked to join
+the Woman's Literary Club. Even the jaunty Madeleine was aware of a
+tension in the brief conversation over the child's head, and remarked as
+she and Lydia walked away from the house: "Well, really now, _was_ that
+the most tactful thing in the world?"
+
+"What else could I do?" asked Lydia, at her wit's end. "I don't dare
+leave Ariadne with those awful things from the employment agencies, and
+'Stashie's not coming back till next week."
+
+"Oh, _she's_ coming again, is she?" commented her companion. "Well,
+that'll mean lots of fun watching Paul squirm. But don't mind him,
+Lydia." Madeleine was one of the women who prided herself on her loyal
+sense of solidarity among her sex. "If he says a word, you poke him one
+in the eye. Keep her till after your confinement, anyhow. A woman ought
+to be allowed to run her house without any man butting in. We let them
+alone; they ought to let us."
+
+There never was a person in the world, Lydia thought, in whom marriage
+had made less difference than in Paul's sister. She was exactly the same
+as in her girlhood. Lydia wondered at her with an ever-growing
+amazement. The enormous significance of the marriage service, the
+mysteries of the dual existence, her new responsibilities,--they all
+seemed non-existent. Paul said approvingly that Madeleine knew how to
+get along with less fuss than any woman he ever saw. Her breezy high
+spirits were much admired in Endbury, and her good humor and prodigious
+satisfaction with life were considered very cheerfully infectious.
+
+The two women had reached Madame Hollister's house while Madeleine was
+expounding her theory of matrimony, and now took their places in the
+throng of extremely well-dressed women sitting on camp chairs, the rows
+of which filled the two parlors. The lecturer with the president of the
+club, occupied a dais at the other end of the room. He was a tall, ugly
+man, with prominent blue eyes, gray hair upstanding in close-cropped
+military stiffness, and a two-pronged grizzled beard. He was looking
+over his audience with a leisurely smiling scrutiny that roused in Lydia
+a secret resentment.
+
+"He's very distinguished looking, isn't he?" whispered Madeleine. "So
+different! And _cool_! I'd like to see Pete Lowder sit up there to be
+stared at by all this gang of women."
+
+"Oh, he's probably used to it," said her neighbor on the other side.
+"They say he's spoken before any number of women's clubs. He does two a
+day sometimes. He's seen lots of American society women before now."
+
+Madeleine stared at him curiously. "I wonder what he thinks of us! I
+wonder! I'd give anything to know!" she said. She repeated this
+sentiment in varying forms several times.
+
+Lydia wondered why Madeleine should care so acutely about the opinion of
+a stranger and a foreigner, and finally, in her naïve, straightforward
+way, she put this question to her. Madeleine was not one of the many who
+evaded Lydia's questions, or answered them only with a laugh at their
+oddity. She was very straightforward herself and generally had a very
+clear idea of what underlay any action or feeling on her part. But this
+time her usual rough-and-ready methods of analysis seemed at fault.
+
+"Oh, because," she said indefinitely. "Don't you always want to know
+what men are thinking of you?"
+
+"Men that know something about me, maybe," Lydia amended.
+
+Madeleine laughed. "_They're_ the ones that don't think at all, one way
+or the other," she reminded her sister-in-law.
+
+The president of the club rose. Her introduction of the speaker was
+greeted with cordial, muted applause from gloved hands. There was a
+scraping of chairs, a stir of draperies, and little gusts of delicate
+perfumes floated out, as the hundred or more women settled themselves at
+the right angle, all their keen, handsome, nervous faces lifted to the
+speaker in a pleasant expectancy. Not only were they agreeably aware
+that they were forming part of one of the most recherché events of
+Endbury's social life, but they were remembering piquant rumors of M.
+Buisine's sensational attacks on American materialism. The afternoon
+promised something more interesting than their usual programme of
+home-made essays and papers.
+
+Their expectation was not disappointed. In fluent English, apparently
+smooth with long practice on the same theme, he wove felicitous and
+forceful elaborations on the proverb relating to people who are absent
+and the estimation in which they are held by those present. He had seen
+in America, he said, everything but the American man. He had seen
+hundreds and thousands of women as well-dressed as Parisiennes (and, as
+a rule, much more expensively), as self-possessed as English great
+ladies, as cultivated as Russian princesses, as universally and
+variously handsome as visions in a painter's dream--("He's not afraid of
+laying it on thick, is he?" whispered Madeleine with an appreciative
+laugh)--but, except for a few professors in college, he had seen no men.
+He had inquired for them everywhere and was told that he did not see
+them because he was a man of letters. If he had been the inventor of a
+new variety of railroad brake he would have seen millions. He was told
+that the men, unlike their wives, had no intellectual interests, had no
+clubs with any serious purposes, had no artistic aims, had no home life,
+no knowledge of their children, no interest in education--that, in
+short, they left the whole business of worthy living to their wives, and
+devoted themselves exclusively to the wild-beast joys of tearing and
+rending their business competitors.
+
+He gave many picturesque instances of his contention, he sketched
+several lively and amusing portraits of the one or two business men he
+had succeeded in running down; their tongue-tied stupefaction before the
+ordinary topics of civilization, their scorn of all æsthetic
+considerations; their incapacity to conceive of an intellectual life as
+worthy a grown man; the Stone-age simplicity with which they referred
+everything to savage cunning; their oblivion to any other standard than
+"success," by which they meant possessing something that they had taken
+away by force from somebody else.
+
+It was indeed a very entertaining lecture, a most stimulating,
+interesting experience to the crowd of well-dressed women; although
+perhaps some of them found it a little long after the dining-room across
+the hall began to be filled with waiters preparing the refreshments and
+an appetizing smell of freshly-made coffee filled the air. Still, it was
+a lecture they had paid for, and it was gratifying to have it so full
+and conscientiously elaborated.
+
+The ideas promulgated were not startlingly new to them, since they had
+read magazine articles on "Why American Women Marry Foreigners" and
+similar analyses of the society in which they lived; but to have it said
+to one's face, by a living man, a tall, ugly, distinguished foreigner,
+with the ribbon of the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole,--that brought
+it home to one! They nodded their beautifully-hatted heads at the truth
+of his well-chosen, significant anecdotes, they laughed at his sallies,
+they applauded heartily at the end when the lecturer sat down, the
+little smile, that Lydia found so teasing, still on his bearded lips.
+
+"Well, he hit things off pretty close, for a foreigner, didn't he?"
+commented Madeleine cheerfully, gathering her white furs up to the
+whiter skin of her long, fair throat and preparing for a rush on the
+refreshment room. "He must have kept his eyes open pretty wide since he
+landed."
+
+Lydia did not answer, nor did she join in the stampede to the
+dining-room. She sat still, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, her
+eyes very bright and dark in her pale face. She was left quite alone in
+the deserted room. Across the hall was the loud, incessant uproar of
+feminine conversation released from the imprisonment of an hour's
+silence. From the scraps of talk that were intelligible, it might have
+been one of her own receptions. Lydia heard not a mention of the
+opinions to which they had been listening. Apparently, they were
+regarded as an entertaining episode in a social afternoon. She listened
+intently. She looked across at the crowd of her acquaintances as though
+she were seeing them for the first time. In their midst was the tall
+foreigner, smiling, talking, bowing, drinking tea. He was being
+introduced in succession to all of his admiring auditors.
+
+Lydia rose to go and made her way to the dressing-room on the second
+floor for her wraps. As she returned toward the head of the stairs she
+saw a man's figure ascending, and stood aside to let him pass. He bowed
+with an unconscious assurance unlike that of any man Lydia had ever
+seen, and looked at her pale face and burning eyes with some curiosity.
+A faint aroma of delicate food and fading flowers and woman's
+sachet-powder hung about him. It was the lecturer, fresh from his throng
+of admirers. Lydia's heart leaped to a sudden valiant impulse,
+astonishing to her usual shyness, and she spoke out boldly, hastily:
+"Why did you tell us all that about our men? Didn't you think any of us
+would realize that they are good--our men are--good and pure and kind!
+Didn't you think we'd know that anything that's the matter with them
+must be the matter with us, too? They had mothers as well as fathers!
+It's not fair to blame everything on the men! It's not fair, and it
+can't be true! We're all in together, men and women. One can't be
+anything the other isn't!"
+
+She spoke with a swift, grave directness, looking squarely into the
+man's eyes, for she was as tall as he. They were quite alone in the
+upper hall. From below came the clatter of the talking, eating women.
+The Frenchman did not speak for a moment. For the first time the faint
+smile on his lips died away. He paid to Lydia the tribute of a look as
+grave as her own. Finally, "Madame, you should be French," he told her.
+
+The remark was so unexpected an answer to her attack that Lydia's eyes
+wavered. "I mean," he went on in explanation, "that you are acting as my
+wife would act if she heard the men of her nation abused in their
+absence. I mean also that I have delivered practically this same lecture
+over thirty times in America before audiences of women, and you are the
+first to--Madame, I should like to know your husband!" he exclaimed with
+another bow.
+
+"My husband is like all other American men," cried Lydia sharply,
+touched to the quick by this reference. "It is because he is that I--"
+She broke off with her gesture of passionate unresignation to her lack
+of fluency. Already the heat of the impulse that had carried her into
+speech was dying away. She began to hesitate for words.
+
+"Oh, I can't say what I mean--you must know it, anyhow! You blame the
+fathers for leaving all the bringing-up of the children to their wives,
+and yet you point out that the sons keep growing up all the time to
+be--to be--to be all you blame their fathers for being! If we women were
+half so--fine--as you tell us, why haven't we changed things?"
+
+The foreigner made a vivid, surprised, affirmatory gesture. "Exactly!
+exactly! exactly, Madame!" he cried. "It is the question I have asked
+myself a thousand times: Why is it--why is it that women so
+strong-willed, so unyielding in the seeking what they desire, why is it
+that apparently they have no influence on the general fabric of the
+society in--"
+
+"Perhaps it is," said Lydia unsparingly, her latent anger coming to the
+surface again and furnishing her fluency, "perhaps it is because people
+who see our faults don't help us to correct them, but flatter us by
+telling us we haven't any, and all the time think ill of us behind our
+backs."
+
+The lecturer began to answer with aplomb and an attempt at graceful
+cynicism: "Ah, Madame, put yourself in my place! I am addressing
+audiences of women. Would it be tactful to--" but under Lydia's honest
+eyes he faltered, stopped, flushed darkly under his heavy beard, up over
+his high, narrow forehead to the roots of his gray hair. He swallowed
+hard. "Madame," he said, "you have rebuked me--deservedly. I--I demand
+your pardon."
+
+"Oh, you needn't mind me," said Lydia humbly; "my opinion doesn't amount
+to anything. I oughtn't to talk, either. I don't _do_ anything different
+from the rest--the women downstairs, I mean. I can only see there's
+something wrong--" She found the other's gaze into her troubled eyes so
+friendly that she was moved to cry out to him, all her hostility gone:
+"What _is_ the trouble, anyhow?"
+
+The lecturer flushed again, this time touched by her appeal. "I proudly
+put at your service any reflections I have made--as though you were my
+daughter. I have a daughter about your age, who is also married--who
+faces your problems. Madame, you look fatigued--will you not sit down?"
+He led her to a sofa on one side of the hall and took a seat beside her.
+"Is not the trouble," he began, "that the women have too much leisure
+and the men too little--the women too little work, the men too much?"
+
+"Oh, yes, yes, yes!" Lydia's meditations had long ago carried her past
+that point; she was impatient at his taking time to state it. "But how
+can we change it?"
+
+"You cannot change it in a day. It has taken many years to grow. It has
+seemed to me that one way to change it is by using your leisure
+differently. Even those women who use their leisure for the best
+self-improvement have not used it well. Many of my countrymen say that
+the culture of American women is like a child's idea of
+ornamentation--the hanging on the outside of all odd bits of broken
+finery. I have not found it always so. I have met many learned women
+here, many women more cultivated than my own wife. But listen, Madame,
+to the words of an old man. Culture is dust and ashes if the spiritual
+foundations of life are not well laid; and, believe me, it takes two, a
+man and a woman, to lay those foundations. It can not be done alone."
+
+"But how, how--" began Lydia impatiently.
+
+"In the only way that anything can be accomplished in this world, by
+working! Your women have not worked patiently, resolutely, against the
+desertion of their men. Worse--they have encouraged it! Have you never
+heard an American, woman say: 'Oh, I can't bear a man around the house!
+They are so in the way!' Or, 'I let my husband's business alone. I want
+him to let--'"
+
+He imitated an accent so familiar to Lydia that she winced. "Oh, don't!"
+she said. "I see all that."
+
+"You must find few to see with you."
+
+"But how to change it?" She leaned toward him as though he could impart
+some magic formula to her.
+
+"With the men, work to have them share your problems--work to share
+theirs. Do not be discouraged by repeated failure. Defeat should not
+exist for the spirit. And, oh, the true way--you pointed it out in your
+first words. You have the training of the children. Their ideals are
+yours to make. A generation is a short--"
+
+His face answered more and more the eager intentness of her own. He
+raised his hand with a gesture that underlined his next words: "But
+remember always, always, what Amiel says, that a child will divine what
+we really worship, and that no teaching will avail with him if we
+_teach_ in contradiction to what we _are_."
+
+They were interrupted by a loud hail from the stairs. Madeleine Lowder's
+handsome head showed through the balustrade, and back of her were other
+amused faces.
+
+"I started to look you up, Lydia," she said, advancing upon them
+hilariously, "I thought maybe you weren't feeling well, and then I saw
+you monopolizing the lion so that everybody was wondering where in the
+world he was, and you were so wrapped up that you never even noticed me,
+so I motioned the others to see what a demure little cat of a sister I
+have."
+
+She stood before them at the end of this facetious explanation,
+laughing, frank, sure of herself, and as beautiful as a great rosy
+flower.
+
+"Your _sister_," said the lecturer incredulously to Lydia.
+
+"My husband's sister," Lydia corrected him, and presented the newcomer
+in one phrase.
+
+"Isn't she a sly, designing creature, Mr. Buisine?" cried Madeleine, in
+her usual state of hearty enjoyment of her situation. "You haven't met
+many as up-and-coming, have you now?"
+
+"I do not know the meaning of your adjective, Mademoiselle; but it is
+true that I have met few like your brother's wife."
+
+"I'm not Mademoiselle!" Madeleine was greatly amused at the idea.
+
+The lecturer looked at her with a return to his enigmatic smile of the
+earlier afternoon. "I never saw a person who looked more unmarried than
+yourself, Mademoiselle," he persisted.
+
+"Oh, we American women know the secret of not looking married," said
+Madeleine proudly.
+
+"You do indeed," said the Frenchman with the manner of gallantry. "All
+of you look unmarried."
+
+Lydia rose to go. The lecturer looked at her, his eyes softening, and
+made a silent gesture of farewell.
+
+He turned back to Madeleine. "But I _am_," she assured him, pleased and
+flattered with the centering of their persiflage on herself. She made a
+gesture toward Lydia, disappearing down the stairs. "I'm as much married
+as _she_ is!"
+
+M. Buisine continued smiling. "That is quite, quite incredible," he told
+her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+"... in tragic life, God wot,
+No villain need be. Passions spin the plot."
+
+
+"Say, Lydia," said Madeleine with her bluff good humor, coming into the
+house a few days after the French lecture, "say, I'm awfully sorry I
+told Paul! I never supposed he'd go and get mad. It was just my fool
+notion of being funny."
+
+Lydia was dusting the balustrade, her back to her visitor. She tingled
+all through at this speech, and for an instant went on with her work,
+trying to decide if she should betray the fact that she knew nothing of
+the incident to which Madeleine's remark seemed to refer, or if she
+should, as she had done so many times already, conceal under a silence
+her ignorance of what her husband told other people. She never learned
+of matters pertaining to Paul's profession except from chance remarks of
+his business associates. He had not even told her, until questioned,
+about his great inspiration for rearranging the territory covered in
+that region by his company; a plan that must have engrossed his thoughts
+and fired his enthusiasm during months of apparently common life with
+his wife. And Paul had been genuinely surprised, and a little put out at
+her desire to know of it.
+
+She decided that she dared not in this instance keep silent. She was too
+entirely in the dark as to what Madeleine had done. "I don't know what
+you're talking about, Madeleine," she said, turning around, dust-cloth
+in hand, trying to speak casually.
+
+Her sister-in-law stared. "Didn't Paul come home and give it to you? He
+looked as though he were going to."
+
+Lydia's heart sank in a vague premonition of evil. "Paul hasn't said
+anything to me. Why in the world should he? Is it about 'Stashie? She's
+been back several days now, but I thought he hadn't noticed her much."
+
+"Well, he _hasn't_ said anything, that's a fact!" exclaimed Madeleine,
+with the frank implication in her voice that she had not before believed
+Lydia's statement. "My, no! It's not about 'Stashie. It's about the
+French lecturer."
+
+Lydia's astonishment at this unexpected answer quite took away her
+breath. "_About the_--" she began.
+
+"Why, look-y here, it was this way," explained Madeleine rapidly. "I
+told you I was only joking. I thought it would be fun to tease Paul
+about the mash you made on old What's-his-name--about your sitting off
+on a sofa with him, and being so wrapped up you didn't even notice when
+the whole gang of us came to look at you--and maybe I stretched it some
+about how you looked leaning forward and gazing into his eyes--" She
+broke off with a laugh, cheerfully unable to continue a serious attitude
+toward life. "Oh, never you mind! It does a married man good to make him
+jealous once in a while. Keeps 'em from getting too stodgy and
+husbandy."
+
+"Jealous!" cried Lydia. "Paul jealous! Of me! Never!" Her certainty on
+the point was instant and fixed.
+
+"Well, you'd ha' thought he was, if you'd seen him. I was jollying him
+along--we were in the trolley, going to Endbury. I had to take that
+early car so's to keep a date with Briggs, and, oh, Lydia! that brown
+suit he's making for me is a _dream_, simply a dream! He's put a little
+braid, just the least little bit, along--"
+
+"What did Paul say?"
+
+"Paul? Oh, yes--How'd I get switched off onto Briggs? Why, Paul didn't
+say _anything_; that was what made me see he wasn't taking it right. He
+just sat still and listened and listened till it made me feel foolish. I
+thought he'd jolly me back, you know. He's usually a great hand for
+that. And then when I looked at him I saw he looked as black as a
+thundercloud--that nasty look he has when he's real mad. When we were
+children and he'd look that way, I'd grab up any old thing and hit him
+quick, so's to get it in before he hit me. Well, I was awfully sorry,
+and I said, 'Why, hold on a minute, Paul, let me tell you--' but he said
+he guessed I'd told him about enough, and before I could open my mouth
+he dropped off the car. We'd got in as far as Hayes Avenue. I wanted to
+explain, you know, that the Frenchman was old enough to be our
+_grandfather_!"
+
+"When did this happen?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know; three or four days ago--why, Thursday, it must have
+been, for after I got through with Briggs I went on to that--"
+
+"And this is Monday," said Lydia; "four days."
+
+At the sight of her sister-in-law's troubled eyes, Madeleine was again
+overcome with facile remorse. She clapped her on the shoulder
+hearteningly. "I'm awfully sorry, Lyd, but don't you go being afraid of
+Paul. You're too gentle with him, anyhow. A married woman can't afford
+to be. You have to keep the men in their places, and you can't do that
+if you don't knock 'em the side of the head once in so often. It's good
+for 'em. Honest! And about this, don't you worry your head a minute.
+Like as not Paul's forgot everything about it. He'd forget anything, you
+know he would, if an interesting job came up in business. And if he ever
+does say anything, you just laugh and tell him about old Thingamajig's
+white hair and pop eyes, and he'll laugh at the joke on himself."
+
+Lydia drew back with a gesture of extreme repugnance. "Don't talk so--as
+though Paul could be so--so vulgar."
+
+Madeleine laughed. "I guess you won't find a man in _this_ world that
+isn't 'vulgar' that way."
+
+"Why, I've been _married_ to Paul for years--he wouldn't think I--no
+matter what you told him, he couldn't conceive of my--"
+
+Mrs. Lowder, as usual, found her brother's wife very diverting. "Of your
+doing a little hand-holding on the side? Oh, go on! Flirting's no
+crime! And you did--honest to goodness, you did, turn that old fellow's
+head. You ought to have seen the way he looked after you."
+
+Lydia cut her off with a sharp "Oh, _don't_!" She was now sitting, still
+absently grasping the dust-cloth.
+
+Madeleine stood for a moment looking at her in a meditative silence
+rather unusual for her. "Lydia, you don't look a bit well," she said
+kindly. "Are you still bothered with that nausea?" She sat down by her
+sister-in-law and put her arms around her with an impulse of
+affectionate pity that almost undid Lydia, always so helplessly
+responsive to tenderness. "What's the matter, Lyd?" Madeleine went on.
+"Something's not going just right. Are you scared about this second
+confinement? Is Paul being horrid about something? You just take my
+advice, and if you want anything out of him, you fight for it. Nobody
+gets anything in this world if they don't put up a fight for it."
+
+Lydia began to say that there were some things which lost their value if
+obtained by fighting, but suddenly she stopped her faltering words, drew
+a long breath, and laid her head on the other's shoulder. More than
+wifely loyalty kept her silent. All her lifelong experience of Madeleine
+crystallized into a certainty of her limitations, and with this
+certainty came the realization that Madeleine stood for all the circle
+of people about her. Lydia had learned one lesson of life. She knew, she
+now knew intensely, that there was no cry by which she could reach the
+spiritual ear of the warm human beings so close to her in the body. She
+knew there was no language in which she could make intelligible her
+travail of soul. In the moment the two women sat thus, she renounced,
+once for all, any hope of outside aid in her perplexities. They lay
+between herself and Paul. She could hope to find expression and relief
+for them only through that unique privilege of marriage, utter intimacy.
+
+She kissed her husband's sister gently, comforted somewhat by the mere
+fact of her presence. "You're good to bother about me, Maddely," she
+said, using a pet name of their common childhood. "I guess I'm not
+feeling very well these days. But that's to be expected."
+
+"Well, I tell you what, I wouldn't be so patient about it as _you_ are!"
+cried the other wife. "It's simply horrid to have all this a second
+time, and Ariadne so little yet. It's _mean_ of Paul."
+
+She continued voicing an indignant sympathy with her usual energy. Lydia
+looked at her with a vague smile. At the first words of the childless
+woman, she had been filled with the mother-hunger which gave savor to
+her life during those days. As Madeleine went on, she sat unheeding,
+lost in a fond impatience to feel the tiny body on her knees, the downy
+head against her cheek. Her arms ached with emptiness. For an instant,
+so vivid was her sense of it, the child seemed to be there, in her arms.
+She felt the eager tug of the soft lips at her breast. She looked
+down--"Well, anyhow, you poor, dear thing! I hope you will bottle-feed
+this one! It would be just a little _too_ much if they made you nurse
+it!"
+
+Lydia did not even attempt a protest. Her submissive, entire acceptance
+of spiritual isolation seemed an answer to many of the conflicting
+impulses which had hitherto distracted her. She wished that she could
+reassure Madeleine by telling her that she would never again make
+another "odd" speech to her. She renounced all common life except the
+childlike, harmless, animal-like one of mutual material wants, and this
+renunciation brought her already a peace which, though barren, was
+infinitely calming after her former struggling uncertainties. "How did
+those waists come out that you sent to the cleaner's, Madeleine?" she
+asked, in a bright, natural tone of interest. "I hope the blue one
+_didn't_ fade."
+
+Madeleine reported to her husband that Lydia had seemed in one of her
+queer notional moods at first, but cheered up afterward and talked more
+"like folks," and seemed more like herself than she had since her father
+died. They had a real good visit together she said, and she began to
+think she could get some good satisfaction out of having Lydia for a
+neighbor, after all.
+
+But after Lydia was alone, there sprang upon her the terror of living on
+such terms with Paul. No, no! Never that! It would be dying by inches!
+Beaten back to this last inner stronghold of the dismantled castle of
+her ideals of life, she prepared to defend it with the energy of
+desperation.
+
+She did not believe Madeleine's story, or, at least, not her
+interpretation of Paul's attitude, but she felt a dreary chill at his
+silence toward her. It seemed to her that their marriage ought to have
+brought her husband an irresistible impulse to have in all their
+relations with each other a perfect openness. She resolved that she
+would begin to help him to that impulse that very day; now, at once.
+
+When Paul came in, he seemed abstracted, and went directly upstairs to
+pack a satchel, stating with his usual absence of explanatory comment
+that he was called to Evanston on business. He ate his dinner rather
+silently, glancing furtively at the paper. Only at the
+breakfast-table--such was their convention--did he allow himself to
+become absorbed in the news.
+
+Ariadne prattled to her mother of her adventures in the kitchen, where
+Patsy O'Hern, 'Stashie's cousin Patsy, was visiting her, and he made
+Ariadne a "horse out of a potato and toothpicks for legs, and a little
+wagon out of a matchbox, and a paper doll to sit and drive, and Patsy
+was perfectly loverly, anyhow, and he was making such a lot of money
+every day, and, oh, he made the wheels out of potato, too, as round as
+could be he cut it, and he gave every cent of it to his grandmother and
+she loved him as much as she did 'Stashie, and wasn't it good to have
+'Stashie back, and--"
+
+Paul frowned silently over his pie.
+
+"Come, dear; it's seven o'clock and bedtime," said Lydia, leading the
+little girl away.
+
+When she came back she noticed by the clock that she had been gone
+almost half an hour. She was surprised to see Paul still in the
+dining-room, as though he had not stirred since she left him. He was
+sitting in an attitude of moody idleness, singular with him, his elbows
+on the table, his chin in his hands. He looked desperately, tragically
+tired.
+
+No inward monitor gave any warning to Lydia of what the next few moments
+were to be in her life. She crossed the room quickly to her husband,
+feeling a great longing to be close to him.
+
+As she did so, a rattling clatter of tin was heard from the kitchen,
+followed by a shout of roaring laughter. Something in Paul's tense face
+snapped. He started up, overturning his chair. "Oh, _damn_ that idiot!"
+he cried.
+
+The door opened behind them. 'Stashie stood there, her red hair hidden
+in a mass of soft dough that was beginning to ooze down over her
+perspiring, laughing face. "I just wanted to show you what a comycal
+thing happened, Mis' Hollister," she began, in her familiar way.
+"'Twould make a pig laugh, now! I'd begun my bread dough, and put it on
+a shelf, an'--"
+
+"Oh, get out of here!" Paul yelled at her furiously. "And less noise out
+of you in the kitchen!"
+
+He slammed the door shut on her retreat, and turned to Lydia with a face
+she did not recognize. The room grew black before her eyes.
+
+"I suppose you still prefer that dirty Irish slut to my wishes," he
+said.
+
+His words, his accent, the quality of his voice, were the zigzag of
+lightning to his wife. The storm burst over her head like thunder.
+
+She was amazed to feel a great wave of anger surge up in her, responsive
+to his own. She cried, in outraged resentment at his injustice: "You
+know very well--" and stopped, horrified at the passion which rose
+clamoring to her lips.
+
+"I know very well that my home is the last place where my wishes are
+consulted," said Paul, catching her up.
+
+"I will dismiss 'Stashie to-morrow," returned Lydia with a bitter,
+proud brevity.
+
+"You're rather slow to take a hint. How long has she been with us? As
+for your saying that you can't get anyone else, and can't keep house
+decently as other decent people do, there isn't a word of truth in it!
+You can do whatever you care enough about to try to do. You didn't make
+an incompetent mess of taking care of the baby as you did out of that
+disgusting dinner party!"
+
+It was the first time he had ever spoken outright to her of that
+experience. Lydia was transfixed to hear the poison of the memory as
+fresh in his voice as though it had happened yesterday.
+
+"I'm simply not worth putting yourself out for," went on Paul, turning
+away and picking up his overcoat. "I'm only a common, ignorant,
+materialistic beast of an American husband!" He added in an insulting
+tone: "I suppose you'd like two husbands; one to earn your living for
+you, and one to talk to about your soul and to exchange near-culture
+with!"
+
+He had not looked at Lydia as he poured out this sudden flood of
+acrimony, but at her quick, fierce reply, he faced her.
+
+"I'd like _one_ husband," she cried white with indignation.
+
+"And I'd like a wife!" Paul flashed back at her hotly. "A wife that'd be
+a help and not a hindrance to everything I want to do--a wife that'd be
+loyal to me behind my back, and not listen to sneaking foreigners
+telling her that she's a misunderstood martyr--_martyr_!" His sense of
+injury exalted him. "Yes; all you American wives are martyrs, all right,
+I must say. While your husbands are working like dogs to make you money,
+you're sitting around with nothing to do but drink tea and listen to a
+foreigner who tells you--in summer time, while you're enjoying the cool
+breeze out here on a--maybe you think a dynamo-room's a funny place to
+be, with the thermometer standing at--what am I _doing_ when I'm away
+from you? Enjoying myself, no doubt. Maybe you think it's enjoyment to
+travel all night on a--maybe you think it's nice to make yourself
+conspicuous with another man that's been abusing your--"
+
+Lydia could hear no more for a loud roaring in her ears. She knew then
+the blackest moment of her life--a sickening scorn for the man before
+her. Madeleine had been right, then. They were of the same blood. His
+sister knew him better than--she, his wife, his wedded wife, was not to
+be spared the pollution of having her husband--
+
+"I didn't take any stock in Madeleine's nasty insinuations about your
+flirting with him, of course, but it showed me what you've been thinking
+about me all this time I've been working like a--"
+
+Lydia drew the first conscious breath since the beginning of this
+nightmare. The earth was still under her feet, struck down to it though
+she was. The roaring in her ears stopped. She heard Paul say:
+
+"Maybe you think I'm made of iron! I tell you I'm right on my nerves
+every minute! Dr. Melton threatens me with a breakdown every time I see
+him!" There was a sort of angry pride in this statement. "I can't sleep!
+I'm doing ten men's work! And what do I get from you? Any rest? Any
+quiet? Why, these first years, when you might have made things easier
+for me by taking all other cares off my mind and leaving me free for
+business--they've actually been harder because of you!"
+
+He thrust his arms into his overcoat and caught up his satchel. "I
+haven't wanted anything so hard to give! Good Lord! All I asked for was
+a well-kept house where I could invite my friends without being ashamed
+of it, and to live like other decent people!" He moved to the door, and
+put one hand, one strong, thin hand, on the knob. With the unearthly
+clearness of one in a terrible accident, Lydia noticed every detail of
+his appearance. He was flushed, a purple, congested color, singularly
+unlike his usual indoor pallor; hurried pulses throbbed visibly, almost
+audibly, at his temples; one eyelid twitched rapidly and steadily, like
+a clock ticking. With a gesture as automatic as drawing breath, he
+jerked out his watch and looked at it, apparently to make sure of
+catching his trolley, although his valedictory was poured out with such
+a passionate unpremeditation that the action must have been involuntary
+and unconscious. "But I don't even ask that now--since it doesn't suit
+you to bother to give it! All I ask now ought to be easy enough for any
+woman to do--not to _bother_ me! Leave me alone! Keep your everlasting
+stewing and fussing and hysterical putting-on to yourself! I don't
+bother you with my affairs--I haven't, and I never will--why, for God's
+sake, can't you-- Some men marry women who help them, and pull with them
+loyally, instead of pulling the other way all the time! Such a woman
+would have made me a thousand times more successful than I--"
+
+Lydia broke in with a loud voice of anguished questioning: "Do they make
+them better men?" she asked piercingly.
+
+Her husband looked at her over his shoulder. "Oh, you and your
+goody-goody cant!" he said, and going out without further speech, closed
+the door behind him.
+
+The clock struck the half-hour. Their conversation had lasted less than
+five minutes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+TRIBUTE TO THE MINOTAUR
+
+
+The scene of Paul's departure was no worse than many an outbreak in the
+ordinary married life of ordinary, quick-tempered, over-tired married
+people, for whom an open quarrel brings relief like the clearing of the
+air after an electric storm, but to Lydia it was no such surface
+manifestation of nerves. The impulse that had made them both break out
+into the cruel words came from some long-gathering bitterness, the very
+existence of which was like the end of all things to her. A single flash
+of lightning had showed her to the edge of what a terrifying precipice
+they had strayed, and then had left her in darkness.
+
+That was how it seemed to her; she was in the most impenetrable
+blackness, though the little girl played on beside her with a child's
+cheerful blindness to its elder's emotion, and Anastasia detected
+nothing but that her mistress had a better color than before and stepped
+about quite briskly.
+
+It was the restless activity of a tortured animal which drove Lydia from
+one household task to another, hurrying her into a trembling physical
+exhaustion, which, however, brought with it no instant's cessation of
+the tumult in her heart. The night after Paul's departure was like a
+black eternity to her turning wildly on her bed, or rising to walk as
+wildly about the silent house. "But I can't stand this!--to hate and be
+hated! I can not bear it! I must do something--but what? but what?" Once
+she feared she had screamed out these ever-recurring words, so audibly
+like a cry of agony did they ring in her ears; but, forcing herself to
+an instant's immobility, she heard Ariadne's light, regular breathing
+continue undisturbed.
+
+She sat down on her bed and told herself that she would go out of her
+mind if she could not think something different from this chaos of angry
+misery. She fell on her knees, she sent her soul out in a supreme appeal
+for help and, still kneeling, she felt the intolerable tension within
+her loosen. She began to cry softly. The unnatural strength which had
+sustained her gave way; she sank together in a heap, her head leaning
+against the bed, her arms thrown out across it. Here Anastasia found her
+the next morning, apparently asleep, although upon being called she
+seemed to come to herself from a deeper unconsciousness.
+
+Whatever it had been, the hour or two of oblivion that lay back of her
+was like a wall between her soul and the worst phase of her suffering.
+In answer to her cry for help, perhaps an appeal to the best in her own
+nature, there had come a cessation of what was to her the only
+unbearable pain--the bitter, blaming anger which had flared up in her,
+answering her husband's anger like the reflection of a torch in a
+mirror. In that silent hour before dawn, she had seen Paul suddenly as a
+victim to forces outside himself quite as much as she was; poor, tired
+Paul, with his haggard face, flushed with a wrath that was not his own,
+but an involuntary expression of suffering, the scream of a man caught
+in the cogs of a great machine. She hung before her mental vision now,
+constantly, the picture of Paul as she had seen him when she came
+downstairs; Paul leaning his chin on his hands, his jaded face white and
+drawn under his thinning, graying hair.
+
+The alleviation which came through this conception of her husband was
+tempered by the final disappearance of her old feeling that Paul was
+stronger, clearer-headed, than she, and that if she could but once make
+him stop and understand the forces in their life which she feared, he
+could conquer them as easily as he conquered obstacles in the way of
+their material success. She now felt that he was not even as strong as
+she, since he could not get even her faint glimpse of their common
+enemy, this Minotaur of futile materialism which had devoured the young
+years of their marriage and was now threatening to destroy the
+possibility of a great, strongly-rooted affection which had lain so
+clearly before them. She felt staggered by the responsibility of having
+to be strong enough for two; and as another day wore on this new
+preoccupation became almost as absorbing an obsession as her anger of
+the night before.
+
+But this was steadying in the very velocity with which her mind swept
+around the circle of possible courses of action. Her thoughts hummed
+with a steady, dizzy speed around and around the central idea that
+something must be done and that she was now the only one to do it.
+'Stashie thought to herself that she had never seen Mrs. Hollister look
+so well, her eyes were so bright, her cheeks so pink.
+
+Lydia had set herself the task of getting down and sorting the curtains
+in the house, preparatory to sending them to the cleaner. Above the
+piles of dingy drapery, her face shone, as 'Stashie had noted, with a
+strange, feverish brightness. Her knees shook under her, but she walked
+about quickly. Ariadne ran in and out of the house, chirping away to her
+mother of various wonderful discoveries in the world of outdoors. Lydia
+heard her as from a distance, although she gave relevant answers to the
+child's talk.
+
+"It has come down," she was saying to herself, "to a life-and-death
+struggle. It isn't a question now of how much of the best in Paul, in
+me, in our life, we can save. It's whether we can save _any_! How dirty
+lace curtains get! It must be the soft coal--yes, it is a life and death
+struggle--I must see to Ariadne's underwear. It is too warm for these
+sunny days.--Oh! Oh! Paul and I have quarreled! And what about! About
+such sickeningly trivial things--how badly 'Stashie dusts! There are
+rolls of dust under the piano--but I thought people only
+quarreled--quarreled terribly--over great things: unfaithfulness,
+cruelty, differences in religion! Oh, if I only now had a religion, a
+religion which would--Yes, Ariadne; but only to the edge of the driveway
+and back. How muddy the driveway is! Paul said it should have more
+gravel--_Paul!_ How _can_ he come back to me after such--Madeleine says
+married people always quarrel--how can they look into each other's eyes
+again! We must escape that sort of life! We must! We _must_!"
+
+The thought of what she had hoped from her marriage and of what she had,
+filled her with the most passionate self-reproach. It must be at least
+half her fault, since she and Paul made up but one whole. As she helped
+'Stashie sort the dingy curtains, she was saying over and over to
+herself that she was responsible, responsible as much as for Ariadne's
+health. This conception so possessed her now that she felt herself able
+to accomplish anything, even the miracle needed.
+
+To have achieved this state of passionate resolution gave her for a
+moment the sense of having started upon the straight road to escape from
+her nightmare; and for the first time since the door had slammed behind
+Paul she drew a long breath and was able to give more than a blind gaze
+to the world about her.
+
+She noticed that, though it was after twelve o'clock, Ariadne had not
+been told to come to luncheon. When the little girl came running at her
+mother's call, her vivid face flushed with happy play, Lydia knew a
+throb of that exquisite, unreasoning parent's joy, lying too near the
+very springs of life for any sickness of the spirit to affect it. Like
+everything else, however, the touch of the child's tight-clinging arms
+about her neck brought her back to her preoccupation. Ariadne must not
+be allowed to grow up to such a regret as she felt, that she had never
+known her father. There were moments, she saw them clearly, when Paul
+realized with difficulty the fact of his daughter's existence, and he
+never realized it as a fact involving any need for a new attitude on his
+part.
+
+"When is Daddy coming back to us _vis_ time?" asked Ariadne over her
+egg.
+
+Anastasia paused furtively at the door. She had had a divination of
+trouble in the last talk between her master and mistress. The door had
+slammed. Mr. Hollister had not called for the tie she was pressing for
+him in the kitchen--'Stashie told herself fiercely that "killing wud be
+too good for her, makin' trouble like the divil's own!" She listened
+anxious for Lydia's answer.
+
+"Daddy's coming back to us as soon as his business is done," said Paul's
+wife. At the turn of her phrase she turned cold, and added with a quick
+vehemence: "No, no! before that! Long before that!" She went on, to
+cover her agitation and get the maid out of the room, "'Stashie, get the
+baby a glass of milk."
+
+"The front door bell's ringin'," said 'Stashie, departing in that
+direction, with the assurance of her own ability to choose the proper
+task for herself, so exasperating to her master.
+
+She came back bringing Miss Burgess in her wake, Miss Burgess
+apologizing for "coming right _in_, that way," exclaiming effusively at
+the pretty picture made by mother and child,--"She must be such company
+for you, Miss Lydia"--Miss Burgess, deferential, sure of her own
+position and her hostess', and determinedly pleased with the general
+state of things. Lydia repressed a sigh of impatience, but, noting the
+tired lines in the little woman's face, told Anastasia to make another
+cup of tea for Miss Burgess and cook her an egg.
+
+"Oh, delighted, I'm sure! Quite an honor to have the same lunch with
+little Miss Hollister."
+
+Ariadne did not smile at this remark, though from the speaker's accent
+it was meant as a pleasantry.
+
+Miss Burgess cast about in her mind for another bit of suitable
+badinage, but finding none, she began at once on the object of her
+visit.
+
+"Now, my dear, I want you to listen to all I have to say before you make
+one objection. It's an idea of my very own. You'll let me get through
+without interruption?"
+
+"Yes, oh, yes," murmured Lydia, lifting Ariadne down from her high-chair
+and untying the napkin from about her thin little neck.
+
+The introduction of a new element in her surroundings had for a moment
+broken the thread of her exalted resolutions. She wondered with a sore
+heart, as though it had been a common lovers' quarrel, how she and Paul
+could ever get over the first sight of each other again. She was
+wondering how, with the most passionate resolve in the world, she could
+do anything at all under the leaden garment of physical fatigue which
+would weigh her down in the months to come.
+
+Miss Burgess began in her best style, which she so evidently considered
+very good indeed, that she could not doubt Lydia's attention. It was all
+about a home for working-women she explained; a new charity which had
+come from the East, had caught on like anything among the Smart Set of
+Columbus, and was about to be introduced into Endbury. The most
+exclusive young people in Columbus--the East End Set (Miss Burgess had a
+genius for achieving oral capitalization) gave a parlor play for the
+first benefit there, in one of the Old Broad Street Homes, and they were
+willing to repeat it in Endbury to introduce it there. A Perfectly
+splendid crowd was sure to come, tickets could be Any Price, and the
+hostess who lent her house to it could have the glory of a most unique
+affair. Mrs. Lowder would be overwhelmed with delight to have the pick
+of the Society of the Capital at her house, but Miss Burgess had thought
+it such an opportunity for Miss Lydia to come out of mourning with,
+since it was for charity. She motioned Lydia, about to speak, sternly to
+silence: "You said you wouldn't interrupt! And you haven't let me say
+_half_ yet! That's your side of it--the side your dear mother would
+think of if she were only here; but there's another side that you can't,
+you _oughtn't_ to resist!" She finished her tea with a hasty swallow
+and, going around the table, sat down by Lydia, laying her hand
+impressively on the young matron's slim arm. "You're the sweetest thing
+in the world, of course, but, like other people of your fortunate class,
+you can't realize how perfectly awfully lucky you are, nor how unlucky
+_poor_ people are! Of course it stands to reason that you can't even
+imagine the life of a working-woman--you, a woman of entire leisure,
+with every want supplied before you speak of it by a husband who adores
+you! Why, Miss Lydia, to give you some idea let me tell you just one
+little thing. Lots and lots of the working-women of Endbury live with
+their families in two or three rooms right on that horrid Main Street
+near their work because they can't afford _carfares_!"
+
+Lydia looked at her without speaking. She remembered her futile,
+desperate, foolish proposition to Paul to get more time together by
+living near his work. With a roar, the flood of her bewilderment,
+diverted for a time, broke over her again. She braced herself against
+it. Through her companion's dimly-heard exhortations that, from her high
+heaven of self-indulgence, she stoop to lend a hand to her less favored
+sisters, she repeated to herself, clinging to the phrase as though it
+were a magic formula: "If I can only wish hard enough to make things
+better, nothing can prevent me."
+
+The telephone bell rang, and Miss Burgess interrupted herself to say:
+"It's for me, I know. I told them at the office to call me up here." She
+got herself out of the room in her busy way, her voice soon coming in a
+faint murmur from the far end of the hall.
+
+Lydia walked to the window to call Ariadne in to put on a wrap, the
+thought and action automatic. She had buttoned the garment about the
+child's slender body before she responded again to the little living
+presence. Then she took her in a close embrace. With the child's breath
+on her face, with her curls exhaling the fresh outdoor air, there came
+to pass for poor Lydia one of the strange, happy mysteries of the
+contradictory tangle that is human nature. She had felt it often with
+Paul after one of their long separations--how mere physical presence can
+sometimes bring a consolation to the distressed spirit.
+
+As she held her child to her heart, things seemed for a moment quite
+plain and possible. Why, Paul was Ariadne's father! As soon as he was
+with her again, all would be well. It must be. Nothing could separate
+her from the father of her baby! They were one flesh now. There was
+still all their lifetime to grow to be one in spirit. She had only to
+try harder. They had simply started on a false track. They were so
+young. So many years lay before them. There was plenty of time to turn
+back and start all over again--there was plenty of time to--
+
+"Oh, my dear! my dear!" Miss Burgess faltered weakly into the room and
+sank upon a chair.
+
+Lydia sprang up, Ariadne still in her arms, and faced her for a long
+silent instant, searching her face with passion. Then she set the little
+girl down gently. "Run out and play, dear," she said, and until the door
+had shut on the child she did not stir. Her hand at her throat, "Well?"
+she asked.
+
+Miss Burgess began to cry into her handkerchief.
+
+"It's Paul!" said Lydia with certainty. She sat down.
+
+The weeping woman nodded.
+
+"He has left me," Lydia continued in the same dry tone of affirmation.
+"I know. We had a quarrel, and he has left me."
+
+Miss Burgess looked up, quite wild with surprise, her sobs cut short,
+her face twisted. "Oh, no--no--no!" she cried, running across the room
+and putting her arms about the other. "No; it's not that! He--he--the
+man who telephoned said they were testing the dynamo, and your husband
+insisted on--"
+
+Lydia came to life like a swimmer emerging into the air after a long
+dive. "Oh, he's hurt! He's hurt!" she cried, bounding to her feet. "I
+must go to him. I must go to him!"
+
+She tore herself away from the reporter and darted toward the door. The
+older woman ran after her, stumbling, sobbing, putting hands of
+imploring pity on her.
+
+Although no word was spoken, Lydia suddenly screamed out as though she
+had been stabbed. "_NO! Not that!_" she cried.
+
+"Yes, yes, my poor darling!" said the other.
+
+Lydia turned slowly around. "Then it is too late. We never can do
+better," she said.
+
+Miss Burgess tried helplessly to unburden her kind heart of its aching
+sympathy. "You spoke of a little disagreement, but, oh, my dear, don't
+let that be the last thought. Think of the years of perfect love and
+knowledge you had together."
+
+"We never knew each other," said Lydia. Her voice did not tremble.
+
+"Oh, don't! don't!" pleaded Miss Burgess, alarmed. "You mustn't let it
+unhinge you so! Such a perfect marriage!"
+
+"We were never married," said Lydia. She leaned against the wall and
+closed her eyes.
+
+"Oh, help! Someone!" called the poor reporter. "Somebody come quick."
+
+Lydia opened her eyes. She spoke still in a low, steady voice, but in it
+now was a shocking quality from which the other shrank back terrified.
+"_I could have loved him!_" she said.
+
+"Quick--'Stashie--hurry--keep the baby out of the room! Your mistress
+has fainted!"
+
+- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
+
+                                BOOK IV
+
+                  "BUT IT IS NOT TOO LATE FOR ARIADNE"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+PROTECTION FROM THE MINOTAUR
+
+
+Dr. Melton burst open the door of the house in the Black Rock woods, and
+running to the owner caught hold of his bared brown arm. "Paul Hollister
+is dead!" he cried.
+
+"I read the papers," said Rankin, looking down at him without stirring.
+
+"The damn fool!" cried the doctor, his face working. "Just now! There's
+another child expected."
+
+Rankin's inscrutable gravity did not waver at this speech. He felt the
+hand that rested on his arm tremble, and he was thinking, as Judge Emery
+had so often thought, that perhaps one reason for the doctor's success
+in treating women was a certain community of too-responsive nerves. "You
+can hardly blame a man because the date of his death is inconvenient,"
+he said reasonably. He drew up one of his deep chairs and pushed the
+doctor into it. "Sit down and get your breath. You look sick. How do you
+happen to be up so early? It's hardly daylight."
+
+"Up! You don't suppose I've been to bed! Lydia--" His voice halted.
+
+Rankin's quiet face stirred. "She feels it--terribly?"
+
+"I can't make her out! I can't make her out!" The doctor flung this
+confession of failure before him excitedly. "I don't know what's in her
+mind, but she's evidently dangerously near--women in her condition
+never have a very settled mental poise, anyhow, and this sudden
+shock--they _telephoned_ it--and there was nobody there but that fool
+Flora--"
+
+"Do you mean that Mrs. Hollister is out of her mind?" asked Rankin
+squarely.
+
+"I don't know! I don't know, I tell you! She says strange
+things--strange things. When I got there yesterday afternoon, she was
+holding Ariadne--you knew, didn't you? that she called their little girl
+Ariadne--?"
+
+Rankin sat down, white to the lips. "No," he said, "I didn't know that.
+I never heard anything about--about her married life."
+
+"Well, she was holding Ariadne as close as though she was expecting
+kidnapers. I came in and she looked up--God! Rankin, with what a face of
+fear! It wasn't grief. It was terror! She said: 'I must save the
+children--I mustn't let it get the children, too.' I asked her what she
+meant, and she went on in a whisper that fairly turned the blood
+backward in my veins, 'The Minotaur! He got Paul--I must hide the
+children from him!' And that's all she would say. I managed to put
+Ariadne to bed, though Lydia screamed at the idea of having her out of
+her sight, and I gave Lydia a bromide and made her lie down. I think she
+knew me--oh, yes, I'm sure she did--why, she seemed like herself in
+every way but that one--but all night long she has wakened at intervals
+with a shriek and would not be quieted until she had felt of Ariadne.
+Nothing I said has had the slightest effect. I'm at my wits' end! If she
+doesn't get quieted soon--I finally gave her an opiate--enough to drug
+her senseless for a time--I don't know what to do! I don't know what to
+do!" He dropped his head into his hands and sat silent, shivering.
+
+Rankin was looking at him, motionless, his powerful hands gripping his
+knees. He did not seem to breathe at all.
+
+The doctor sprang up and began to trot about, kicking at the legs of
+the furniture and biting his nails. "Yes, I can, too! I do blame him for
+the date of his death!" He went back angrily to an earlier remark.
+"Hollister killed himself as gratuitously as if he had taken a pistol!
+And he did it out of sheer, devilish vanity--ambition! He had worked
+himself almost insane, anyhow. I'd warned him that he must take it easy,
+get all the rest he could. His nerves were like fiddle-strings. And what
+did he do? Made a night trip to Evanston to superintend a job entirely
+outside his work. The inspector gave the machines the regular test; but
+Paul wasn't satisfied. Said they hadn't come up to what he'd guaranteed
+to get the contract; took charge of the test himself, ran the speed up
+goodness knows how high. The inspector said he warned him, but Paul had
+got going and nothing could stop
+him--speed-mad--efficiency-mad--whatever you call it. And at last the
+fly-wheel on the engine couldn't stand it. It went through four floors
+and tore a hole in the roof--they say, in their ghastly phrase, there
+isn't enough left of him for a funeral! The other men left widows and
+children, too, I suppose--Oh, damn! damn! damn!" He stopped short in the
+middle of the floor, his teeth chattering, his hand at his mouth.
+
+Rankin's face showed that he was making a great effort to speak. "Would
+I be allowed to see her?" he asked finally.
+
+The doctor spun round on him, amazed. "You? Lydia? Why in the world?"
+
+"Perhaps I could quiet her. I have been able to quiet several delirious
+sick people when others couldn't."
+
+"I don't even know she's delirious--that's what puzzles me. She seems--"
+
+"Will you let me try?" asked Rankin again.
+
+                 *       *       *       *       *
+
+When they reached the house in Bellevue, Lydia was still in a heavy
+stupor, so Mrs. Sandworth told them, showing no surprise at Rankin's
+appearance. The two men sat down outside the door of her room to wait.
+It was a long hour they passed there. Rankin sat silent, holding on his
+knee little Ariadne, who amused herself quietly with his watch and the
+leather strap that held it. He took the back off, and let her see the
+little wheel whirring back and forth. His eyes never left the child's
+serious, rosy face. Once or twice he laid his large, work-roughened hand
+gently on her dark hair.
+
+Dr. Melton fidgeted about, making excursions into the sick room and
+downstairs to look after his business by telephone, and, when he sat by
+the door, relieving his overburdened heart from time to time in some
+sudden exclamation. "Paul hasn't left a penny, of course," one of these
+ran, "and he hadn't finished paying for the house. But she'll come
+naturally to live with Julia and me." At these last words, in spite of
+his painful preoccupation, a tender look of anticipation lighted his
+face.
+
+Again, he said: "What crazy notion can it be about the whatever-it-was
+getting Paul?" Later, "Was there ever such a characteristic death?"
+Finally, with a long sigh: "Poor Paul! Poor Paul! It doesn't seem more
+than yesterday that he was a little boy. He was a brave little boy!"
+
+Mrs. Sandworth came to the door. "She's beginning to come to herself, I
+think. She stirs, and moves her hands about."
+
+As she spoke, there was a scream from the bedroom: "My baby! My baby!"
+
+Rankin sprang to his feet, holding Ariadne on one arm, and stepped
+quickly inside. "Here is the baby," he said in a quiet voice. "I was
+holding her all the time you slept. I will not let the Minotaur come
+near her."
+
+Lydia looked at him long, with no sign of recognition. The room was
+intensely silent. A drop of blood showed on Dr. Melton's lower lip where
+his teeth gripped it.
+
+"Nobody else sees it," said Lydia in a hurried, frightened tone. "They
+won't believe me when I say it is there. They won't take care of
+Ariadne. They can't--"
+
+"I see it," Rankin broke in. He went on steadily: "I will take care
+that it does not hurt Ariadne."
+
+"Do you promise?" asked Lydia solemnly.
+
+"I promise," said Rankin.
+
+Lydia looked about her wonderingly, with blank eyes. "I think, then, I
+will lie down and rest a little," she said, in a thin, weak voice. "I
+feel very tired. I can't seem to remember what makes me so tired." She
+sank back on the pillows and closed her eyes. Her face was like a sick
+child's in its appealing, patient look of suffering. She looked up at
+Rankin again. "You will not go far?" she asked.
+
+"I shall be close at hand," he answered.
+
+"You are very kind," murmured Lydia, closing her eyes again. "I am sorry
+to be so much trouble to you--but it is so important about Ariadne. I am
+sorry to be so--you are--very--"
+
+Melton touched the other man's arm and motioned him to the door.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+AS ARIADNE SAW IT
+
+
+All that day, the tall, ruddy-haired man in working clothes sat in the
+hall, within sight, though not within hearing, of the sick room, playing
+with the rosy child, and exerting all his ingenuity to invent quiet
+games that they could play there "where Muvver tan see us"; Ariadne soon
+learned the reason for staying in one place so constantly. She was very
+happy that day. Never in her life had she had so enchanting a
+playfellow. He showed her a game to play with clothespins and tin plates
+from the kitchen--why, it was so much fun that 'Stashie herself had to
+join in as she went past. And he told one story after another without a
+sign of the usual grown-up fatigue. They had their lunch there at the
+end of the hall, on the little sewing-table with two dolls beside them
+and the new man made Ariadne laugh by making believe feed the dolls out
+of her doll's tea-set.
+
+It was a little queer, of course, to stay right there all the time, and
+to have Muvver staring at them from the bedroom at the other end of the
+hall, and not to be allowed to do more than tiptoe in once or twice and
+kiss her without saying a word; but when Ariadne grew confused with
+trying to think this out, and the little eyes drooped heavily, the new
+man picked her up and tucked her away in his arms so comfortably that,
+though she meant to reach up and feel if his beard felt as red as it
+looked, she fell asleep before she could raise her hand.
+
+When she woke up it was twilight, but she was still in his arms. She
+stirred sleepily, and he looked down and smiled at her. His face looked
+like an old friend's--as though she had always known it. He had a
+friendly smile. She was very happy. Uncle Marius came toward them,
+teetering on his toes, the way he always did. "I think it's safe to
+leave now, Rankin," he said. "She has fallen into a natural sleep."
+
+The new man stood up, still holding Ariadne. How tall he was! She kept
+going up and up, and when she peered over his shoulder she found herself
+looking down on Uncle Marius' white head.
+
+"How about to-morrow?" asked the new man.
+
+"We'll see. We'll see," said Dr. Melton; and then they all went
+downstairs and had toast and boiled eggs for supper. Ariadne informed
+her companions, looking up from her egg with a yolky smile, "Daddy told
+Muvver the other day that 'Stashie had certainly learned to boil eggs
+something _fine_! And he laughed, but Muvver didn't. Was it a joke?"
+
+"They are very good eggs indeed, and well boiled," the new man answered.
+She loved the way in which he conversed with her.
+
+"Ought we to give her some idea?" asked the doctor in a low voice.
+
+"I would wait until she asks," said the other.
+
+But Paul's child never asked. Once or twice she remarked that Daddy was
+away longer than usual "_vis_ time," but he had never been a very
+steadily recurrent phenomenon in her life, and soon her little brain,
+filled with new impressions, had forgotten that he ever used to come
+back.
+
+There were many new impressions. A great deal was happening nowadays.
+Every morning something different, every day new people going and
+coming. Aunt Marietta, Auntie Madeleine, Uncle George from Cleveland,
+whom she'd seen only once or twice before, and Great-Aunt Hollister,
+whom she knew very well and feared as well as she knew her. After a time
+even the husbands began to appear, the husbands she had seen so rarely;
+Aunt Marietta's husband, and Aunt Madeleine's--fat, bald Mr. Lowder, who
+smelled of tobacco and soap and took her up on his lap--as much as he
+had--and gave her a big round dollar and kissed her behind her ear and
+smiled at her very kindly and held her very close. He said he liked
+little girls, and he wished Auntie Madeleine would get him one some day
+for a Christmas present. She informed him, filled with admiration at the
+extent of her own knowledge, that he couldn't get a Christmas present
+some day, but only just Christmas Day.
+
+Mostly, however, they paid no attention to her, these many aunts and
+uncles who came and went. And, oddly enough, Uncle Marius always shut
+the door to Muvver's room when they came, and wouldn't let them, no
+matter how much they wanted to, go in and see Muvver, who was, she
+gathered, very sick. Ariadne didn't see, really, why they came at all,
+since they couldn't see Muvver and they certainly never so much as
+looked at 'Stashie, dear darling 'Stashie--more of a comfort these queer
+days than ever before--and they never, never spoke to the new man, who
+came and went as though nobody knew he was there. They would look right
+at him and never see him. Everything was very hard for a little girl to
+understand, and she dared ask no questions.
+
+Everybody seemed to be very angry, and yet not at her. Indeed, she took
+the most prodigious care to avoid doing anything naughty lest she
+concentrate on herself this now widely diffused disapprobation. Never in
+her life had she tried so hard to be good, but nobody paid the least
+attention to her--nobody but the new man and 'Stashie, and they weren't
+the angry ones. The others stood about in groups in corners, talking in
+voices that started in to be low and always got loud before they
+stopped. Ariadne added several new words to her vocabulary at this time,
+from hearing them so constantly repeated. When her dolls were bad now,
+she shook them and called them "Indecent! indecent!" and asked them,
+with as close an imitation as she could manage, of Great-Aunt
+Hollister's tone, "What _do_ you suppose people are thinking! What _do_
+you suppose people are thinking!" Or she knocked them into a corner and
+said "Shocking! Shocking!"
+
+One day she stopped Uncle Marius, hurrying past her up the stairs, and
+asked him: "What are you thinking of, Uncle Marius?"
+
+"What am I thinking of? What do you mean?" he repeated, his face and
+eyes twitching the way they did when he couldn't understand something
+right off.
+
+"Why, Auntie Madeleine keeps asking everybody all the time, 'What _can_
+the doctor be thinking of?' I just wondered."
+
+He bent to kiss her raspingly--there were stiff little stubby white
+hairs coming out all over his face--and he said, as he trotted on up the
+stairs, "I am thinking of making sure that you have a mother, my poor
+dear."
+
+And then there was a bigger change one day. She went to bed in her own
+little crib, and when she woke up she wasn't there at all, but in a big
+bed in a room at Aunt Julia's; and Aunt Julia was smiling at her, and
+hugging her, and saying she was so glad she had come to live with her
+and Uncle Marius for a while. Ariadne found out that Uncle Marius had
+brought her and Muvver the night before in a carriage all the way from
+Bellevue. She regretted excessively that she had not been awake to enjoy
+the adventure.
+
+At Aunt Julia's, things were quieter. All at once the other people, the
+other uncles and aunts, had disappeared. That, of course, was because
+she and Muvver were at Aunt Julia's. She conceived of the house in
+Bellevue as still filled with their angry faces and voices, still
+echoing to "Indecent! indecent!" and "What _do_ you suppose people
+are saying?"
+
+There was a long, long time after this when nothing special happened.
+The new man continued to come here, and his visits were the only events
+in Ariadne's quiet days. Apparently he came to see Ariadne, for he never
+went to see Muvver at all, as he used to do in Bellevue. He took Ariadne
+out in the back yard as the weather began to get warmer, and showed her
+lots of outdoor plays. He was as nice as ever, only a good deal whiter;
+and that was odd, for they were now in May, and from playing outdoors
+all the time Ariadne herself was as brown as a berry. At least, that was
+what Aunt Julia said. Ariadne accepted it with her usual patient
+indulgence of grown-ups' mistakes. There was not, of course, a single
+berry that was anything but red or black, or at least a sort of blue,
+like huckleberries in milk. She and 'Stashie had gone over them, one by
+one; they knew.
+
+Uncle Marius remembered to shave himself nowadays. In fact, everything
+was more normal. Ariadne began to forget about the exciting time in
+Bellevue. Muvver wasn't in bed all the time now, but sat up in a chair
+for part of the day and even, if one were ever so quiet, could listen to
+accounts of what happened in Ariadne's world and could be told how Aunt
+Julia said that 'Stashie was quite a help as second girl if you just
+remembered to put away the best china, and that they had had eight new
+cooks since Ariadne had been there, but the second _would_ have stayed,
+only her mother got sick. The others just left. But Aunt Julia didn't
+mind. When there wasn't any cook, if it happened to be 'Stashie's day
+off, they all had bread and milk for supper, just as she had, and they
+let her set the table, and she could do it ever so well only she forgot
+_some_ things, of course, and Uncle Marius never got mad. He just said
+he hoped eating bread and milk like her would make him as good as she
+was--and she _was_ good--oh, Muvver, she was trying ever so hard to be
+good--
+
+"Come, dear," said Aunt Julia, "Mother's getting tired. We'd better go."
+
+It was only after she went away, sometimes only when she lay awake in
+her strange big bed, that Ariadne remembered that Muvver never said a
+word, but only smoothed her hair and kissed her.
+
+She and the new man used to play out in the old grape-arbor in the back
+yard, and it was there, one day in mid-May, that Uncle Marius came
+teetering out and called the new man to one side, only Ariadne could
+hear what they said. Uncle Marius said: "It's no use, Rankin. It's a
+fixed idea with her. She isn't violent any more, but she hasn't changed.
+She is certainly a little deranged, but not enough for legal restraint.
+She could take Ariadne and disappear any day. I'm in terror lest she do
+that. I've no authority to prevent her. She won't talk to me freely
+about what she is afraid of. She doesn't seem to trust me--_me_!"
+
+Ariadne found the conversation as dull as all overheard grown-ups' talk,
+and tried to busy herself with a corn-cob house the new man had been
+showing her how to build. Two or three times lately he had taken her out
+to his little house in the woods and showed her a lot of tools, and told
+her what they were for, and said if she were older he would teach her
+how to use them. Ariadne's head was full of the happy excitement of
+those visits. Corn-cob houses were for babies, she thought now.
+
+After a time, Uncle Marius went away, slamming the front gate after him
+and stamping away up the street as though he were angry, only he did all
+kinds of queer things without being angry. In fact, she had never seen
+him angry. Perhaps he and Muvver were different from other people and
+never were.
+
+She looked up with a start. The new man had come back to the arbor, but
+he did not look like play. He looked queer, so queer that Ariadne's
+sensitive lower lip began to tremble and the corners of her mouth to
+draw down. She could _not_ remember having done anything naughty. She
+was frightened by the way he looked. And yet, he picked her up quite
+gently, and held her on his knee, and asked her if Muvver could walk
+about the house yet.
+
+"Oh, yes," she told him, "and came down to dinner last night."
+
+The new man put her down, and asked her with a "please" and "I'd be much
+obliged" as though she were a grown-up herself, if she would do
+something for him--go to Muvver and ask her if she felt strong enough to
+come down into the grape-arbor to see him. Tell her he had something
+very special to say to her.
+
+Ariadne went, skipping and hopping in pleasurable excitement at her own
+importance, and returned triumphantly to say that Muvver said she would
+come. She wondered if he felt too grown-up for cob houses himself. He
+hadn't built it any higher when she was gone. He looked as if he hadn't
+even winked. While she stood wondering at his silence, his face got very
+white. He stood up looking toward the house. Muvver was coming out, very
+slowly, leaning on the railing to the steps--Muvver in the nightgowny
+dress Aunt Julia had made her, only it wasn't really nightgowny, because
+it was all over lace--Muvver with her hair in two braids over her
+shoulders and all mussed up where she'd been lying down. Ariadne
+wondered that she hadn't smoothed it a little. She knew what people
+would say to _her_ if she came around with her hair looking like that.
+
+The man went forward to meet Muvver, and gave her his hand, and they
+neither of them smiled or said how do you do, but came back together
+toward the arbor. And when they got there Muvver sat down quick, as
+though she were tired, and laid her head back against the chair. The man
+lifted Ariadne up and kissed her--he had never done that before. Now she
+knew how his beard felt--very soft. She felt it against her face for a
+long time. And he told her to go into the house to 'Stashie.
+
+So she went. Ariadne always did as she was told. 'Stashie was trying to
+make some ginger cookies, and the oven "jist would _not_ bake thim," she
+said. They were all doughy when they came out, very much as they were
+when they went in; but the dough was deliciously sweet and spicy.
+'Stashie and Ariadne ate a great deal of it, because 'Stashie knew very
+well from experience that the grown-ups have an ineradicable prejudice
+against food that comes out of the oven "prezackly" the way it went in.
+
+After that they had to wash their hands, all sticky with dough, and
+after that 'Stashie took Ariadne on her lap and told her Irish fairy
+stories, all about Cap O'Rushes and the Leprechaun, till they were
+startled by the boiling over of the milk 'Stashie had put on the stove
+to start a pudding. 'Stashie certainly did have bad luck with her
+cooking, as she herself frequently sadly admitted.
+
+But, oh! wasn't she darling to Ariadne! It made the lonely little girl
+warm all over to be loved the way 'Stashie loved her. Sometimes when
+Ariadne woke up with a bad dream it was 'Stashie who came to quiet her,
+and she just hugged her up close, close, so that she could feel her
+heart go thump, thump, thump. And she always, always had time to explain
+things. It was wonderful how much time 'Stashie had for that--or
+anything else Ariadne needed.
+
+She was putting more milk on the stove when in dashed Uncle Marius, his
+mouth wide open and his hands jumping around. "Where's your mother?
+Where's Mrs. Hollister?" he cried.
+
+"Out in the arbor," said Ariadne.
+
+"Alone?"
+
+"Oh, no--" Ariadne began to explain, but the doctor had darted to the
+window. You could see the grape-arbor plainly from there--Muvver sitting
+with her hair all mussed up around her face, listening to the new man,
+who sat across the table from her and talked and talked and talked, and
+never moved a finger. Uncle Marius put his hand up quick to his side and
+said something Ariadne couldn't catch. She looked up, saw his face, and
+ran away, terrified, to hide her face in 'Stashie's dirty apron. Now she
+knew how Uncle Marius looked when he was angry. She heard him go out and
+down the steps, and went fearfully to watch him. He went across the
+grass to the arbor. The others looked toward him without moving, and
+when he came close and leaned against the table, Muvver looked up at him
+and said something, and then leaned back again, her head resting against
+the chair, her eyes closed, her hands dropped down. How tired Muvver
+always looked!
+
+And just then 'Stashie spilled all the cocoa she was going to use to
+flavor the pudding with. She spilled it on the stove, and it smoked and
+stinked--there was nobody nowadays to forbid Ariadne to use 'Stashie's
+words--and 'Stashie said there wasn't any more and they'd have to go off
+to the grocery-store to get some, and if Ariadne knew where that nickel
+was Mis' Sandworth give her, they could get a soda-water on the way, and
+with two straws it would do for both.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+WHAT IS BEST FOR THE CHILDREN?
+
+
+Lydia lifted her face, white under the shadow of her disordered hair,
+and said: "It is Mr. Rankin who must take care of the children--Ariadne,
+and the baby if it lives."
+
+She spoke in a low, expressionless voice, as though she had no strength
+to spare. Dr. Melton's hand on the table began to shake. He answered: "I
+have told you before, my dear, that there is no reason for your fixed
+belief that you will not live after the baby's birth. You must not dwell
+on that so steadily."
+
+Lydia raised her heavy eyes once more to his. "I want him to have the
+children," she said.
+
+The doctor took a step or two away from the table. He was now shaking
+from head to foot, and when he came back to the silent couple and took a
+chair between them he made two or three attempts at speech before he
+could command his voice. "It is very hard on me, Lydia, to--to have you
+turn from me to a--to a stranger." His voice had grotesque quavers.
+
+Lydia raised a thin, trembling hand, and laid it on her godfather's
+sinewy fingers. She tried to smile into his face. "Dear Godfather," she
+said wistfully, "if it were only myself--but the children--"
+
+"What do you mean, Lydia? What do you mean?" he demanded with tremulous
+indignation.
+
+She dropped her eyes again and drew a long, sighing breath. "I haven't
+strength to explain to you all I mean," she said gently, "and I think
+you know without my telling you. You have always known what is in my
+heart."
+
+"I had thought there was some affection for me in your heart," said the
+doctor, thrusting out his lips to keep them from trembling.
+
+Lydia's drooping position changed slightly. She lifted her hands and
+folded them together on the table, leaning forward, and bending full on
+the doctor the somber intensity of her dark, deep-sunken eyes. "Dear
+Godfather, I have no time or strength to waste." The slowness with which
+she chose her words gave them a solemn weight. "I cannot choose. If it
+hurts you to have me speak truth, you must be hurt. You know what a
+failure I have made of my life, how I have missed everything worth
+having--"
+
+Dr. Melton, driven hard by some overmastering emotion, drew back, and
+threw aside precipitately the tacit understanding he and Lydia had
+always kept. "Lydia, what are you talking about! You have been more than
+usually favored--you have been loved and cherished as few women--" His
+voice died away under Lydia's honest, tragic eyes.
+
+She went on as though he had not spoken. "My children must know
+something different. My children must have a chance at the real things.
+If I die, who can give it to them? Even if I live, shall I be wise
+enough to give them what I had not wisdom or strength enough to get for
+myself?"
+
+"You speak as though I were not in the world, Lydia," the doctor broke
+in bitterly, "or as though you hated and mistrusted me. Why do you look
+to a stranger to--"
+
+"Could you do for my children what you have not done for yourself?" she
+asked him earnestly. "How much would you see of them? How much would you
+know of them? How much of your time would you be willing to sacrifice to
+learn patiently the inner lives of two little children? You would be
+busy all day, like the other people I know, making money for them to
+dress like other well-to-do children, for them to live in this fine, big
+house, for them to go to expensive private schools with the children of
+the people you know socially--for them to be as much as possible like
+the fatherless child I was."
+
+Lydia clenched her thin hands and went on passionately: "I would rather
+my children went ragged and hungry than to be starved of real
+companionship."
+
+The doctor made a shocked gesture. "But, Lydia, someone must earn the
+livings. You are--"
+
+Lydia broke in fiercely: "They are not earning livings--they are earning
+more dresses and furniture and delicate food than their families need.
+They are earning a satisfaction for their own ambitions. They are
+willing to give their families anything but time and themselves."
+
+"Lydia! Lydia! I never knew you to be cruel before! They can not help
+it--the way their lives are run. It's not that they wish to--they can
+not help it! It is against an economic law you are protesting."
+
+"That economic law has been broken by _one_ person I know," said Lydia,
+"and that is the reason I--"
+
+The doctor flushed darkly. The tears rose to his eyes. "Lydia, oh, my
+dear! trust me--trust me! I, too, will--I swear I will do all that you
+wish--don't turn away from me--trust me--!"
+
+Lydia's mouth began to quiver. "Ah! don't make me say what must sound so
+cruel!"
+
+The doctor stared at her hard. "Make you say, you mean, that you _don't_
+trust me."
+
+She drew a little, pitiful breath, and turned away her head. "Yes; that
+is what I mean," she said. She went on hurriedly, putting up appealing
+hands to soften her words, "You see--it's the children--I _must_ do what
+is best for them. It must be done once for all. Suppose you found you
+couldn't now, after all these years, turn about and be different?
+Suppose you found you couldn't arrange a life that the children could be
+a part of, and help in, and really do their share and live with you. You
+_mean_ to--I'm sure you mean to! But you never _have_ yet! How dare I
+let you try if you are not sure? I can't come back if I am dead, you
+know, and make a new arrangement. Mr. Rankin has proved that he can--"
+
+At the name, the doctor's face darkened. He shot a black look at the
+younger man sitting beside him in his strange silence. "What has Rankin
+done?" he asked bitterly. "I should say the very point about him is that
+he has done nothing."
+
+"He has tried, he has tried, he is trying," cried Lydia, beating her
+hands on the table. "Think! Of all the people I know, he is the only one
+who is even trying. That was all I wanted myself. That is all I dare ask
+for my children--a chance to try."
+
+"To try what?" asked the doctor challengingly.
+
+"To try not to have life make them worse instead of better. That's not
+much to ask--but nobody I know, but one only has--"
+
+"Simplicity and right living don't come from camping out in a shed,"
+said the doctor angrily. "Externals are nothing. If the heart is right
+and simple--"
+
+"If the heart is right and simple, nothing else matters. That is what I
+say," answered Lydia.
+
+Dr. Melton gave a gesture of cutting the question short. "Well, of
+course it's quite impossible! Rankin can't possibly have any claim on
+your children in the event of your death. Think of all your family, who
+would be--"
+
+"_I think of them_," said Lydia with an accent so strange that the
+doctor was halted. "Oh, I have thought of them!" she said again. She put
+her hands over her eyes. "Could I not make a will, and appoint as
+guardian--" she began to ask.
+
+Dr. Melton cut her short with a sound like a laugh, although his face
+was savage. "Did you never hear of wills being contested? How long do
+you suppose a will you make under the present circumstances would stand
+against an attack on it by your family and the Hollisters, with their
+money and influence!"
+
+"Oh! Oh!" moaned Lydia, "and I shall not be here to--"
+
+Rankin stirred throughout all his great height and broke his silence.
+He said to Lydia: "There is some way--there must be some way. I will
+find it."
+
+Lydia took down her hands and showed a face so ravaged by the emotions
+of the colloquy that the physician in her godfather sprang up through
+the wounded jealousy of the man. "Lydia, my dear, you must stop--this is
+idiotic of me to allow you--not another word. You must go into the house
+this instant and lie down and rest--"
+
+He bent over her with his old, anxious, exasperated, protecting air.
+Lydia seized his hands. Her own were hot and burning. "Rest! I can't
+rest with all this unsettled! I go over and over it--how can I sleep!
+How can you think that your little opiates will make me forget that my
+children may be helpless, with no one to protect them--" She looked
+about her wildly. "Why, little Ariadne may be given to _Madeleine_!" Her
+horrified eyes rested again on her godfather. She drew him to her. "Oh,
+help me! You've always been kind to me. Help me now!"
+
+There was a silence, the two exchanging a long gaze. The man's forehead
+was glistening wet. Finally, his breath coming short, he said: "Yes; I
+will help you," and, his eyes still on hers, put out a hand toward
+Rankin.
+
+The younger man was beside them in a stride. He took the hand offered
+him, but his gaze also was on the white face of the woman between them.
+"We will do it together," he told her. "Rest assured. It shall be done."
+
+The corners of Lydia's mouth twitched nervously. "You are a good man,"
+she said to her godfather. She looked at Rankin for a moment without
+speaking, and then turned toward the house, wavering. "Will you help me
+back?" she said to the doctor, her voice quite flat and toneless; "I am
+horribly tired."
+
+                 *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the doctor came back again to the arbor, Mrs. Sandworth was with
+him, her bearing, like his, that of a person in the midst of some
+cataclysmic upheaval. It was evident that her brother had told her.
+Without greeting Rankin, she sat down and fixed her eyes on his face.
+She did not remove them during the talk that followed.
+
+The doctor stood by the table, drumming with his fingers and grimacing.
+"You must know," he finally made a beginning with difficulty, "I don't
+know whether you realize, not being a physician, that she is really not
+herself. She has for the present a mania for providing as she thinks
+best for her children's future. Of course no one not a monomaniac would
+so entirely ignore your side, would conceive so strange an idea. She is
+so absorbed in her own need that she does not realize what an unheard-of
+request she is making. To burden yourself with two young children--to
+mortgage all your future--"
+
+Rankin broke in with a shaking voice and a face of exultation: "Good
+God, Doctor! Don't grudge me this one chance of my life!"
+
+The doctor stared, bewildered. "What are you talking about?" he asked.
+
+"About myself. I don't do it often--let me now. Do you think I haven't
+realized all along that what you said of me is true--that I have done
+nothing? Done nothing but succeed smugly in keeping myself in comfort
+outside the modern economic treadmill! What else could I do? I'm no
+orator, to convince other people. I haven't any universal panacea to
+offer! I'm only an inarticulate countryman, a farmer's son, with the
+education the state gives everyone--who am I, to try to lead? Apparently
+there was nothing for me to do but ignobly to take care of myself--but
+now, God be thanked! I have my chance. Someone has been hurt in their
+infernal squirrel-cage, and I can help--"
+
+The older man was looking at him piercingly, as though struck by a
+sudden thought. He now cut him short with, "You're not deceiving
+yourself with any notion that she--"
+
+The other answered quickly, with a smile of bitter humility: "You have
+seen her look at me. She does not know whether I am a human being or
+not--I am to her any strong animal, a horse, an ox--any force that can
+carry Ariadne safely!" He added, in another tone, his infinitely gentle
+tone: "I see in that the extremity of her anxiety."
+
+The doctor put his hand on the other man's powerful arm. "Do you realize
+what you are proposing to yourself? You are human. You are a young man.
+Are you strong enough to keep to it?"
+
+Rankin looked at him. Mrs. Sandworth leaned forward.
+
+"I am," said Rankin finally.
+
+The words echoed in a long silence.
+
+The younger man stood up. "I am going to see a lawyer," he announced in
+a quiet voice of return to an everyday level. "Until then, we have all
+more to think over than to talk about, it seems to me."
+
+                 *       *       *       *       *
+
+After he had left them the brother and sister did not speak for a time.
+Then the doctor said, irritably: "Julia, say something, for Heaven's
+sake. What did you think of what he said?"
+
+"I didn't hear what he said," answered Mrs. Sandworth; "I was looking at
+him."
+
+"Well?" urged her brother.
+
+"He is a good man," she said.
+
+A sense that she was holding something in reserve kept him silent,
+gazing expectantly at her.
+
+"How awfully he's in love with her!" she brought out finally. "That's
+the whole point. He's in love with her! All this talk about 'ways of
+living' and theories and things that they make so much of--it just
+amounts to nothing but that he's in love with her."
+
+"Oh, you sentimental idiot!" cried the doctor. "I hoped to get some
+sense out of you."
+
+"That's sense," said Mrs. Sandworth.
+
+"It hasn't anything to do with the point! Why, as for that, Paul was in
+love with--"
+
+"He was _not_!" cried Mrs. Sandworth, with a sudden loud certainty.
+
+The doctor caught her meaning and considered it frowningly. When he
+spoke, it was to burst out pathetically: "_I_ have loved her all her
+life."
+
+"Oh, you!" retorted his sister, with a sad conclusiveness.
+
+Ariadne came running out to them. "I just went to look into Muvver's
+room, and she was sound asleep! Honest! She was!"
+
+The child had heard enough of the doctor's long futile struggles with
+the horrors of Lydia's sleepless nights to divine that her news was
+important. She was rewarded with a startled look from her elders.
+"Come!" said the doctor.
+
+They went into the house, and silently to Lydia's half-open door. She
+lay across the bed as she had dropped down when she came in, one long
+dark braid hanging to the floor. They stood looking at her almost with
+awe, as though they were observing for the first time the merciful
+miracle of sleep. Her bosom rose and fell in long, regular breaths. The
+drawn, haggard mask that had overlain her face so many months was
+dissolved away in an utter unconsciousness. Her eyelashes lay on a cheek
+like a child's; her mouth, relaxed and drooping, fell again into the
+lines they had loved in her when she was a little girl. She looked like
+a little girl again to them.
+
+Mrs. Sandworth's hand went to her throat. She looked at her brother
+through misty eyes. He closed the door gently, and drew her away, making
+the gesture of a man who admits his own ignorance of a mystery.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+THROUGH THE LONG NIGHT
+
+
+"They must have gone crazy, simply crazy!" said Madeleine, making quick,
+excited gestures. "Mrs. Sandworth, of course--a person can hardly blame
+her for anything! She's a cipher with the rim off when the doctor has
+made up his mind. But, even so, shouldn't you think in common decency
+she'd have let us know what they were up to in time to prevent it? _I_
+never heard a word of this sickening business of Ariadne's adoption till
+day before yesterday. Did _you_?" she ended half-suspiciously.
+
+Mrs. Mortimer stopped her restless pace up and down the old-fashioned,
+high-ceilinged room, and made a gesture for silence. "I thought I heard
+something--up there," she explained, motioning to the upper part of the
+house. "I wonder what made Lydia so sure beforehand that she wouldn't
+live through this?"
+
+"Well, I guess from what the nurse told me there _isn't_ much chance for
+her," said Madeleine in a hard voice. Her color was not so high as
+usual, her beautiful face looked grim, and she spoke in a bitter tone of
+seriousness that made her seem quite another person. Marietta's thin,
+dark countenance gave less indication of her mood, whatever it was. She
+looked sallow and worn, and only her black eyes, hot and gloomy, showed
+emotion.
+
+Both women were silent a moment, listening to the sound of footsteps
+overhead. "It seems as though it _must_ be over soon now!" cried the
+childless one of the two, drawing in her breath sharply. "It makes me
+furious to think of women suffering so. Bertha Williamson was telling me
+the other day about when her little Walter was born--it made me _sick_!"
+
+The matron looked at her and shivered a little, but made no response.
+
+"The nurse says Lydia is mostly unconscious now. Perhaps the worst is
+over for her! Poor Lyd! What do you suppose made her act so?" went on
+Madeleine, moving about restlessly, her voice uncertain. She went to the
+window, and drew aside the shade to look out into the blackness. "Oh, I
+wish the men would come! What time is it, do you suppose? Yes, I see;
+half-past three. Oh, it _must_ be over soon! I wish they'd come! You
+telegraphed George, didn't you? Heavens! how it rains!"
+
+"He was to come on the midnight train. Is your husband--"
+
+"Oh, he was horrid about it--wanted me to do it all myself. He's in the
+midst of some big deal or other. But I told him he'd _have_ to come and
+help out, or I'd--I'd _kill_ him! He'll bring the lawyer."
+
+"Where do you suppose?" began Marietta, looking over her shoulder.
+
+"Out in his shanty in the Black Rock woods," said Madeleine harshly,
+"with no idea of what's going on. Just before you came, the doctor sent
+out for a messenger to take him word, and you'd better believe I got
+hold of that messenger!"
+
+"Of course that'll make things easier," said Marietta.
+
+"Oh, it won't be hard at all," Madeleine assured her; "the lawyer'll be
+right at hand; it'll be over in a minute."
+
+Marietta's face altered. She drew back from the other woman. "Oh,
+Madeleine! you act as though--you were counting on Lydia's--"
+
+"No; I'm not. I used to think a lot of Lydia before she disgraced poor
+Paul's memory in this way! But you see it'll be easy to do, one way or
+the other. If she--if she doesn't--why, Marietta, you know Lydia! She
+never can hold out against you and George, the nearest she has in the
+world. I should think you'd feel awfully about what people are
+saying--her letting Ariadne be adopted in that scandalous way when she
+had brothers and sisters. I should think you'd feel like asserting
+yourselves. _I_ do, certainly! I'm just as near to Ariadne as you are!
+And I know George is perfectly furious about the whole business!"
+
+"But maybe the doctor won't let us go in, right in to her--"
+
+A long-cherished grudge rose to the surface in Mrs. Lowder's energetic
+reply: "Well, I guess this is one time when the high-and-mighty Dr.
+Melton'll have to be shoved on one side, and if necessary I'll do the
+shoving!"
+
+"You feel justified?"
+
+"Justified! I should think I do! Justified in keeping my brother's child
+out of the clutches of that--and if my husband and your brother together
+can't raise the cash and the pull to get Ariadne away from him, too, I
+miss my guess. They will; of course they will, or what's the use of
+having money when you go to law!"
+
+Marietta was silent. Madeleine took her lack of responsiveness as due to
+the resentment of a poor person to her remarks as to the value of wealth
+in a democracy. She frowned, regretting a false step, and went on
+conciliatorily: "Of course we're only doing what any decent family is
+bound to do--protecting the children. It's what Lydia herself would want
+if she were in her right mind."
+
+She fell silent now, restless, fidgeting about, picking up small objects
+and setting them down unseeingly, and occasionally going to the window
+to look out at the hot, rainy night. She was in mourning for Paul, and
+above her black draperies her face was now like marble.
+
+Mrs. Mortimer, also in black, sat in a determinedly passive silence.
+
+Finally, the younger woman broke out: "Oh, I'll go crazy if I just stay
+here! I'm going upstairs to see the nurse again."
+
+In an instant she was back, her face whiter than before.
+
+"It's a boy--alive, all right--half an hour ago. Would you think they'd
+let us sit here and never tell us--" Her voice changed. "A little boy--"
+She sat down.
+
+"How is Lydia?" asked Lydia's sister.
+
+"--a little boy," said Madeleine. She addressed the other woman
+peremptorily. "I want him! You can have Ariadne!" She flushed as she
+spoke, and added defiantly: "I know I always said I didn't want
+children!"
+
+"How is Lydia?" Marietta broke in with an angry impatience.
+
+"Very low, the nurse said; Dr. Melton wouldn't give any hope."
+
+Marietta's face twitched. Her large white hands clasped each other hard.
+
+"I'm going into the doctor's office to telephone my husband," went on
+Madeleine; "there's not a minute to lose."
+
+After she was alone, Mrs. Mortimer's thin, dark face settled into tragic
+repose. She leaned back her head and closed her eyes, from which a slow
+tear ran down over her sallow cheeks. There was no sound but the patter
+of summer rain on the porch roof outside.
+
+Firm, light steps came hastily to the outer door, the door clicked open
+and shut, the steps came down the hall. Mrs. Mortimer sat up and opened
+her eyes. She saw a tall man in rough clothes, hatless, with raindrops
+glistening on his bright, close-cropped hair and beard. He was
+hesitating at the foot of the stairs, but at her slight movement he
+caught sight of her and rushed toward her. "Has she--is there--" he
+began.
+
+Mrs. Mortimer gazed intently into his quivering face. "My sister has
+given birth to a son, and lies at the point of death," she said with her
+unsparing conciseness, but not harshly.
+
+The man she addressed threw up one hand as though she had struck him,
+and took an aimless, unsteady step. Mrs. Mortimer did not turn away her
+eyes from the revelation of his face. Her own grew sterner. She was
+trying to bring herself to speak again. She put her hand on his arm to
+attract his attention, and looked with a fierce earnestness into his
+face. "Listen," she said. "We were wrong, all of us, about Lydia. We
+were wrong about everything. You were right. I wanted to tell you. If my
+sister had lived--she is so young--I hoped--" She turned away to hide
+the sudden break-up of her rigid calm. "Little Lydia!" she cried. "Oh,
+misery! misery!"
+
+Behind them was the sound of a shutting door and a key turned in the
+lock. They both spun about and saw Mrs. Lowder slip the key into the
+bosom of her dress. Her aspect of white determination suited this
+theatrical gesture, as she placed herself quickly before the door. "If
+you will promise me solemnly that you will leave the house at once, I
+will let you out," she said, in a high, shaking voice.
+
+Rankin did not answer. He looked at her as though he did not see her.
+
+"What business have you here, anyhow?" she went on fiercely.
+
+"I am here to adopt Mrs. Hollister's second child," stated Rankin,
+collecting himself with an effort.
+
+Mrs. Lowder's pale face flushed. "You'll do nothing of the sort. I shall
+adopt my brother's child myself! How _dare_ you--a perfect stranger--"
+
+"Mrs. Hollister wishes it," said Rankin.
+
+"Lydia is out of her mind--if she is alive!" said Madeleine, trembling
+excitedly, "and the child's own relatives are the proper--you needn't
+think you are going to keep Ariadne, either! It can be proved in any
+court that Lydia was crazy, and that her family are the ones that ought
+to--"
+
+"That will be decided in the future," said Rankin. "For the present I
+have a legal right to Ariadne, and I shall have to the boy!"
+
+"Do you mean you would dare to lay hands on a woman?" cried Madeleine,
+extending her arms across the door.
+
+Rankin turned, and in one stride had reached the window, which stood
+open to the hot, rainy summer night. He was gone in an instant.
+
+"Quick! quick! Lock the front door!" cried Madeleine, fumbling with the
+key. She turned it and darted into the hallway, and fell back, crying
+angrily: "Oh, no! there's the back door--and the doctor's office and all
+the windows. It's no use! It's no use!" She broke into a storm of sobs.
+"You didn't help a bit!" she cried furiously to the other woman. "You
+didn't even try to help!"
+
+It was an accusation against which Marietta did not attempt to defend
+herself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+THE SWAYING BALANCE
+
+
+Dr. Melton was at the top of the stairs as the other man came bounding
+up. "Where in God's name have you been?" he demanded. "Did you start as
+soon as my messenger--"
+
+"No messenger came--only 'Stashie just now. I started the instant she--"
+
+"Have you the paper--the contract--whatever it--"
+
+Rankin showed a flash of white in his pocket. "Is she able to sign it?"
+
+"Oh, she _must_! She won't have an instant's peace until she does. She
+has been wild because you were so late in--"
+
+Their hurried, broken colloquy was cut short by a nurse who came to Dr.
+Melton, saying, "The patient is always asking if the gentleman who is
+to--"
+
+"Yes, yes; he is here." The doctor motioned her to precede them. "Go in;
+you're needed as a witness."
+
+He held Rankin back an instant at the door. "Remember! No heroics! Just
+have the signing done as quickly as possible and get out!" His little
+wizened face looked ghastly in the dim light of the hall, but his voice
+was firm, and his hand did not tremble.
+
+Rankin followed him into the bedroom, which was filled with a strong
+odor of antiseptics. The nurse turned on the electric light, shading it
+with her hand so that the light fell only on the lower part of the bed,
+leaving Lydia's head in the shadow.
+
+She lay very straight and stark, as though, thought Rankin despairingly,
+she were already dead. Her right arm was out over the sheet, her thin
+hand nerveless. Her face was very white, her lips swollen and bleeding
+as though she had bitten them repeatedly. She was absolutely motionless,
+lying on her back with closed eyes. At the slight sound made by the men
+in entering, she opened her eyes and looked at them. Every vestige of
+color dropped out of Rankin's face. Her eyes were alive, sane,
+exalted--Lydia's own eyes again.
+
+He was holding the paper open in his hand, and without a word knelt down
+by the bed, offering it to her mutely. Their eyes met in a long gaze.
+The doctor and nurse looked away from this mute communion. Rankin put a
+pen in Lydia's fingers and held up the paper. With, a faint, sighing
+breath, loud in the silent room, she raised her hand. It fell to the bed
+again. Dr. Melton then knelt beside her, put his own sinewy, corded
+fingers around it and guided it to the paper. The few lines were traced.
+Lydia's hand dropped and her eyes closed. Rankin stood up to go.
+
+The nurse turned off the light and the room was again in a half
+obscurity, the deep, steady voice of the rain coming in through the open
+windows, the sweet summer-night smells mingling with the acrid odor of
+chemicals, Lydia lying straight and stark under the sheet--but now her
+eyes were open, shining, fixed on Rankin. Their light was the last he
+saw as he closed the door behind him.
+
+After a time the doctor came out and joined Rankin waiting at the head
+of the stairs. He looked very old and tired, but the ghastly expression
+of strain was replaced with a flickering restlessness. He came up to
+Rankin, blinking rapidly, and touched him on the arm. "Look here!" he
+whispered. "Her pulse has gone down from a hundred and fifty to a
+hundred and thirty."
+
+He sat down on the top step, clasped his hands about his knees, and
+leaned his white head against the balustrade. He looked like some small,
+weary, excited old child. "Lord, Rankin! Sit down when you get a
+chance!" he whispered. "If you'd been through what I have! And you
+needn't try to get me to add another word to what I've just told you. I
+don't dare! It may mean nothing, you know. It may very likely mean
+nothing. Good Heavens! The mental sensitiveness of women at this time!
+It's beyond belief. I never get used to the miracle of it. Everything
+turns on it--everything! If the pulse should go down ten more now, I
+should--Oh, Heaven bless that crazy Celt for getting you here! Good
+Lord! If you hadn't come when you did! I don't see what could have
+become of the messenger I sent--why, hours ago--I knew that nothing
+could go right if you weren't--is that the door?" He sprang up and sank
+back again--"I told the nurse to report as soon as there was any
+change--I was afraid if I stayed in the room she would feel the
+twitching of my damned nerves--yes, really--it's so--she's in a state
+when a feather's weight--suppose 'Stashie hadn't brought you! I couldn't
+have kept Madeleine off much longer--God! if _Madeleine_ had gone into
+that room, I--Lydia--but nobody told 'Stashie to go! It must have been
+an inspiration. I thought of course my messenger--I was expecting you
+every instant. She's been crouching out here in the hall all night, not
+venturing even to ask a question, until I caught sight of her eyes--she
+loves Lydia too! I told her then the baby had come and that her mistress
+had no chance unless you were here. She must have--when did she--"
+
+Rankin gave a sound like a sob, and leaned against the wall. He had not
+stirred before since the doctor's first words. "You don't mean there's
+_hope_?" he whispered, "any hope at all?"
+
+The doctor sprang at him and clapped his hand over his mouth. "I didn't
+say it! I didn't say it!"
+
+The door behind them opened, and the nurse stepped out with a noiseless
+briskness. The doctor walked toward her steadily and listened to her
+quick, low-toned report. Then he nodded, and she stepped back into the
+bedroom and shut the door. He stood staring at the floor, one hand at
+his lips.
+
+Rankin made an inarticulate murmur of appeal. His face glared white
+through the obscurity of the hall.
+
+The older man went back to him, and looked up earnestly into his eyes.
+"Yes; there's every hope," he said. He added, with a brave smile: "For
+you and Lydia there's every hope in the world. For me, there's the usual
+lot of fathers."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+ANOTHER DAY BEGINS
+
+
+They started. From below came a wail of fright. As they listened the
+sound came nearer and nearer. "That's Ariadne--a bad dream--get her
+quiet, for the Lord's sake."
+
+"Where is she sleeping?"
+
+"In the room next the parlor."
+
+Rankin gave an exclamation, and leaped down the stairs. At the foot he
+was met by a little figure in sleeping-drawers. "Favver! Favver!" she
+sobbed, holding up her arms.
+
+Rankin caught her up and held her close. "You promised you wouldn't get
+so afraid of dreams, little daughter," he said in a low, tender voice of
+reproach.
+
+"But this was a nawful one!" wept Ariadne. "I fought I heard a lot of
+voices, men's and ladies' as mad--Oh! awful mad--and loud!" She went on
+incoherently that she had been too frightened to stir, even though after
+a while she dreamed that the front door slammed and they all went away.
+But then she was _too_ frightened, and came out to find Favver.
+
+Rankin took her back to her bed, and sat down beside it, keeping one big
+hand about the trembling child's cold little fingers. "It was only a bad
+dream, Ariadne. Just go to sleep now. Father'll sit here till you do."
+
+"You won't let them come back?" asked the child, drawing long, shaken
+breaths.
+
+"No," he said quietly.
+
+"You'll always be close, to take care of me?"
+
+"Yes, dear."
+
+"And of Muvver and 'Stashie?"
+
+There was a pause.
+
+Ariadne spoke in grieved astonishment. "Why, of _course_ of Muvver and
+'Stashie, Favver."
+
+Rankin took a sudden great breath. "I hope so, Ariadne."
+
+"Well, you _can_ if you want to," the child gravely gave her assent.
+
+She said no more for a time, clutching tightly to his hand. Then,
+"Favver."
+
+"Yes, dear."
+
+"I fink I could go to sleep better if I had my bunny."
+
+"Yes, dear," said the man patiently; "where is he?"
+
+"I fink he's under ve chair where my clothes are--ve _big_ chair.
+'Stashie lets me put my clothes on ve biggest chair."
+
+The man fumbled about in the dark. Then, "Here's your bunny, Ariadne."
+
+The child murmured something drowsily unintelligible. The man took his
+seat again by the bed. There was a pause. The child's breathing grew
+long and regular. The rain sounded loud in the silence.
+
+In the distance a street-car rattled noisily by. Ariadne started up with
+a scream: "Favver! Favver!"
+
+"Right here, dear. Just the trolley-car."
+
+"It 'minded me of ve mad ladies' voices," explained Ariadne
+apologetically, breathing quickly. She added: "Vat was such a _nawful_
+dream, Favver. I wonder could I have your watch to hear tick in my hand
+to go me to sleep."
+
+"Yes, dear; but only for to-night because of the bad dream."
+
+There were little nestling noises, gradually quieting down. Then,
+sleepily:
+
+"Favver, please."
+
+"Yes, dear."
+
+"I fink I could go _all_ to sleep if you'd pit your head down on my
+pillow next my bunny."
+
+A stir in the darkness, and an instant's quiet, followed by, "Why,
+Favver, what makes your face all over water?"
+
+There was no answer.
+
+"And your beard is as wet as--" She broke off to explain to herself:
+"Oh, it's rain, of tourse. I forgot it's raining. _Now_ I remember how
+to _really_ go all to sleep. I did before. I listen to it going patter,
+patter, patter, patter--" The little voice died away.
+
+There was no sound at all in the room but the swift, light voice of the
+watch calling out that Time, Time, Time can cure all, can cure all, can
+cure all--and outside the brooding murmur of the rain.
+
+A faint, clear gray began to show at the windows.
+
+                                THE END
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+                           ROMAIN ROLLAND'S
+                            JEAN-CHRISTOPHE
+                    DAWN · MORNING · YOUTH · REVOLT
+                     Translated by GILBERT CANNAN.
+
+                   600 pp. $1.50 net; by mail, $1.62.
+
+It commences with vivid episodes of this musician's childhood, his
+fears, fancies, and troubles, and his almost uncanny musical sense. He
+plays before the Grand Duke at seven, but he is destined for greater
+things. An idol of the hour, in some ways suggesting Richard Strauss,
+tries in vain to wreck his faith in his career. Early love episodes
+follow, and at the close the hero, like Wagner, has to fly, a hopeful
+exile.
+
+"'Hats off, gentlemen--a genius.' ... Has the time come for the 20th
+century to uncover before a master work? A book as big, as elemental, as
+original as though the art of fiction began to-day."--Springfield
+Republican. (Entire notice on application.)
+
+"The most momentous novel that has come to us from France, or from any
+other European country, in a decade.... Highly commendable and effective
+translation ... the story moves at a rapid pace. It never lags."--_E. F.
+Edgett in Boston Transcript._
+
+                        JEAN-CHRISTOPHE IN PARIS
+                            THE MARKET-PLACE
+                        ANTOINETTE · THE HOUSE
+
+                   473 pp. $1.50 net; by mail, $1.62.
+
+A writer in the _London Daily Mail_ comments on the French volumes here
+translated as follows:--"In 'The Market-Place,' we are with the hero in
+his attempt to earn his living and to conquer Paris. The author
+introduces us to the numberless 'society' circles in Paris and all the
+cliques of so-called musicians in pages of superb and bitter irony and
+poetic fire. Christophe becomes famous. In the next volume, Antoinette
+is the sister of Christophe's great friend, Olivier. She loves
+Christophe.... This, the best volume of the series, is a flawless gem.
+'The House' introduces us to the friends and enemies of the young
+musician. They gravitate around Christophe and Olivier, amid the noisy
+and enigmatic whirl of Parisian life."
+
+It is worth adding that toward the close of this book a war-cloud
+appears between France and Germany. Christophe, with Olivier, visits his
+mother and his Fatherland.
+
+                         HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+                         PUBLISHERS -- NEW YORK
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+                    WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S JOSEPH VANCE
+
+A touching story, yet full of humor, of lifelong love and heroic
+sacrifice. While the scene is mostly in and near the London of the
+fifties, there are some telling glimpses of Italy, where the author
+lives much of the time ($1.75).
+
+"The book of the last decade; the best thing in fiction since Mr.
+Meredith and Mr. Hardy; must take its place as the first great English
+novel that has appeared in the twentieth century."--Lewis Melville in
+_New York Times Saturday Review._
+
+"If the reader likes both 'David Copperfield' and 'Peter Ibbetson,' he
+can find the two books in this one."--The _Independent._
+
+                  WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S ALICE-FOR-SHORT
+
+This might paradoxically be called a genial ghost-and-murder story, yet
+humor and humanity again dominate, and the most striking element is the
+touching love story of an unsuccessful man. The reappearance in
+Nineteenth Century London of the long-buried past, and a remarkable case
+of suspended memory, give the dramatic background ($1.75).
+
+"Really worth reading and praising ... will be hailed as a masterpiece.
+If any writer of the present era is read a half century hence, a quarter
+century, or even a decade, that writer is William De Morgan."--_Boston
+Transcript._
+
+"It is the Victorian age itself that speaks in those rich, interesting,
+over-crowded books.... Will be remembered as Dickens' novels are
+remembered."--_Springfield Republican._
+
+                    WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S SOMEHOW GOOD
+
+The purpose and feeling of this novel are intense, yet it is all
+mellowed by humor, and it contains perhaps the author's freshest and
+most sympathetic story of young love. Throughout its pages the "God be
+praised evil has turned to good" of the old Major rings like a trumpet
+call of hope. This story of to-day tells of a triumph of courage and
+devotion ($1.75).
+
+"A book as sound, as sweet, as wholesome, as wise, as any in the range
+of fiction."--_The Nation._
+
+"Our older novelists (Dickens and Thackeray) will have to look to their
+laurels, for the new one is fast proving himself their equal. A higher
+quality of enjoyment than is derivable from the work of any other
+novelist now living and active in either England or America."--_The
+Dial._
+
+                         HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+                      34 WEST 33D STREET NEW YORK
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+             WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S IT NEVER CAN HAPPEN AGAIN
+
+This novel turns on a strange marital complication. The beautiful Judith
+Arkroyd, with her stage ambitions, the pathetic Lizarann and her father,
+Blind Jim, are striking figures. There are strong dramatic episodes
+($1.75).
+
+"De Morgan at his very best, and how much better his best is than the
+work of any novelist of the past thirty years."--_The Independent._
+
+"There has been nothing at all like it in our day. The best of our
+contemporary novelists ... do not so come home to our business and our
+bosoms ... most enchanting ... infinitely lovable and pathetic."--_The
+Nation._
+
+               WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S AN AFFAIR OF DISHONOR
+
+A dramatic story of England in the time of the Restoration. It commences
+with a fatal duel, and shows a new phase of its remarkable author
+($1.75).
+
+"An artistic triumph.... He is a persistent humorist."--_Boston
+Transcript._
+
+"A better story than any of the others, so far as sustained interest is
+concerned.... The rich, suggestive, highly metaphorical the M. I.
+style.... A marvelous example of Mr. De Morgan's inexhaustible fecundity
+of invention.... Shines as a romance quite as much as 'Joseph Vance'
+does among realistic novels."--_Chicago Record-Herald._
+
+                   WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S A LIKELY STORY
+                               $1.35 net.
+
+"Begins comfortably enough with a little domestic quarrel in a
+studio.... The story shifts suddenly, however, to a brilliantly told
+tragedy of the Italian Renaissance embodied in a girl's portrait ...
+which speaks and affects the life of the modern people who hear it....
+The many readers who like Mr. De Morgan will enjoy this charming fancy
+greatly."--_New York Sun._
+
+"In the forefront of English fiction.... Both ingenious and amusing....
+All in his highly personal and individual manner, the result of which is
+a novel with an emphatic difference from all other works of contemporary
+fiction."--_Boston Transcript._
+
+"One sparkling stream, where realism in its sweeter, human and humorous
+aspects shall appear at its best.... Humor, wisdom, artists' jargon from
+the studios, psychic phenomena.... All in Mr. De Morgan's best vein....
+The advancing chapters ... how realistically modern they are, with the
+exactness of finish, appositeness of delineation, humor in dialog, and
+condensed dramatic action!"--_The Independent._
+
+A thirty-two page illustrated leaflet about Mr. De Morgan, with complete
+reviews of his first four books, sent on request.
+
+                         HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+                         PUBLISHERS -- NEW YORK
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+                      INEZ HAYNES GILLMORE'S JANEY
+              Illustrated by Ada C. Williamson. $1.25 net.
+
+"Being the record of a short interval in the journey thru life and the
+struggle with society of a little girl of nine, in which she repudiates
+her duties as an amateur mother, snares the most blundering of birds,
+successfully invades Grub Street, peers behind the veil of the seen into
+the unseen, interprets the great bard, grubs at the root of all evil,
+faces the three great problems--Birth--Death--Time--and finally, in
+passing thru the laborious process of becoming ten, discovers the great
+illusion," says the descriptive title.
+
+"Our hearts were captive to 'Phoebe and Ernest,' and now accept 'Janey.'
+... She is so engaging.... Told so vivaciously and with such
+good-natured and pungent asides for grown people."--_Outlook._
+
+"Janey's naturalness in quest of the whys of life is the naturalness of
+the child who lives in the world instead of between the covers of a
+delightfully written book."--_Washington Evening Star._
+
+"Depicts youthful human nature as one who knows and loves it. Her
+'Phoebe and Ernest' studies are deservedly popular, and now, in 'Janey,'
+this clever writer has accomplished an equally charming
+portrait."--_Chicago Record-Herald._
+
+                INEZ HAYNES GILLMORE'S PHOEBE AND ERNEST
+           With 30 illustrations by R. F. Schabelitz. $1.50.
+
+Parents will recognize themselves in the story, and laugh
+understandingly with, and sometimes at, Mr. and Mrs. Martin and their
+children.
+
+Youths and maidens will understand Phoebe and Ernest's experiences and
+problems.
+
+"Attracted delighted attention in the course of its serial publication.
+Sentiment and humor are deftly mingled in this clever book."--_N. Y.
+Tribune._
+
+"We must go back to Louisa Alcott for their equals."--_Boston
+Advertiser._
+
+"For young and old alike we know of no more refreshing story."--_New
+York Evening Post._
+
+                         HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+                         PUBLISHERS -- NEW YORK
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+                HENRY WILLIAMS'S THE UNITED STATES NAVY
+                              A Handbook.
+
+By Henry Williams, Naval Constructor, U. S. Navy. With 32 full-page
+illustrations and a number in the text. 12mo. $1.50 net; by mail, $1.67.
+
+This is a neat, crisp, matter-of-fact account of our Navy, with an
+occasional illuminating anecdote of famous court-martials and such. It
+has been passed by high authorities and its publication officially
+sanctioned. The _Contents_ includes: Naval History--The Navy's
+Organization--The Navy's Personnel--Man-of-War in Commission--Classes of
+Ships in the Navy--Description--High Explosives; Torpedoes; Mines;
+Aeroplanes--Designing and Building a Warship; Dry Docks--The National
+Defense.
+
+                            THOMAS LEAMING'S
+               A PHILADELPHIA LAWYER IN THE LONDON COURTS
+
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+A trained observer's graphic description of the English Law Courts, of
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+
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+revolution in this country.... He disclaims any intention of entering
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+_Dial_:--"His interesting account of the trial and conviction of Madar
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+
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+------------------------------------------------------------------------
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+               SIXTH EDITION, ENLARGED AND WITH PORTRAITS
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+------------------------------------------------------------------------
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Squirrel-Cage, by Dorothy Canfield
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Squirrel-Cage
+
+Author: Dorothy Canfield
+
+Illustrator: John Alanzo Williams
+
+Release Date: December 8, 2007 [EBook #23768]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SQUIRREL-CAGE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<hr class="dashed" />
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width:367px">
+<a name="illus-000" id="illus-000"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-fpc.jpg" alt="PAUL STOOD BY HER, LOOKING DOWN INTO HER EYES, BENDING OVER HER, SMILING, PRESSING, CONFIDENT, MASTERFUL (PAGE 96)" title="" width="367" /><br />
+<span class="caption">PAUL STOOD BY HER, LOOKING DOWN INTO HER EYES, BENDING OVER HER, SMILING, PRESSING, CONFIDENT, MASTERFUL (PAGE 96)</span>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="dashed" />
+
+<table style="margin: auto; border: black 1px solid; border-spacing:2em" summary=""><tr><td>
+<p style=" font-size:2.0em; margin-top:0.5em; margin-bottom:1.5em;">THE SQUIRREL-CAGE</p>
+<p style=" font-size:1.0em; margin-top:0em; margin-bottom:0em;">BY</p>
+<p style=" font-size:1.2em; margin-top:0em; margin-bottom:3em;">DOROTHY CANFIELD</p>
+<p style=" font-size:0.8em; margin-top:0em; margin-bottom:0em;">WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY</p>
+<p style=" font-size:1.1em; margin-top:0em; margin-bottom:5em;">JOHN ALONZO WILLIAMS</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/illus-emb.png" alt="emblem" /></div>
+<p style=" font-size:1.0em; margin-top:3em; margin-bottom:0em;">NEW YORK</p>
+<p style=" font-size:1.2em; margin-top:0em; margin-bottom:0em;">HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY</p>
+<p style=" font-size:1.0em; margin-top:0em; margin-bottom:1em;">1912</p>
+</td></tr></table>
+
+<hr class="dashed" />
+
+<p class="c s nm sc">Copyright, 1911, 1912<br />by<br />THE RIDGWAY COMPANY</p>
+<hr style="width: 4em; margin: 0.5em auto 0.5em auto;" />
+<p class="c s nm sc">Copyright, 1912<br />by<br />HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY</p>
+<hr style="width: 4em; margin: 0.5em auto 0.5em auto;" />
+<p class="c s nm" style="margin-bottom: 1.5em;">Published March, 1912</p>
+
+<hr class="dashed" />
+
+<h2 class="toc"><a name="Contents" id="Contents"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<p class="c l">BOOK I</p>
+<p class="c l i">THE FAIRY PRINCESS</p>
+
+<table border="0" width="500" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="Contents" class="sc" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto"><col style="width:15%;" />
+<col style="width:5%;"  />
+<col style="width:70%;" />
+<col style="width:10%;" />
+<tr>
+<td align="right"><span style="font-size:x-small">CHAPTER</span></td>
+<td></td>
+<td></td>
+<td align="right"><span style="font-size:x-small">PAGE</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">I</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">An American Family</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#AN_AMERICAN_FAMILY_103">3</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">II</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">American Beauties</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#AMERICAN_BEAUTIES_378">12</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">III</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Picking up the Threads</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#PICKING_UP_THE_THREADS_728">22</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">IV</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">The Dawn</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#THE_DAWN_1077">32</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">V</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">The Day Begins</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#THE_DAY_BEGINS_1411">42</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">VI</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Lydia&#8217;s Godfather</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#LYDIAS_GODFATHER_1896">55</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">VII</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Outside the Labyrinth</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#OUTSIDE_THE_LABYRINTH_2105">61</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">VIII</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">The Shadow of the Coming Event</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#THE_SHADOW_OF_THE_COMING_EVENT_2701">78</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">IX</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Father and Daughter</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#FATHER_AND_DAUGHTER_3029">88</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">X</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Casus Belli</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#CASUS_BELLI_3423">99</a></td>
+</tr></table>
+
+<p class="c l">BOOK II</p>
+<p class="c l i">IN THE LOCOMOTIVE CAB</p>
+
+<table border="0" width="500" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="Contents" class="sc" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto">
+<col style="width:15%;" />
+<col style="width:5%;"  />
+<col style="width:70%;" />
+<col style="width:10%;" />
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XI</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">What is Best for Lydia</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#WHAT_IS_BEST_FOR_LYDIA_4040">115</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XII</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">A Sop to the Wolves</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#A_SOP_TO_THE_WOLVES_4287">122</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XIII</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Lydia Decides in Perfect Freedom</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#LYDIA_DECIDES_IN_PERFECT_FREEDOM_4665">131</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XIV</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Mid-Season Nerves</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#MIDSEASON_NERVES_4952">139</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XV</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">A Half-Hour&#8217;s Liberty</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#A_HALFHOURS_LIBERTY_5514">154</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XVI</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Engaged to Be Married</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#ENGAGED_TO_BE_MARRIED_5940">165</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XVII</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Card-Dealing and Patent Candles</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#CARDDEALING_AND_PATENT_CANDLES_6385">177</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p class="c l">BOOK III</p>
+<p class="c l i">A SUITABLE MARRIAGE</p>
+
+<table border="0" width="500" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="Contents" class="sc" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto">
+<col style="width:15%;" />
+<col style="width:5%;"  />
+<col style="width:70%;" />
+<col style="width:10%;" />
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XVIII</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Two Sides to the Question</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#TWO_SIDES_TO_THE_QUESTION_6978">193</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XIX</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Lydia&#8217;s New Motto</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#LYDIAS_NEW_MOTTO_7480">207</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XX</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">An Evening&#8217;s Entertainment</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#AN_EVENINGS_ENTERTAINMENT_7768">215</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXI</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">An Element of Solidity</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#AN_ELEMENT_OF_SOLIDITY_8157">226</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXII</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">The Voices in the Wood</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#THE_VOICES_IN_THE_WOOD_8405">233</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXIII</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">For Ariadne&#8217;s Sake</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#FOR_ARIADNES_SAKE_8823">244</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXIV</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">&#8220;Through Pity and Terror Effecting a Purification of the Heart&#8221;</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#THROUGH_PITY_AND_TERROR_EFFECTING_A_PURIFICATION_OF_THE_HEART_9423">261</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXV</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">A Black Milestone</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#A_BLACK_MILESTONE_9744">270</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXVI</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">A Hint from Childhood</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#A_HINT_FROM_CHILDHOOD_10013">277</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXVII</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Lydia Reaches Her Goal and has Her Talk with Her Husband</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#LYDIA_REACHES_HER_GOAL_AND_HAS_HER_TALK_WITH_HER_HUSBAND_10430">289</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXVIII</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">&#8220;the American Man&#8221;</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#THE_AMERICAN_MAN_11065">307</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXIX</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">&#8220;... in Tragic Life, God Wot,<br />
+    No Villain Need Be. Passions Spin the Plot.&#8221;</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#i_in_tragic_life_God_wot_No_villain_need_be_Passions_spin_the_ploti_11446">318</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXX</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Tribute to the Minotaur</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#TRIBUTE_TO_THE_MINOTAUR_11804">327</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p class="c l">BOOK IV</p>
+<p class="c l i">BUT IT&#8217;S NOT TOO LATE FOR ARIADNE</p>
+
+<table border="0" width="500" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="Contents" class="sc" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto">
+<col style="width:15%;" />
+<col style="width:5%;"  />
+<col style="width:70%;" />
+<col style="width:10%;" />
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXXI</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Protection from the Minotaur</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#PROTECTION_FROM_THE_MINOTAUR_12131">337</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXXII</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">As Ariadne Saw it</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#AS_ARIADNE_SAW_IT_12300">342</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXXIII</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">What is Best for the Children?</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#WHAT_IS_BEST_FOR_THE_CHILDREN_12591">351</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXXIV</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Through the Long Night</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#THROUGH_THE_LONG_NIGHT_12903">359</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXXV</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">The Swaying Balance</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#THE_SWAYING_BALANCE_13109">365</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">XXXVI</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Another Day Begins</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#ANOTHER_DAY_BEGINS_13228">369</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr class="dashed" />
+
+<h2 class="loi"><a name="Illustrations" id="Illustrations"></a>ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+<table border="0"  width="500" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="Illustrations" class="sc" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto">
+<col style="width:80%;" />
+<col style="width:20%;" />
+<tr><td class="tdleft">Paul stood by her, looking down into her eyes, bending over her, smiling, pressing, confident, masterful (page 96)</td><td class="tdright"><a href="#illus-000"><span style="font-variant:normal"><i>Frontispiece</i></span></a></td></tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="right" colspan="3"><span style="font-size:x-small">PAGE</span></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdleft">&#8220;You say beautiful things!&#8221; he replied quietly. &#8220;My rough quarters are glorified for me.&#8221;</td><td class="tdright"><a href="#illus-001">68</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdleft">&#8220;No, no; I can&#39;t&mdash;see him&mdash;I can&#39;t see him any more&mdash;&#8221;</td><td class="tdright"><a href="#illus-002">136</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdleft">&#8220;I see everything now,&#8221; she went on. &#8220;He could not stop&#8221;</td><td class="tdright"><a href="#illus-003">272</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr class="dashed" />
+
+<h1>THE SQUIRREL-CAGE</h1>
+
+<p class="xl c"><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_3" id="pg_3">3</a></span>BOOK I</p>
+
+<p class="xl c i">THE FAIRY PRINCESS</p>
+
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="AN_AMERICAN_FAMILY_103" id="AN_AMERICAN_FAMILY_103"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER I</p>
+<p class="l c">AN AMERICAN FAMILY</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The house of the Emery family was a singularly good example of the
+capacity of wood and plaster and brick to acquire personality. It was
+the physical symbol of its owners&#8217; position in life; it was the history
+of their career, written down for all to see, and as such they felt in
+it the most justifiable pride. When Mr. and Mrs. Emery, directly after
+their wedding in a small Central New York village, had gone West to Ohio
+they had spent their tiny capital in building a small story-and-a-half
+cottage, ornamented with the jig-saw work and fancy turning popular in
+1872, and this had been the nucleus of their present rambling,
+picturesque, many-roomed home. Every step in the long series of changes
+which had led from its first state to its last had a profound and
+gratifying significance for the Emerys, and its final condition,
+prosperous, modern, sophisticated, with the right kind of woodwork in
+every room that showed, with the latest, most unobtrusively artistic
+effects in decoration, represented their culminating well-earned
+position in the inner circle of the best society of Endbury.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, they felt that just as the house had been attained with
+effort, self-denial and careful calculations, yet still without
+incurring debt, so their social position had been secured by unremitting
+diligence and care, but with no loss of self-respect or even of dignity.
+They were honestly <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_4" id="pg_4">4</a></span>proud both of their house and of their list of
+acquaintances and saw no reason to regard them as less worthy
+achievements of an industrious life than their four creditable grown-up
+children or Judge Emery&#8217;s honorable reputation at the bar. In their
+youth they had conceived of certain things as worth attaining. They had
+worked hard for these things and their unabashed pleasure in possessing
+them had the vivid and substantial quality which comes from a keen
+memory of battles with a world none too ready to grant human desires.</p>
+
+<p>The two older children, George and Marietta, could remember those early
+struggling days with almost as fresh an emotion as that of their
+parents. Indeed, Marietta, now a competent, sharp-eyed matron of
+thirty-two, could not see the most innocuous colored lithograph without
+an uncontrollable wave of bitterness, so present to her mind was the
+period when they painfully groped their way out of chromos.</p>
+
+<p>The date of that epoch coincided with the date of their first
+acquaintance with the Hollisters. The Hollisters were Endbury&#8217;s First
+Family; literally so, for they had come up from their farm in Kentucky
+to settle in Endbury when it was but a frontier post. It was a part of
+their superiority over other families that their traditions took
+cognizance of the time when great stumps from the primeval forest stood
+in what was now Endbury&#8217;s public square, the hub of interurban trolley
+traffic, whence the big, noisy cars started for their infinitely
+radiating journeys over the flat, fertile country about the little city.
+The particular Mrs. Hollister who, at the time the Emerys began to
+pierce the upper crust, was the leader of Endbury society, had discarded
+chromos as much as five years before. Mrs. Emery and Marietta, newly
+admitted to the honor of her acquaintance, wondered to themselves at the
+cold monotony of her black and white engravings. The artlessness of this
+wonder struck shame to their hearts when they chanced to learn that the
+lady had repaid it with a worldly-wise amusement at their own
+highly-colored <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_5" id="pg_5">5</a></span>waterfalls and snow-capped mountain-peaks. Marietta
+could recall as piercingly as if it were yesterday, in how crestfallen a
+chagrin she and her mother had gazed at their parlor after this
+incident, their disillusioned eyes open for the first time to the
+futility of its claim to sophistication. As for the incident that had
+led to the permanent retiring from their table of the monumental
+salt-and-pepper &#8220;caster&#8221; which had been one of their most prized wedding
+presents, the Emerys refused to allow themselves to remember it, so
+intolerably did it spell humiliation.</p>
+
+<p>Even the oldest son, prosperous, well-established manufacturer that he
+was, could not recall without a shudder his first dinner-party. A branch
+of the Hollisters had moved next door to the Emerys and, to Mrs. Emery&#8217;s
+great satisfaction, an easy neighborly acquaintance had sprung up
+between the two families. Secure in this familiarity, and not
+distinguishing the immense difference between a chance invitation to
+drop in to dinner and a formal invitation to dine, the young
+business-man had almost forgotten the date for which he had been bidden.
+Remembering it with a start, he had gone straight from his office to the
+house of his hosts, supposing that he would be able, as he had done many
+times before, to wash his face and hands in the bath-room and brush his
+hair in the room of the son of the house.</p>
+
+<p>The sight of a black man in evening dress, who opened the door to him
+instead of the usual maid, sent a vague apprehension through his
+preoccupied mind, but it was not until he found himself in the room set
+apart for the masculine guests and saw everyone arrayed in
+&#8220;swallow-tails,&#8221; as he thought of them, that he realized what he had
+done. The emotion of the moment was one that made a mark on his life.</p>
+
+<p>He had an instant&#8217;s wild notion of making some excuse to go home and
+dress, for his plight was by no means due to necessity. He had a correct
+outfit of evening clothes, bought at the urgent command of his mother,
+which he had worn several times at public dinners given by the <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_6" id="pg_6">6</a></span>city
+Board of Trade and once at a dancing party at the home of the head of
+his firm. However, the hard sense which made him successful in his
+business kept him from a final absurdity now. He had been seen, and he
+decided grimly that he would be, on the whole, a shade more laughable if
+he appeared later in a changed costume.</p>
+
+<p>He was twenty-one years old at that time; he considered himself a man
+grown. He had been in business for five years and his foot was already
+set firmly on the ladder of commercial success on which he was to mount
+high, but not for nothing had he felt about him all his life the
+inextinguishable desire of his family to outgrow rusticity. He chided
+himself for unmanly pettiness, but the fact remained that throughout the
+interminable evening the sight of his gray striped trousers or colored
+cuffs affected him to a chagrin that was like a wave of physical nausea.
+Four years later he had married a handsome young lady from among the
+Hollister connections, and, moving away to Cleveland, where no memory of
+his antecedents could handicap him, had begun a new social career as
+eminently successful as his rapid commercial expansion. He forced
+himself sometimes to think of that long-past evening as one presses on a
+scar to learn how much soreness is left in an old wound, and he smiled
+at the little tragedy of egotism it had been to him. But it was a wry
+smile.</p>
+
+<p>A brighter recollection to all the Emerys was the justly complacent and
+satisfied remembrance of the house grounds during the first really
+successful social event they had achieved. It was a lawn-f&ecirc;te, given for
+the benefit of St. Luke&#8217;s church, which Mrs. Emery and Marietta had
+recently joined. Socially, it was the first fruits of their conversion
+from Congregationalism. The weather was fine, the roses were out, the
+very best people were there, the bazaar was profitable, and the dowager
+of the Hollister matrons had spoken warm words of admiration of the
+competent way in which the occasion had been managed to Mrs. Emery,
+smiling and flushed in an indomitably self-respecting pleasure. The
+older Emerys still sometimes <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_7" id="pg_7">7</a></span>spoke of that afternoon and evening as
+parents remember the hour when their baby first walked alone, with
+something of the same mixture of pride in the later achievements of the
+child and of tenderness for its early weakness.</p>
+
+<p>The youngest of the Emerys, many years the junior of her brothers and
+sister, knew nothing at all of the anxious bitter-sweet of these early
+endeavors for sophistication. By the time she came to conscious,
+individual life the summit had been virtually reached. It is not to be
+denied that Lydia had witnessed several abrupt changes in the family
+ideal of household decoration or of entertaining, but since they were
+exactly contemporaneous with similar changes on the part of the
+Hollisters and other people in their circle, these revolutions of taste
+brought with them no sense of humiliation. Such, for instance, was the
+substitution for carpets of hardwood floors and rugs as oriental as the
+purse would allow. Lydia could remember gorgeously flowered carpets on
+every Emery floor, but since they also covered all the prosperous floors
+in town at the same time, it was not more painful to have found them
+attractive than to have worn immensely large sleeves or preposterously
+blousing shirt waists, to have ridden bicycles, or read E. P. Roe, or
+anything else that everybody used to do and did no more. She could
+remember, also, when charades and book-parties were considered amusing
+pastimes for grown-ups, but in passing beyond these primitive tastes the
+Emerys had been well abreast of their contemporaries. The last charade
+party had not been held in <i>their</i> parlors, they congratulated
+themselves.</p>
+
+<p>A philosophic observer who had known the history of Mrs. Emery&#8217;s life
+might have found something pathetic in her pleasure at Lydia&#8217;s
+light-hearted jesting at the funny old things people used to think
+pretty and the absurd pursuits they used to think entertaining. It was
+to her a symbol that her daughter had escaped what had caused her so
+much suffering, the uneasy, self-distrusting dread lest she might still
+be finding pretty things that up-to-date people thought grotesque; lest
+suddenly what she had toiled <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_8" id="pg_8">8</a></span>so painfully to obtain should somehow turn
+out to be not the &#8220;right thing&#8221; after all. Marietta did not recall more
+vividly than did her mother the trying period that had elapsed between
+their new enlightenment on the subject of chromos and the day when an
+unexpected large fee from a client of Mr. Emery (not yet Judge) enabled
+them to hang their Protestant walls with engravings of pagan gods and
+Roman Catholic saints. For their problem had never been the simple one
+of merely discovering the right thing. There had always been added to it
+the complication of securing the right thing out of an income by no
+means limitless. The head of the household had enjoyed the success that
+might have been predicted from his whole-souled absorption in his
+profession, but Judge Emery came of old-fashioned rural stock with
+inelastic ideas of honesty, and though he was more than willing to toil
+early and late to supply funds for his family and satisfy whatever form
+of ambition his women-folk might decree to be the best one, he was not
+willing to take advantage of the perquisites of his position, and never,
+as the phrase in the town ran, &#8220;made on the side.&#8221; Of his temptations
+and of his stout resistance to them, his wife and children knew no more,
+naturally, than of any of the other details of his professional life,
+which, according to the custom of their circle, were as remote and
+hidden from them as if he had departed each morning after his hearty
+early breakfast into another planet; but his wife was proud of the
+integrity which she divined in her husband and, as she often declared
+roundly to Marietta, would not have exchanged his good name for a much
+larger income.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, the acridity which for Marietta lingered about the recollection
+of their efforts to make themselves over did not exist in the more amply
+satisfied mind of her mother. The difference showed itself visibly in
+the contrast between the daughter&#8217;s face, stamped with a certain tired,
+unflagging intensity of endeavor, and the freshness of the older woman.
+At thirty-two, Marietta looked, perhaps, no older than her age, but
+obviously more worn by the strain of life than <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_9" id="pg_9">9</a></span>her mother at fifty-six.
+Sometimes, as she noted in her mirror the sharp lines of a fatigue that
+was almost bitterness, she experienced a certain unnerving uncertainty,
+a total lack of zest for what she so eagerly struggled to attain, and
+she envied her mother&#8217;s single-minded satisfaction in getting what she
+wanted.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery had enjoyed the warfare of her life heartily; the victories
+for their own sake, the defeats because they had spurred her on to fresh
+and finally successful efforts, and the remembrance of both was sweet to
+her. She loved her husband for himself and for what he had been able to
+give her, and she loved her children ardently, although she had been
+sorely vexed by her second son&#8217;s unfortunate marriage. He had always
+been a discordant note in the family concert, the veiled, unconscious,
+uneasy skepticism of Marietta bursting out openly in Henry as a
+careless, laughing cynicism, excessively disconcerting to his mother.
+She sometimes thought he had married the grocer&#8217;s daughter out of
+&#8220;contrariness.&#8221; The irritation which surrounded that event, and the play
+of cross-purposes and discord which had filled the period until the
+misguided young people had voluntarily exiled themselves to the Far
+West, remained more of a sore spot in Mrs. Emery&#8217;s mind than any blow
+given or taken in her lifelong campaign for distinction. She admitted
+frankly to herself that it was a relief that Harry was no longer near
+her, although her mother&#8217;s heart ached for the Harry he had seemed to
+her before his rebellion. She fancied that she would enjoy him as of old
+if the litter of inconvenient persons and facts lying between them could
+but be cleared away; with a voluntary blindness not uncommon in parents,
+refusing to recognize that these superficial differences were only the
+outward expression of a fundamental alienation within. At all events, it
+was futile to speculate about the matter, since the width of the
+continent and her son&#8217;s intense distaste for letter-writing separated
+them. She had come, therefore, to turn all her attention and proud
+affection on her youngest child.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed to her sometimes that Lydia had been granted <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_10" id="pg_10">10</a></span>her by a
+merciful Providence in order that she might make that &#8220;fresh start all
+over again&#8221; which is the never-realized ideal of erring humanity.
+Marietta had been a young lady fourteen years before, and fourteen years
+meant much&mdash;meant everything to people who progressed as fast as the
+Emerys. Uncertain of themselves, they had not ventured to launch
+Marietta boldly upon the waves of a society the chart of which was so
+new to them. She had no coming-out party. She simply put on long skirts,
+coiled her black hair on top of her head, and began going to evening
+parties with a few young men who were amused by the tart briskness of
+her tongue and attracted by the comeliness of her healthful youth. She
+had married the first man who proposed to her&mdash;a young insurance agent.
+Since then they had lived in a very comfortable, middling state of
+harmony, apparently on about the same social scale as Marietta&#8217;s
+parents. That this feat was accomplished on a much smaller income was
+due to Marietta&#8217;s unrivaled instinct and trained capacity for keeping up
+appearances.</p>
+
+<p>All this history had been creditable, but nothing more; and Mrs. Emery
+often looked at her elder daughter with compunction for her own earlier
+ignorance and helplessness. She could have done so much more for
+Marietta if she had only known how. Mrs. Mortimer was, however, a rather
+prickly personality with whom to attempt to sympathize, and in general
+her mother felt the usual -in-law conclusion about her daughter&#8217;s life:
+that Marietta could undoubtedly have done better than to marry her
+industrious, negligible husband, but that, on the whole, she might have
+done worse; and it was much to be hoped that her little boy would
+resemble the Emerys and not the Mortimers.</p>
+
+<p>No such philosophical calm restrained her emotions about Lydia. She was
+in positive beauty and charm all that poor Marietta had not been, and
+she was to have in the way of backing and management all that poor
+Marietta had lacked. It seemed to Mrs. Emery that her whole life had
+been devoted to learning what to do and what not to do for Lydia. As the
+time of action drew nearer she nerved herself <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_11" id="pg_11">11</a></span>for the campaign with a
+finely confident feeling that she knew every inch of the ground. Her
+expectancy grew more and more tense as her eagerness rose. During the
+long year that Lydia was in Europe, receiving a final gloss, even higher
+than that imparted by the expensive and exclusive girls&#8217; school where
+she had spent the years between fourteen and eighteen, Mrs. Emery laid
+her plans and arranged her life with a fervent devotion to one end&mdash;the
+success of Lydia&#8217;s first season in society. Every room in the house
+seemed to her vision to stand in a bright vacancy awaiting the arrival
+of the d&eacute;butante.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_12" id="pg_12">12</a></span>
+<a name="AMERICAN_BEAUTIES_378" id="AMERICAN_BEAUTIES_378"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER II</p>
+<p class="l c">AMERICAN BEAUTIES</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>On the morning of Lydia&#8217;s long-expected return, as Mrs. Emery moved
+restlessly about the large double parlors opening out on a veranda where
+the vines were already golden in the September sunlight, it seemed to
+her that the very walls were blank in hushed eagerness and that the
+chairs and tables turned faces like hers, tired with patience, toward
+the open door. She had not realized until the long separation was almost
+over how unendurably she had missed her baby girl, as she still thought
+of the tall girl of nineteen. She could not wait the few hours that were
+left. Her fortitude had given way just too soon. She must have the dear
+child now, now, in her arms.</p>
+
+<p>She moved absently a spray of goldenrod which hid a Fra Angelico angel
+over the mantel and noted with dramatic self-pity that her hand was
+trembling. She sat down suddenly, and lost herself in a vain attempt to
+recall the well-beloved sound of Lydia&#8217;s fresh young voice. A knot came
+in her throat, and she covered her face with her large, white,
+carefully-manicured hands.</p>
+
+<p>Marietta came in briskly a few moments later, bringing a bouquet of
+asters from her own garden. She was dressed, as always, with a severe
+reticence in color and line which, though due to her extreme need for
+economy, nevertheless gave to the rather spare outlines of her tall
+figure a distinction, admired by Endbury under the name of stylishness.
+Her rapid step had carried her half-way across the wide room before she
+saw to her surprise that her mother, usually so self-contained, was
+giving way to an inexplicable emotion.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_13" id="pg_13">13</a></span>&#8220;Good gracious, Mother!&#8221; she began in the energetic fashion which was
+apt to make her most neutral remarks sound combative.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery dried her eyes with a gesture of protest, adjusted her gray
+pompadour deftly, and cut off her daughter&#8217;s remonstrance, &#8220;Oh, you
+needn&#8217;t tell me I&#8217;m foolish, Marietta. I know it. I just suddenly got so
+impatient it didn&#8217;t seem as though I could wait another minute!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The younger woman accepted this explanation of the tears with a murmured
+sound of somewhat enigmatic intonation. Her thin dark face settled into
+a repose that had a little grimness in it. She began putting the flowers
+into a vase that stood between the reproduction of a Giotto Madonna and
+a Japanese devil-hunt, both results of the study of art taken up during
+the past winter by her mother&#8217;s favorite woman&#8217;s club. Mrs. Emery
+watched the process in the contemplative relief which follows an
+emotional outbreak, and her eyes wandered to the objects on either side
+the vase. The sight stirred her to speech. &#8220;Oh, Marietta, how <i>do</i> you
+suppose the house will seem to Lydia after she has seen so much? I hope
+she won&#8217;t be disappointed. I&#8217;ve done so much to it this last year,
+perhaps she won&#8217;t like it. And Oh, I <i>was</i> so tried because we weren&#8217;t
+able to get the new sideboard put up in the dining-room yesterday!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Mortimer glanced without smiling at a miniature of her sister,
+blooming in a shrine-like arrangement on her mother&#8217;s writing-desk. She
+shook her dark head with a gesture like her father&#8217;s, and said with his
+blunt decisiveness, &#8220;Really, Mother, you must draw the line about Lydia.
+She&#8217;s only human. I guess if the house is good enough for you and father
+it is good enough for her.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She crossed the room toward the door with a brisk rattle of starched
+skirts, but as she passed her mother her hand was caught and held.
+&#8220;That&#8217;s just it, Marietta&mdash;that&#8217;s just what came over me! <i>Is</i> what&#8217;s
+good enough for us good enough for Lydia? Won&#8217;t anything, even the best,
+in Endbury be a come-down for her?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_14" id="pg_14">14</a></span>The slightly irritated impatience with which Mrs. Mortimer had listened
+to the first words of this speech gave way to a shrewd amusement. &#8220;You
+mean that you&#8217;ve put Lydia up on such a high plane to begin with that
+whichever way she goes will be a step down,&#8221; she asked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, yes; that&#8217;s just it,&#8221; breathed her mother, unconscious of any
+irony in her daughter&#8217;s accent. She fixed her eyes, which, in spite of
+her having long since passed the half-century mark, were still very
+clear and blue, anxiously upon Marietta&#8217;s opaque dark ones. She felt not
+only a need to be reassured in general by anyone, but a reluctant faith
+in the younger woman&#8217;s judgment.</p>
+
+<p>Marietta released herself with a laugh that was like a light, mocking
+tap on her mother&#8217;s shoulder. &#8220;Well, folks that haven&#8217;t got real worries
+will certainly manufacture them! To worry about Lydia&#8217;s future in
+Endbury! Aren&#8217;t you afraid the sun won&#8217;t rise some day? If ever there
+was any girl that had a smooth road in front of her&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The door-bell rang. &#8220;They&#8217;ve come! They&#8217;ve come!&#8221; cried Mrs. Emery
+wildly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Lydia wouldn&#8217;t ring the bell, and her train isn&#8217;t due till ten,&#8221; Mrs.
+Mortimer reminded her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, yes. Well, then, it&#8217;s the new sideboard. I am so&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s a boy with a big pasteboard box,&#8221; contradicted Mrs. Mortimer,
+looking down the hall to the open front door.</p>
+
+<p>Seeing someone there to receive it, the boy set the box inside the
+screen door and started down the steps.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Bring it here! Bring it here!&#8221; called Mrs. Mortimer, commandingly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s for Lydia,&#8221; said Mrs. Emery, looking at the address. She spoke
+with an accent of dramatic intensity, and a flush rose to her fair
+cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>Her olive-skinned daughter looked at her and laughed. &#8220;What did you
+expect?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But he didn&#8217;t care enough about her coming home to be <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_15" id="pg_15">15</a></span>in town to-day!&#8221;
+Mrs. Emery&#8217;s maternal vanity flared up hotly.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Mortimer laughed again and began taking the layers of crumpled
+wax-paper out of the box. &#8220;Oh, that was the trouble with you, was it?
+That&#8217;s nothing. He had to be away to see about a new electrical plant in
+Dayton. Did you ever know Paul Hollister to let anything interfere with
+business?&#8221; This characterization was delivered with an intonation that
+made it the most manifest praise.</p>
+
+<p>Her mother seconded it with unquestioning acquiescence. &#8220;No, that&#8217;s a
+fact; I never did.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Mortimer in her turn had an accent of dramatic intensity as she
+cried out, &#8220;Oh! they are American Beauties! The biggest I ever saw!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The two women looked at the flowers, almost awestruck at their size.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Have you a vase?&#8221; Mrs. Mortimer asked dubiously.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery rose to the occasion. &#8220;The Japanese umbrella stand.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There was a pause as they reverently arranged the great sheaf of
+enormous flowers. Then Mrs. Emery began, &#8220;Marietta&mdash;&#8221; She hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well,&#8221; Mrs. Mortimer prompted her, a little impatiently.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do you really think that he&mdash;that Lydia&mdash;?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Marietta accepted with a somewhat pinched smile her mother&#8217;s boundary
+lines of reticence. &#8220;Of course. Did you ever know Paul Hollister to give
+up anything he wanted?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her mother shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Mortimer rose with a &#8220;Well, then!&#8221; and the air of one who has said
+all there is to be said on a subject, and again crossed the room toward
+the door. Her mother drifted aimlessly in that direction also, as though
+swept along by the other&#8217;s energy.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, it&#8217;s a pity he is not here now, anyhow,&#8221; she said, adding in a
+spirited answer to her daughter&#8217;s expression, &#8220;Now, you needn&#8217;t look
+that way, Marietta. You know <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_16" id="pg_16">16</a></span>yourself that Lydia is very romantic and
+fanciful. It would be a very different matter if she were like Madeleine
+Hollister. She wouldn&#8217;t need any managing.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Mortimer smiled at the idea. &#8220;Yes, I&#8217;d like to see somebody try to
+manage Paul&#8217;s sister,&#8221; she commented.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They wouldn&#8217;t <i>have</i> to,&#8221; her mother pointed out, &#8220;she&#8217;s so
+levelheaded and sane. But Lydia&#8217;s different. It&#8217;s part of her
+loveliness, of course, only you do have to manage her. And she&#8217;ll be in
+a very unsettled state for the first week or two after she gets home
+after such a long absence. The impressions she gets then&mdash;well, I wish
+he were here!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Mortimer waved her hand toward the roses.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course, of course,&#8221; assented her mother, subsiding peaceably down
+the scale from anxiety to confidence with the phrase. She looked at the
+monstrous flowers with the gaze of acquired admiration so usual in her
+eyes. &#8220;They don&#8217;t look much like roses, do they?&#8221; she remarked
+irrelevantly.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Mortimer turned in the doorway, her face expressing an extreme
+surprise. &#8220;Good gracious, no,&#8221; she cried. &#8220;Why, of course not. They cost
+a dollar and a half apiece.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She did not stop to hear her mother&#8217;s vaguely assenting reply. Mrs.
+Emery heard her firm, rapid tread go down the hall to the front door and
+then suddenly stop. Something indefinable about the pause that followed
+made the mother&#8217;s heart beat thickly. &#8220;What is it, Marietta?&#8221; she
+called, but her voice was lost in Mrs. Mortimer&#8217;s exclamation of
+surprise, &#8220;Why it can&#8217;t be&mdash;why, <i>Lydia</i>!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As from a great distance, the mother heard a confused rush in the hall,
+and then, piercing through the dreamlike unreality of the moment, came
+the sweet, high note of a girl&#8217;s voice, laughing, but with the liquid
+uncertainty of tears quivering through the mirth. &#8220;Oh, Marietta! Where&#8217;s
+Mother? Aren&#8217;t you all slow-pokes&mdash;not a soul to meet us at the
+train&mdash;where&#8217;s Mother? Where&#8217;s Mother? Where&#8217;s&mdash;&#8221; The room swam around
+Mrs. <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_17" id="pg_17">17</a></span>Emery as she stood up looking toward the door, and the girl who
+came running in, her dark eyes shining with happy tears, was not more
+real than the many visions of her that had haunted her mother&#8217;s
+imagination during the lonely year of separation. At the clasp of the
+young arms about her face took light as from an inner source, and
+breath came back to her in a sudden gasp. She tried to speak, but the
+only word that came was &#8220;Lydia! Lydia! Lydia!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The girl laughed, a half-sob breaking her voice as she answered
+whimsically, &#8220;Well, who did you expect to see?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Mortimer performed her usual function of relieving emotional
+tension by putting a strong hand on Lydia&#8217;s shoulder and spinning her
+about. &#8220;Come! I want to see if it <i>is</i> you&mdash;and how you look.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>For a moment the ardent young creature stood still in a glowing quiet.
+She drank in the dazzled gaze of admiration of the two women with an
+innocent delight. The tears were still in Mrs. Emery&#8217;s eyes, but she did
+not raise a hand to dry them, smitten motionless by the extremity of her
+proud satisfaction. Never again did Lydia look to her as she did at that
+moment, like something from another sphere, like some bright,
+unimaginably happy being, freed from the bonds that had always weighed
+so heavily on all the world about her mother.</p>
+
+<p>Before she could draw breath, Lydia moved and was changed. Her mother
+saw suddenly, with that emotion which only mothers know, reminiscences
+of little-girlhood, of babyhood, even of long-dead cousins and aunts, in
+the lovely face blooming under the wide hat. She felt the sweet
+momentary confusion of individuality, the satisfied sense of complete
+ownership which accompanies a strong belief in family ties. Lydia was
+not only altogether entrancing, but she was of the same stuff with those
+who loved her so dearly. It gave a deeper note to her mother&#8217;s passion
+of affectionate pride.</p>
+
+<p>The girl turned with a pretty, defiant tilt of her head. &#8220;Well, and how
+<i>do</i> I look?&#8221; she asked; and before she could be answered she flew at
+Mrs. Mortimer with a gentle <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_18" id="pg_18">18</a></span>roughness, clasping her arms around her
+waist until the matron gasped. &#8220;<i>You</i> look too good to be true&mdash;both of
+you&mdash;if you are such lazybones that you wouldn&#8217;t go to the station to
+meet the prodigal daughter!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, if you will come on an earlier train than you telegraphed&mdash;&#8221;
+began Mrs. Mortimer, &#8220;Everybody&#8217;s getting ready to meet you with a brass
+band. What did you do with Father?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The girl moved away, putting her hands up to her hat uncertainly as
+though about to take out the hat-pins. There was between the three a
+moment of that constraint which accompanies the transition from
+emotional intensity down to an everyday level. In Lydia&#8217;s voice there
+was even a little flatness as she answered, &#8220;Oh, he put me in the hack
+and went off to see about business. I heard him &#8217;phoning something to
+somebody about a suit. We got through the customs sooner than we thought
+we could, you see, and caught an earlier train.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery turned her adoring gaze from Lydia&#8217;s slim beauty and looked
+inquiringly at her elder daughter. Mrs. Mortimer understood, and nodded.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What are you two making faces about?&#8221; Lydia turned in time to catch the
+interchange of glances.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery hesitated. Marietta spoke with a crisp straightforwardness
+which served as well in this case as nonchalance for keeping her remark
+without undue significance. &#8220;We were just wondering if now wasn&#8217;t a good
+time to show you what Paul Hollister did for your welcome home. He
+couldn&#8217;t be here himself, so he sent those.&#8221; She nodded toward the
+bouquet.</p>
+
+<p>As Lydia turned toward the flowers her two elders fixed her with the
+unscrupulously scrutinizing gaze of blood-relations; but their
+microscopic survey showed them nothing in the girl&#8217;s face, already
+flushed and excited by her home-coming, beyond a sudden amused surprise
+at the grotesque size of the tribute.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, for mercy&#8217;s sake! Did you ever see such monsters! <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_19" id="pg_19">19</a></span>They are as big
+as my head! Look!&#8221; She whirled her hat from the pretty disorder of her
+brown hair and poised it on the topmost of the great flowers, stepping
+back to see the effect and laughing, &#8220;They don&#8217;t look any more like
+roses, do they?&#8221; she added, turning to her mother. Mrs. Emery&#8217;s answer
+rose so spontaneously to her lips that she was not aware that she was
+echoing Marietta. &#8220;Good gracious, no; of course not. They cost a dollar
+and a half apiece.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia neither assented to nor dissented from this apothegm. It started
+another train of thought in her mind. &#8220;As much as all that! Why, Paul
+oughtn&#8217;t to be so extravagant! He can&#8217;t afford it, and I should have
+liked something else just as&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her sister broke in with an ample gesture of negation. &#8220;You don&#8217;t know
+Paul. If he goes on the way he&#8217;s started&mdash;he&#8217;s district sales manager
+for southern Ohio already.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia paid to this information the passing tribute of a moment&#8217;s
+uncomprehending surprise. &#8220;Think of that! The last time Paul told me
+about himself he was working day and night in Schenectady, learning the
+business, and getting&mdash;oh, I don&#8217;t know&mdash;fifty cents an hour, or some
+such starvation wages.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Mortimer&#8217;s bitterly acquired sense of values revolted at this.
+&#8220;What are you talking about, Lydia? Fifty cents an hour starvation
+wages!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, perhaps it was five cents an hour. I don&#8217;t remember. And he
+worked with his hands and was always in danger of getting shot through
+with a million volts of electricity or mashed with a breaking fly-wheel
+or something. He said electricians were the soldiers of modern
+civilization. I told that to a German woman we met on the boat when she
+said Americans have no courage because they don&#8217;t fight duels. The
+idea!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She began pulling off her gloves, with a quick energetic gesture. Mrs.
+Mortimer went on, &#8220;Well, he certainly has <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_20" id="pg_20">20</a></span>a brilliant future before
+him. Everybody says that&mdash;&#8221; She stopped, struck by her rather heavy
+emphasis on the theme and by a curious look from Lydia. The girl did not
+blush, she did not seem embarrassed, but for a moment the childlike
+clarity of her look was clouded by an expression of consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery made a rush upon her, drawing her away toward the door with a
+displeased look at Marietta. &#8220;Never mind about Paul&#8217;s prospects,&#8221; she
+said. &#8220;With Lydia just this minute home, to begin gossiping about the
+neighbors! Come up to your room, darling, and see the little outdoor
+sitting-room we&#8217;ve had fixed over the porch.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Mortimer was not given to bearing chagrin, even a passing one, with
+undue self-restraint. She threw into the intonation of her next sentence
+her resentment at the rebuke from her mother. &#8220;I still live, you know,
+even if Lydia has come home!&#8221; As Mrs. Emery turned with a look of
+apology, she added, &#8220;Oh, I only wanted to make you turn around so that I
+could tell you that I am going to bring my two men-folks over here
+to-night, to the gathering of the clans, and that I must go home until
+then. Dr. Melton and Aunt Julia are coming, aren&#8217;t they?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, yes!&#8221; cried Lydia. &#8220;It doesn&#8217;t seem to me I can wait to see
+Godfather. I sort of half hoped he might be here now.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, <i>Lydia</i>!&#8221; her mother reproached her jealously.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, you might as well give in, Mother, Lydia likes the little old
+doctor better than any of the rest of us.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He talks to me,&#8221; said Lydia defensively.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>We</i> never say a word,&#8221; commented Mrs. Mortimer.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia broke away from her mother&#8217;s close clasp and ran back to her
+sister. She was always running, as though to keep up with the rapidity
+of her swift impulses. She held her subtly-curved cheek up to the
+other&#8217;s strongly-marked face. &#8220;You just kiss me, Etta dear,&#8221; she pleaded
+softly, &#8220;and stop teasing.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Mortimer looked long into the clear dark eyes with <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_21" id="pg_21">21</a></span>an unmoved
+countenance. Then her face melted suddenly till she looked like her
+mother. She put her arms about the girl with a fervent gesture of
+tenderness. &#8220;Dear little Lydia,&#8221; she murmured, with a quaver in her
+voice.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_22" id="pg_22">22</a></span>
+<a name="PICKING_UP_THE_THREADS_728" id="PICKING_UP_THE_THREADS_728"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER III</p>
+<p class="l c">PICKING UP THE THREADS</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>After she was alone she looked again at the miniature of Lydia. The
+youthful radiance of the face had singularly the effect of a perfect
+flower. Mrs. Mortimer glanced at the hat still drooping its wide brim
+over the rose where Lydia had forgotten it, and stood still in a reverie
+that had, from her aspect, something of sadness in it. After a moment
+she sighed out, &#8220;Poor little Lydia!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s the matter with Lydia?&#8221; asked someone behind her.</p>
+
+<p>She turned and faced a dark, elderly personage, the robust dignity of
+whose bearing was now tempered with shamefacedness. Mrs. Mortimer&#8217;s face
+sharpened in affectionate malice. &#8220;What are you doing here at this hour
+of the morning?&#8221; she asked with a humorously exaggerated air of
+amazement. &#8220;No self-respecting man is ever seen in his house during
+business hours!&#8221; She went on, &#8220;Oh, I know well enough. You let Mother
+have her first to make up for her being sick and not able to go to meet
+her ship; but you can&#8217;t stay away.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Judge waved her raillery away with a smile. The physical resemblance
+between father and daughter was remarkable. &#8220;I asked you what was the
+matter with Lydia,&#8221; he repeated.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Mortimer&#8217;s face clouded. &#8220;Oh, it&#8217;s a hateful, horrid sort of world
+we&#8217;re all so eager to push her into. It&#8217;s like a can full of angleworms,
+everlastingly squirming and wriggling to get to the top. I was just
+thinking that it would be better for her, maybe, if she could always
+stay a little girl and travel &#8217;round to see things.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_23" id="pg_23">23</a></span>&#8220;Why, Etta! I tell you <i>I&#8217;m</i> glad to have Lydia get through with her
+traveling &#8217;round. Maybe I can see something of her if I hurry up and do
+it now before your mother gets things going. I won&#8217;t after that, of
+course. I never have.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>To this his daughter had one of her abrupt, disconcerting responses.
+&#8220;You&#8217;d better hurry and do it before you get so deep in some important
+trial that you wouldn&#8217;t know Lydia from a plaster image. There are more
+reasons than just Mother and card parties why you don&#8217;t see much of her,
+I guess.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Judge Emery forbore to argue the point. &#8220;Where are they now?&#8221; he asked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, upstairs, out of my way. Mother&#8217;s usual state of mind about Lydia
+is more so than ever, I warn you. She thought I wasn&#8217;t refined enough
+company.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now, Etta, you know your mother never thought any such thing.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, I know she was inconsistent, whatever she thought. While we were
+here alone she was speculating about Paul Hollister like anything. And
+yet, because I just happened to mention to Lydia that he is getting on
+in the world, I got put down as if I&#8217;d tried to make her marry him for
+his prospects.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There was an edge in her voice which her father deprecated, rubbing his
+shaven chin mildly. He deplored the appearance of a flaw in the smooth
+surface of harmony he loved to see in his family.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, you know, Marietta, we aim to have everything about right for
+Lydia. She&#8217;s all we&#8217;ve got left now the rest of you are settled.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The deepening of the careworn lines in the woman&#8217;s face seemed a
+justification for the undisguised bitterness of her answer. &#8220;I don&#8217;t see
+why nobody must breathe a word to her about what everybody knows is so.
+What&#8217;s the use of pretending that we&#8217;d be satisfied or she&#8217;d be
+comfortable a minute if Paul didn&#8217;t promise to be a money-maker&mdash;or at
+least to have a good income?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_24" id="pg_24">24</a></span>She turned away and walked rapidly down the hall, followed by her
+father, half apologetic, half reproachful. &#8220;Why, Daughter, you don&#8217;t
+grudge your sister! We couldn&#8217;t do so much for you; but we&#8217;re better off
+since you were a young lady and we want Lydia to have the benefit.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Mortimer paused on the veranda and stood looking in a troubled
+silence at the broad, well-kept lawn, stretching down to the asphalt
+street, shaded by vigorous young maples. Her father waited for her to
+speak, too good a lawyer to spoil by superfluous words the effect of a
+well-calculated appeal.</p>
+
+<p>Finally she turned to him contritely. &#8220;I&#8217;m hateful, Dad, and I&#8217;m sorry.
+Of course I don&#8217;t grudge dear little Lydia anything. Only I have a
+pretty hard time of it scratching along, and when I&#8217;m awfully tired of
+contriving and calculating how to manage somehow and anyhow, it&#8217;s hard
+to come up to the standard of saying everything&#8217;s lovely that you and
+Mother want for Lydia.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Anything the trouble specially?&#8221; asked her father guardedly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, no; same old thing. Keeping up a two-maid and a man establishment
+on a one-maid income, and mostly not being able to hire the one maid.
+There aren&#8217;t <i>any</i> girls to be had lately. It means I have to be the
+other maid and the man all of the time, and all three, part of the
+time.&#8221; She was starting down the step, but paused as though she could
+not resist the relief that came from expression. &#8220;And the cost of
+living&mdash;the necessities are bad enough, but the other things&mdash;the things
+you have to have not to be out of everything! I lie awake nights. I
+think of it in church. I can&#8217;t think of anything else but the way the
+expenses mount up. Everybody&#8217;s getting so reckless and extravagant and I
+<i>won&#8217;t</i> go into debt! I&#8217;ll come to it, though. Everybody else does!
+We&#8217;re the only people that haven&#8217;t oriental rugs now. Why, the
+Gilberts&mdash;and everybody knows how much they still owe Dr. Melton for
+Ellen&#8217;s appendicitis, and their grocer told Ralph they owe him <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_25" id="pg_25">25</a></span>several
+hundred dollars&mdash;well, they have just got an oriental rug that they paid
+a hundred and sixty dollars for. Mrs. Gilbert said they &#8216;just <i>had</i> to
+have it, and you can always have what you have to have.&#8217; It makes me
+sick! Our parlor looks so common! And the last dinner party we gave
+cost&mdash;&#8221; She detected a wavering in her father&#8217;s attention, as though he
+were listening for sounds inside the house, and broke off abruptly with
+a hurt and impatient &#8220;Oh, well, no matter!&#8221; and ran down the steps.</p>
+
+<p>Judge Emery called after with a relieved belittling of her complaints,
+&#8220;Oh, if that&#8217;s all you mean. Why, that&#8217;s half the fun. I remember when
+you were a baby your mother did the washings so that we could have a
+nurse to take you out with the other children and their nurses.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Mortimer was palpably out of earshot before he finished his
+exhortation, so he wasted no more breath but turned back eagerly in
+response to a call from Lydia, who came skimming down the hall. &#8220;Oh,
+Daddy dearest, it&#8217;s a jewel of a little sitting-room, the one you fixed
+up for me&mdash;and Mother says we can serve punch there the night of my
+coming-out party.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery was at her heels. Her husband laughed at his wife&#8217;s
+expression, and drew her toward him. &#8220;Here, Mother, stop staring at
+Lydia long enough to welcome me home, too.&#8221; He bent over her and rubbed
+his cheek against hers. &#8220;Come, tell me the news. Are you feeling
+better?&#8221; He gave her a little playful push toward the door of the
+parlor. &#8220;Here, let&#8217;s go in and visit for a while. I&#8217;m an old fool! I
+can&#8217;t do any work this morning. I kept Lydia from telling me a thing all
+the way from New York, so that we could hear it together.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia protested. &#8220;Tell you! After those monstrous great letters I&#8217;ve
+written! There&#8217;s nothing you don&#8217;t know. There&#8217;s nothing much to tell,
+anyhow. I&#8217;ve been museumed and picture-galleried, and churched, and
+cultured generally, till I&#8217;m full&mdash;up to there!&#8221; She drew her hand
+across her slim white throat and added cheerfully, &#8220;But I forgot the
+most of that the last three months in Paris. <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_26" id="pg_26">26</a></span>Nearly every girl in the
+party was going home to come out in society, and of course we just
+concentrated on clothes. You don&#8217;t mind, do you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As she hesitated, with raised eyebrows of doubt, her mother, heedless of
+what she was saying, was suddenly overcome by her appealing look and
+drew her close with a rush of little incoherent tender cries choked with
+tears. It was as though she were seeing her for the first time. Judge
+Emery twice tried to speak before his husky voice was under control. He
+patted his wife on the shoulder. &#8220;There, there, Mother,&#8221; he said
+vaguely. To Lydia he went on, &#8220;You&#8217;ve been gone quite a while, you know,
+and&mdash;well, till you have a baby-girl of your own I guess you won&#8217;t have
+much notion of how we feel.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia&#8217;s dark eyes filled, responsive to the emotion about her. &#8220;I&#8217;m just
+about distracted,&#8221; she cried. &#8220;I love everybody and everything so, I
+can&#8217;t stand it! I want to kiss you both and I can&#8217;t make up my mind
+which to kiss first&mdash;and it&#8217;s that way about everything! It&#8217;s all so
+good I don&#8217;t know what to begin on.&#8221; She brought their faces together
+and achieved a simultaneous kiss with a shaky laugh. &#8220;Now, look here! If
+we stand here another minute we&#8217;ll all cry. Come and show me the house.
+I want to see every single thing. All the old things, and all the new
+ones Mother&#8217;s been writing about.&#8221; She seized their hands and pulled
+them into the parlor. &#8220;I&#8217;ve been in this room already, but I didn&#8217;t see
+it. I don&#8217;t believe I even touched the floor when I walked, I was so
+excited. Oh, it&#8217;s lovely&mdash;it&#8217;s lovely!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She darted about the room like a humming-bird, recognizing what was
+familiar with fond little exclamations. &#8220;Oh, that darling little wicker
+chair!&mdash;the picture of the dog!&mdash;oh! oh! here&#8217;s my china lamb!&#8221; and
+crying out in admiration over new acquisitions.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, Mother, what a perfectly lovely couch&mdash;sofa&mdash;what do you call it?
+Why, it is so beautifully <i>different</i>! Wherever did you get that?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_27" id="pg_27">27</a></span>Mrs. Emery turned to her husband. &#8220;There, Nathaniel, what did I tell
+you?&#8221; she triumphed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s one of your mother&#8217;s latest extravagances,&#8221; explained Judge
+Emery. &#8220;There&#8217;s a crazy fad in Endbury for special handmade furniture.
+Maybe it&#8217;s all right, but I can&#8217;t see it&#8217;s so much better than what you
+buy in the department stores. Grand Rapids is good enough for me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He doesn&#8217;t like the man who made it,&#8221; said Mrs. Emery accusingly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s the matter with him?&#8221; asked Lydia, rubbing her hand luxuriously
+over the satin-smooth, lusterless wood of the sofa&#8217;s high back.</p>
+
+<p>Judge Emery replied, with his laugh of easy, indifferent tolerance for
+everything outside the profession of the law, &#8220;Oh, I never said I didn&#8217;t
+like him; I only said he struck me as a crack-brained, self-willed,
+conceited&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia laughed. She thought her father&#8217;s dry, ironic turns very witty.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I never saw anything conceited about him,&#8221; protested Mrs. Emery,
+admitting the rest of the indictment.</p>
+
+<p>Judge Emery sat down on the sofa in question and pulled his tie into
+shape. &#8220;Well, folks are always conceited who find the ordinary ways of
+doing things not good enough for them. Lydia, what do you think of this
+tie? Nobody pays a proper attention to my ties but you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve brought you some beauties from London,&#8221; said Lydia. Then reverting
+with a momentary curiosity to the subject they had left, &#8220;Whatever does
+this man do that&#8217;s so queer?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, he&#8217;s just one of the back-to-all-fours faddists,&#8221; said her father.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Back-to-all-fours?&#8221; Lydia was dim as to his meaning, but willing to be
+amused.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s just your father&#8217;s way,&#8221; exclaimed Mrs. Emery, who had not her
+daughter&#8217;s fondness for the Judge&#8217;s tricks of speech.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He lives as no Dago ditch-digger with a particle of <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_28" id="pg_28">28</a></span>get-up-and-get in
+him would be willing to,&#8221; said Judge Emery finally.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia turned to her mother.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, it&#8217;s nothing that would interest you in the least, dear,&#8221; said the
+matron, taking in admiringly Lydia&#8217;s French dress. &#8220;Only for a little
+while everybody was talking about how strangely he acted. He was an
+insurance man, like Marietta&#8217;s husband, and getting on finely, when all
+of a sudden, for no reason on earth, he threw it all up and went to live
+in the woods. Do you mean to say you only paid twenty dollars for that
+dress?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In the woods!&#8221; repeated Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes; the real woods. His father was a farmer, and left him&mdash;why you
+know, you&#8217;ve been there ever so many times&mdash;the Black Rock woods, the
+picnic woods. He has built him a little hut there and makes his
+furniture out of the trees.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia&#8217;s passing curiosity had faded. &#8220;Not quite twenty, even&mdash;only
+ninety-two francs,&#8221; she at last answered her mother&#8217;s question. &#8220;You
+never saw anything like the bargains there in summertime. Well, I should
+think your carpenter man <i>was</i> crazy.&#8221; She glanced down with
+satisfaction at the hang of her skirt.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, not dangerous,&#8221; her mother reassured her; &#8220;just socialistic, I
+suppose, and all that sort of thing.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, who&#8217;s crazier than a socialist?&#8221; cried her father genially. He
+added, &#8220;Where are you going, Daughter?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia stopped in the doorway, with a look of apology for her lack of
+interest in their talk. &#8220;I thought I&#8217;d just slip into the hall and see
+if there&#8217;s anything new there. There&#8217;s so much I want to see&mdash;all at
+once.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her fond impatience brought her parents forward with a start of
+pleasure, and the tour of inspection began. She led them from one room
+to another, swooping with swallow-like motions upon them for sudden
+caresses, dazzling them with her changing grace. She liked it
+all&mdash;all&mdash;she told them, a thousand times better than she remembered.
+She liked the new arrangement of the butler&#8217;s pantry; she loved <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_29" id="pg_29">29</a></span>the
+library for being all done over new; she adored the hall for being left
+exactly the way it was. The dining-room was the best of all, she
+declared, with so much that was familiar and so much that was new. &#8220;Only
+no sideboard,&#8221; she commented. &#8220;Have they gone out of fashion while I was
+away?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery, whose delight at Lydia&#8217;s approval had been mounting with
+every breath, looked vexed. &#8220;I knew you&#8217;d notice that!&#8221; she said. &#8220;We
+tried so hard to get the new one put in before you got back, but Mr.
+Rankin won&#8217;t deliver a thing till it&#8217;s just so!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Rankin!&#8221; cried Lydia, stopping so short in one of her headlong rushes
+across the room that she gave the impression of having encountered an
+invisible obstacle, &#8220;Who&#8217;s that?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, that&#8217;s the crazy cabinet-maker we were talking about. The one
+who&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, I&#8217;ve met a Mr. Rankin,&#8221; said Lydia, with more emphasis than the
+statement seemed to warrant.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s a common enough name,&#8221; said her mother, struck oddly by her
+accent.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But here, in Endbury. Only it can&#8217;t be the same person. He wasn&#8217;t
+queer; he was awfully nice. I met him once when a crowd of us were out
+skating that last Christmas I was home from school; the time when you
+and Father were in Washington and left me at Dr. Melton&#8217;s with Aunt
+Julia. I used to see him there a lot. He used to talk to the doctor by
+the hour, and Aunt Julia and I were doing that set of doilies in
+Hardanger work and we used to sit and sew and count threads and listen.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s the one,&#8221; said her father. &#8220;Melton has one of his flighty
+notions that the man is something wonderful.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But he wasn&#8217;t queer or anything then!&#8221; protested Lydia. &#8220;He never
+talked to me any, of course, I was such a kid, but it was awfully
+interesting to hear him and Godfather go on about morals, and the
+universe, and the future of man, and such&mdash;I never heard such talk
+before or after&mdash;but it can&#8217;t be that one!&#8221; Lydia broke off to marvel
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_30" id="pg_30">30</a></span>incredulously at the possibility. &#8220;He was&mdash;why, he was awfully nice!&#8221;
+she fell back on reiteration to help out her affirmation.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They say there&#8217;s queer blood in the family, and I guess he&#8217;s got his
+share,&#8221; Judge Emery summed up and dismissed the case with a gesture of
+finality. He glanced up at a tall clock standing in the corner, compared
+its time with his watch, exclaimed impatiently, &#8220;Slow again!&#8221; and
+addressed himself with a householder&#8217;s seriousness to setting it right.</p>
+
+<p>A new aspect of the matter they had been discussing struck Lydia. &#8220;But
+what does he&mdash;what do people do about him?&#8221; she asked.</p>
+
+<p>This misty inquiry was as intelligible to her mother as a cipher to the
+holders of a key. &#8220;Oh, he&#8217;s very nice about that. He has dropped out of
+society completely and keeps out of everybody&#8217;s way. Of course you see
+him when he comes to set up a piece of his furniture or to take an
+order, but that&#8217;s all. And he used to be so popular!&#8221; The regret in the
+last clause was that of a thrifty person before waste of any kind. &#8220;I
+understand he still goes to Dr. Melton&#8217;s a good deal, but that just
+counts him in as one of the doctor&#8217;s collection of freaks; it doesn&#8217;t
+mean anything. You know how your godfather goes on about&mdash;&#8221; She broke
+off to look out the window. &#8220;Oh, Lydia! your trunks are here. Quick!
+where are your keys? It seems as though I couldn&#8217;t wait to see your
+dresses!&#8221; She hurried to the door and vanished.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia did not stir for a moment. She was looking down at the table,
+absorbed in watching the dim reflections of her pink finger-tips as she
+pressed them one after another upon the dark polished wood. Her father
+opened the door of the clock with a little click, but she did not heed
+it. She drew her hand away from the table and inspected her finger-tips
+intently, as though to detect some change in them. When her father
+closed the clock-door and turned away she started, as though she had
+forgotten his presence. Her gaze upon him gave him an odd feeling of
+wonder, which he took to be apologetic realization that he had spent a
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_31" id="pg_31">31</a></span>longer time oblivious of her than he had meant. His explanation had a
+little compunction in it. &#8220;I have a time with that pendulum always. I
+can&#8217;t seem to get it the right length!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia continued to look at him blankly for a moment. Then she drew a
+long breath and took an aimless step away from the table. &#8220;Well, if that
+isn&#8217;t too queer for anything!&#8221; she exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>Judge Emery stared. &#8220;Why, no; it&#8217;s quite common in pendulum clocks,&#8221; he
+told her.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_32" id="pg_32">32</a></span>
+<a name="THE_DAWN_1077" id="THE_DAWN_1077"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER IV</p>
+<p class="l c">THE DAWN</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The morning after her return from Europe, Lydia awoke with a start, as
+though in answer to a call. The confusion of the last days had been such
+that she had for a moment the not uncommon experience of an entire
+blankness as to her whereabouts and identity. Realization of where and
+who she was came back to her with much more than the usual neutral
+relief at slipping into one&#8217;s own personality as into the first
+protection available against the vague horror of nihility. After an
+instant&#8217;s uncomfortable wandering in chaos, Lydia found herself with a
+thrill of exultation. She was not negatively relieved that she was
+somebody; she rejoiced to find herself Lydia Emery. She pounced on her
+own personality with a positive joy which for a moment moved her to a
+devout thanksgiving.</p>
+
+<p>It all seemed, as she said to herself, too good to be true&mdash;certainly
+more than she deserved. Among her unmerited blessings she quaintly
+placed being herself, but this was the less na&iuml;ve in that she placed
+among her blessings nearly everything of which she was conscious in her
+world. Her world at this time was not a large one, and every element in
+it seemed to her ideal. Her loving, indulgent father, who always had a
+smile for her as he looked up over his newspaper at the table, and who,
+though she knew he was too good to be wealthy, always managed somehow to
+pay for dresses just a little prettier than other girls&#8217; clothes; her
+devoted, idolizing mother, whose one thought was for her daughter&#8217;s
+pleasure; her rich big Brother George in Cleveland, whom she saw so
+seldom, but whose handsome presents testified to an affection that was
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_33" id="pg_33">33</a></span>to be numbered among the objects of her gratitude; good, sharp-tongued
+Sister Etta, who said such quick, bright things and ran her house so
+wonderfully; Aunt Julia, dear, dear Aunt Julia, whose warm heart was one
+of Lydia&#8217;s happiest homes, and Aunt Julia&#8217;s brother, Dr. Melton&mdash;ah, how
+could anyone be grateful enough for such an all-comprehending,
+quick-helping, ever-ready ally, teacher, mentor, playmate, friend and
+comrade as her godfather!</p>
+
+<p>As she lay in her soft white bed and looked about her pretty room with
+an ineffable sense of well-being, it seemed to her that everything that
+had happened to her was lovely and that the prospect of her future could
+contain only a crescendo of good-fortune. It was not that she imagined
+for herself a future remarkably different in detail from what was the
+past of the people about her. Even now at what she felt was the
+beginning of the first chapter, she knew the general events of the story
+before her; but this morning she was penetrated with the keenest sense
+of the unfathomable difference it made in those events in that they were
+about to happen to her. She had been passively watching the excited
+faces of people hurling themselves down-hill on toboggans, but now she
+was herself poised on the crest of the slope, tense with an excitement
+not only more real, but somehow more vital to the scheme of things, than
+that felt by other people who had made the thrilling trip before her.</p>
+
+<p>She lay still for a few moments, luxuriating in the innocent egotism of
+this view of her future, which was none the less absorbing for being so
+entirely unterrifying, and then sprang up, impatient to begin it. No one
+else in the house was awake. She saw with surprise that it was barely
+five o&#8217;clock. She wondered that she felt so little sleepy, since she had
+been up late the night before. All the family and connections had
+gathered, and she had talked with an eager breathlessness and had
+listened as eagerly to pick up all those details of home news which do
+not go into letters; those insignificant changes and events that make up
+the physiognomy of an existence, without which one cannot <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_34" id="pg_34">34</a></span>again become
+an integral part of a life once familiar. It had been a fatiguing,
+illuminating evening.</p>
+
+<p>A change of mood had come in the night. As she dressed she felt that, in
+some way, neither the fatigue nor the illumination had lasted on through
+the blankness of her sound young sleep. She felt restlessly fresh and
+vigorous, like a creature born anew with the morning light, and she did
+not feel herself as yet an integral part of the busy, absorbing life to
+which she had returned. The countless tendrils of Endbury feelings,
+standards, activities, brushed against her, but had not as yet laid hold
+on her. Europe had never been more real to her young-lady eyes than an
+immense World&#8217;s Exposition, rather overwhelmingly full of objects to be
+inspected, and now, here in Ohio, even that impression was dim and
+remote. But so, also, was Endbury; she had left the one, she had not yet
+arrived at the other. She felt herself for the moment in a neutral
+territory that was scarcely terrestrial.</p>
+
+<p>The silent house was a kingdom of delight to be rediscovered. She
+wandered about it, enchanted with the impressions which her solitude
+gave her leisure to savor and digest. She threw open a window, and was
+struck with the sweet freshness of the morning air, as though it were a
+joy new in the history of the world. She looked out on the lawn, with
+its dew-studded cobwebs, and felt her heart contract with pleasure. When
+she stepped out on the veranda, the look of the trees, the breath of the
+light wind across her cheek, the odor of dawn, all the indefinable
+personality of that early hour was like an enchantment about her.</p>
+
+<p>She ran out to her favorite arbor and plucked one of the heavy clusters
+of purple grapes, finding their cool acidity an exquisite surprise. She
+raised her face to the sky with wonder. She had never, it seemed to her,
+seen so pure yet colorful a sky. The horizon was still faintly flushed
+with the promise of a dawn already fulfilled in the fresh splendor of
+the sunbeams slanting across the fresh splendor of her own youth.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_35" id="pg_35">35</a></span>Never again did Lydia see the things she saw that morning. Never again
+did she have so unquestioningly the happy child&#8217;s conception of the
+whole world as magically centered in indulgent kindness about herself.
+As she looked up the clean, empty street stretching away under the shade
+of its thrifty young trees, it seemed made only to lead her forward into
+the life for which she had been so long preparing herself. Endbury, with
+its shops, its bustle of factories so unmeaning to her, the great bulk
+of its inexplicable &#8220;business,&#8221; existed only as the theater upon the
+stage of which she was to play the leading r&ocirc;le in the drama of
+life&mdash;she almost consciously thought of it in those terms&mdash;which, after
+some exciting and pleasurable incidents and a few thrilling situations,
+was to have a happy ending, none the less actual to her mind because
+lost in so vague a golden shimmer. Her father&#8217;s house, as familiar to
+her as her hand, took on a new and rich dignity as the background for
+the unfolding of that wonderful creature, herself; that unknown, future,
+grown-up self, which was to be all that everyone who loved her expected,
+and more than she in her inexperience knew how to expect.</p>
+
+<p>She was in a little heaven, made up of the most ingenuous aspirations,
+the innocence of which seemed to her a guarantee of their certain
+fulfillment. Her fervent desire to be good was equal to and of the same
+quality as her desire to be a successful d&eacute;butante. It would make her
+family so happy to have her both. These somewhat widely diverging aims
+were all a part of the current of her life, the impulse to be what those
+she loved would like to have her. It was not that she was willing to
+give up her own individuality to gratify the impulse, but rather that
+she did not for an instant conceive of the necessity for such a
+sacrifice. It was part of her immense happiness that she had always
+loved to be what it pleased everyone to have her, and that, apparently,
+people wished to have her only what she wished to be. She was like a
+child guarded by her elders from any knowledge of forbidden food. All
+the goodies of which she had ever heard were hers for the asking. In
+such a <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_36" id="pg_36">36</a></span>carefully arranged nursery it would be perversity to doubt the
+everlasting quality of the coincidence between one&#8217;s desires and one&#8217;s
+obedience. It was no more remarkable a coincidence than that both dew
+and sunshine were good for the grass over which she now ran lightly to
+another corner of the grounds about her parents&#8217; house. Here, just
+outside the circle of deep shade cast by an exuberantly leaved maple,
+she stood for a moment, her hands full of grapes, her eyes wandering
+about the green, well-kept double acres called diversely in the family
+&#8220;the grounds&#8221; (Mrs. Emery&#8217;s name) and &#8220;the yard.&#8221; Lydia always clung to
+her father&#8217;s name; she had very little inborn feeling for the finer
+shades of her mother&#8217;s vocabulary. Mrs. Emery rejoiced in the careless
+unconsciousness of the importance of such details, but she felt that
+Lydia should be cautioned against going too far. It was one of the
+girl&#8217;s odd ways to be fond of the few phrases left over in the Emery
+dictionary from their simpler earlier days. She always called the two
+servants &#8220;the girls&#8221; or &#8220;the help&#8221; instead of &#8220;the maids,&#8221; spoke of the
+&#8220;washwoman&#8221; instead of the &#8220;laundress,&#8221; and, as did her father, called
+the man who took care of the grounds, ran the furnace, and drove the
+Emery&#8217;s comfortable surrey, the &#8220;hired man&#8221; instead of the &#8220;gardener&#8221; or
+the &#8220;coachman,&#8221; or, in Mrs. Emery&#8217;s elegantly indefinite phrase, &#8220;our
+man.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia explained this whimsical reaction rather incoherently by saying
+that those nice old words were so much more fun than the others, and in
+spite of remonstrance she clung to her fancy with so lightly laughing an
+obstinacy that neither she nor anyone suspected it of being a surface
+indication of a significant tendency.</p>
+
+<p>She had occasionally other droll little ways of differing from the
+family, which were called indulgently &#8220;Lydia&#8217;s notions.&#8221; Her mother
+would certainly have thus named this flight out into the early morning.
+She would have found extravagant, and a little disconcerting, the
+completeness of Lydia&#8217;s content in so simple a thing as standing in the
+first sunshine of an early morning in September, and <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_37" id="pg_37">37</a></span>she would have
+been unquestionably disturbed, perhaps even a little alarmed, by the
+beatific expression of Lydia&#8217;s face as she gazed fixedly up into the
+sky, the tempered radiance of which was as yet not too bright for her
+clear gaze.</p>
+
+<p>All the restless joy of a few minutes before, which had driven her about
+from one delight to another, fused under the sun&#8217;s first warmth into a
+trance-like quiet. She stood still in the sunshine, a slow flush, like a
+reflection of dawn, rising to her cheeks, her lips parted, her eyes
+bright and vacant. An old person coming upon her at this moment would
+have been painfully moved by that tragic pity which age feels for the
+unreasoning joy of youth. She looked a child, open-eyed and breathless
+before the fleeting beauties of a bubble, most iridescent when about to
+disappear.</p>
+
+<p>It was a man by no means old who swung suddenly into sight around the
+corner, walking swiftly and noiselessly upon the close-cut grass, and
+the startled expression with which he found himself close to Lydia was
+by no means one of pity. He fell back a step, and in the instant before
+the girl was aware of his presence his gaze upon her was that of a man
+dazzled by an incredible vision.</p>
+
+<p>She brought her eyes down to him, and for the space of a breath the
+expression was hers as well. The sunlight glowing about them seemed the
+reflection of their faces. Then, for a moment longer, though mutual
+recognition flashed into their eyes, they did not speak, looking at each
+other long and seriously.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, with a nymph-like stir of all her slender body, Lydia roused
+herself. &#8220;Well, I can speak&mdash;can you?&#8221; she asked whimsically. &#8220;Don&#8217;t you
+remember me?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The man drew a long breath and took off his cap, showing close-cropped
+auburn hair gleaming, like his beard, red in the sun. &#8220;You took my
+breath away!&#8221; he exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What was the matter with me?&#8221; asked Lydia, prettily confident of a
+compliment to follow.</p>
+
+<p>It came in so much less direct a form than she had expected <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_38" id="pg_38">38</a></span>that before
+she recognized it she had returned it with na&iuml;ve impulsiveness.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I didn&#8217;t think you could be real,&#8221; said the man, &#8220;you looked so exactly
+the way this glorious morning made me feel.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, that&#8217;s just how you looked to me!&#8221; she cried, and flushed at the
+significance of her words.</p>
+
+<p>Before her confusion the other turned away his quiet gray eyes, and said
+lightly, &#8220;Well, that&#8217;s because we are the only people in all the world
+with sense enough to get up so early on a morning like this. I&#8217;ve been
+out tramping since dawn.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia explained herself also. &#8220;I just couldn&#8217;t sleep, it seemed so
+lovely. It&#8217;s my first morning home, you know.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Is it?&#8221; responded the man, with a vagueness he made no effort to
+conceal.</p>
+
+<p>It came over Lydia with a shock that he did not know she had been away.
+She felt hurt. It seemed ungracious for anyone in Endbury not to have
+missed her, not to share in the joyful excitement of her final return.
+&#8220;I&#8217;ve been in Europe for a year,&#8221; she told him, with a dignity that was
+a reproach.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, yes, yes; I remember now hearing Dr. Melton speak of it,&#8221; he
+answered, with no shade of apology for his forgetfulness. He looked at
+her speculatively, as if wondering what note to strike for the
+continuation of their talk. Apparently he decided on the note of
+lightness. &#8220;Well, you&#8217;re the most important person there is for me
+to-day,&#8221; he told her unexpectedly.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia arched her dark eyebrows inquiringly. She was always sensitively
+responsive, and now had forgotten, like a sweet-tempered child, her
+momentary pique.</p>
+
+<p>He smiled suddenly, moved, as people often were, to an apparently
+irrelevant tenderness for her. His voice softened into a playfulness
+like that of a person speaking to an imaginative little girl. &#8220;Why,
+didn&#8217;t you learn in school that all wise old nations have the belief
+that the first person you meet after you go out in the morning decides
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_39" id="pg_39">39</a></span>the fortune of the day for you? Now, what kind of a day are you going
+to give me?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia laughed. &#8220;Oh, you must tell first! You forget you&#8217;re the first
+person I&#8217;ve seen this morning. I&#8217;ll see what I can do for you after I&#8217;ve
+seen what you are going to do for me.&#8221; She added, with a solemnity only
+half jocular, &#8220;But it&#8217;s ever so much more important in my case, for
+you&#8217;re the first person I meet as I begin my life in Endbury. Think what
+a responsibility for you! You ought to give me something extra nice
+beside, for not remembering me any better and never noticing that I had
+been away.&#8221; She broke into a sunny mitigation of her own severity, &#8220;But
+you can have some grapes, even if you are not very flattering.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The man took the cluster she held out to him, but only eyed them as he
+answered, &#8220;Oh, I remember you very well. You&#8217;re a niece of Mrs.
+Sandworth&#8217;s, or of her husband&#8217;s, and Mrs. Sandworth is Dr. Melton&#8217;s
+sister. You&#8217;re the big-eyed little girl who used to sit in a corner and
+sew while the doctor and I talked, and now,&#8221; he brought it out rotundly,
+&#8220;you&#8217;ve been to Europe for a year, and you&#8217;re grown-up.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia hung her head laughingly at his good-natured caricature. &#8220;Well,
+but I <i>have</i>, really and truly,&#8221; she protested, &#8220;all of that. And I just
+guess you haven&#8217;t had two such interesting things happen to you in such
+a short time as&mdash;&#8221; She stopped short, struck dumb by a sudden
+recollection. &#8220;Oh, I beg your pardon,&#8221; she murmured; &#8220;I forgot about
+what they said you had&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her expression was so altered, she looked at him with so curious a
+change from familiarity to strangeness, that his steady eyes wavered a
+moment in startled surprise. &#8220;What&#8217;s that?&#8221; he asked sharply; &#8220;I didn&#8217;t
+catch what you said.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, nothing&mdash;nothing&mdash;only they were telling me yesterday about how
+you&mdash;why, it just came over me that you <i>had</i> had a great deal happen to
+you this last year, as well as I.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_40" id="pg_40">40</a></span>He looked a relieved and slightly annoyed comprehension of the case.
+&#8220;Oh, that!&#8221; he summed it up for her with a grave brevity. &#8220;I have lost
+my father, and I have started life on a new footing during the past
+year.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia fumbled for words that would be applicable and not wounding. &#8220;I
+was so sorry to hear that&mdash;about your father, I mean. And about the
+other&mdash;it must be very&mdash;<i>interesting</i>, I&#8217;m sure.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His silence and enigmatic gaze upon her moved her to a fluttered fear
+lest she seem ungracious. She added, with a droll little air of letting
+him see that she was not of the enemy, &#8220;I do hope some day you&#8217;ll tell
+me all about it; it sounds so romantic.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The young man gave an inarticulate sound, and stroked his ruddy beard to
+conceal a smile. &#8220;It&#8217;s not,&#8221; he said briefly. He put his cap back on his
+head and looked down the street as though his thoughts were already
+away.</p>
+
+<p>His lack of responsiveness came, Lydia thought, from her having wounded
+his feelings. &#8220;Oh, I&#8217;m sure you must have some good reason for doing
+such a <i>queer</i> thing,&#8221; she said hurriedly. Then, appalled by the words
+on which the haste of her good intentions had carried her, &#8220;Oh, I mean
+that it&#8217;s very brave, heroic, of you to have the courage&mdash;perhaps
+something very sad happened to you, and to forget it you&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The other broke into the laugh he had been trying to suppress. His gray
+eyes lighted up brilliantly with his mirth. &#8220;You&#8217;re very kind,&#8221; he said,
+&#8220;you&#8217;re very kind, but rather imaginative. It doesn&#8217;t take any courage;
+quite the reverse. And it&#8217;s not a picturesque way of doing a retreat
+from active life. I hope and pray that it&#8217;s to be a way of getting into
+it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The girl&#8217;s face of bewilderment at his tone moved him to add, a ripple
+of amusement still in his voice, &#8220;Ah, don&#8217;t try to make me out. I don&#8217;t
+belong in your world, you know; I&#8217;m real.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia continued to look at him blankly. The obscurity of his remarks was
+in no way lessened by this last addition, <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_41" id="pg_41">41</a></span>but he vouchsafed no further
+explanation. &#8220;You&#8217;ve given me my breakfast,&#8221; he said, holding up the
+grapes; &#8220;I mustn&#8217;t keep you any longer from yours.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He waited for a moment for Lydia to respond to this speech, struck by a
+sudden realization that it might sound like an unceremonious hint to her
+to retire, rather than the dismissal of himself he intended. When she
+made no answer, he turned away with a somewhat awkward gesture of
+leave-taking. Lydia looked after him in silence.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_42" id="pg_42">42</a></span>
+<a name="THE_DAY_BEGINS_1411" id="THE_DAY_BEGINS_1411"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER V</p>
+<p class="l c">THE DAY BEGINS</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>She watched him until he was out of sight, and although the vigorous,
+rhythmic swing of his broad shoulders was like another manifestation of
+the morning&#8217;s joyous, buoyant spirit, it did not move her to a
+responsive alertness. After he had turned a corner, she lowered her eyes
+to the cluster of grapes she still held; a moment after, without any
+change in expression, she relaxed her grasp on them and let them fall,
+turning away and walking soberly back to the house. The dew had already
+disappeared from the grass. There was now no hint of the dawn&#8217;s
+coolness; the day had begun.</p>
+
+<p>Her father met her at the door with an exclamation about her early
+hours. He would really see something of her, he said, if she kept up
+this sort of thing. It would be too good to be true if he could
+breakfast with her every morning. Whereupon he rang for the coffee and
+unfolded his newspaper. Lydia did not notice his absorption in the news
+of the day, partly because she was trained from childhood up to consider
+reading the newspaper as the main occupation of a man at home, but more
+because on this occasion she was herself preoccupied. When Mrs. Mortimer
+came in on an errand and was prevailed upon to sit down for some
+breakfast with her father and sister, there was a little more
+conversation.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery had not come down stairs. A slight indisposition which she
+had felt for several days seemed to have been augmented by the
+excitement of Lydia&#8217;s return. She had slept badly, and was quite
+uncomfortable, she told her husband, and thought she would stay in bed
+and send for Dr. Melton. It seemed foolish, she apologized, but <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_43" id="pg_43">43</a></span>now
+that Lydia was back, she wanted to be on the safe side and lose no time.
+After these facts had been communicated to her older daughter, Mrs.
+Mortimer asked, &#8220;How in the world does it happen that you&#8217;re up at this
+hour?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia answered that she had been inspecting the yard, which she had not
+seen the day before. She described quite elaborately her tour of
+investigation, without any mention of her encounter with her early
+caller, and only after a pause added carelessly, &#8220;Who do you suppose
+came along but that Mr. Rankin you were all talking about yesterday?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Judge Emery laid down his paper. &#8220;What under the sun was he prowling
+about for at that hour?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He wasn&#8217;t prowling,&#8221; said Lydia. &#8220;He was fairly tearing along past the
+house so fast that he &#8217;most ran over me before I saw him. I&#8217;d forgotten
+he is so handsome.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Handsome!&#8221; Mrs. Mortimer cried out at the idea. &#8220;With that beard!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I like beards, sometimes,&#8221; said Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It makes a man look like a barbarian. I&#8217;d as soon wear a nose-ring as
+have Ralph wear a beard.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, everybody who is anybody in Europe wears a beard, or a mustache,
+anyhow,&#8221; opposed Lydia. &#8220;I got to liking to see them.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, of course if they do it in Europe, we provincial stay-at-homes
+haven&#8217;t a word to say.&#8221; Mrs. Mortimer had invented a peculiar tone which
+she reserved for speeches like this, the neutrality of which gave a
+sharper edge to the words.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now, Marietta, that&#8217;s mean!&#8221; Lydia defended herself very energetically;
+&#8220;you know I didn&#8217;t say it for that.&#8221; There was a moment&#8217;s pause, of
+which Marietta did not avail herself for a retraction, and then Lydia
+went on pensively, &#8220;Well, he may be handsome or not, but he&#8217;s certainly
+not very polite.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He didn&#8217;t say anything to you, did he?&#8221; asked her <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_44" id="pg_44">44</a></span>father in surprise,
+laying down the paper he had raised again during the passage between the
+sisters.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia hastily proffered an explanation. &#8220;He couldn&#8217;t help speaking; he
+almost ran into me, you know. I was standing under the maple tree in the
+corner as he came around from Garfield Avenue. He just took off his cap
+and said good morning, and what a fine day it was, and a few words like
+that.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t see anything so impolite in that. Perhaps he wasn&#8217;t European in
+his manners,&#8221; suggested Mrs. Mortimer dryly. She had evidently arisen in
+the grasp of a mood, not uncommon with her, when an apparently causeless
+irritability drove her to say things for which she afterward suffered an
+honest but fruitless remorse. Dr. Melton had recently evolved for this
+characteristic of hers one of the explanations which the Emerys found so
+enigmatic. &#8220;Marietta,&#8221; he said critically, &#8220;is in a perpetual state of
+nervous irritation from eye-strain. She has naturally excellent and
+normal eyesight, but she has always been trained to wear other people&#8217;s
+spectacles. It puts her out of focus all the time, and that makes her
+snappy.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She had answered explicitly to this vague diagnosis, &#8220;Nonsense! The
+thing that makes me snappy is the lack of an oriental rug in our
+parlor.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;re looking at that through Mrs. Gilbert&#8217;s magnifying glasses,&#8221;
+suggested the doctor.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m not looking at it at all, and that&#8217;s the trouble,&#8221; Marietta had
+assured him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Absence makes the heart&mdash;&#8221; the doctor had the last word.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia tried this morning at breakfast to obtain the same advantage over
+her sister. She flushed with a mixture of emotions and tried in a
+resentful silence to think of some definable cause for her accusation
+against Rankin&#8217;s manners. Finally, &#8220;Well, I gave him a bunch of grapes,
+and he never so much as said thank you. He just took them and marched
+off.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_45" id="pg_45">45</a></span>&#8220;Perhaps he doesn&#8217;t like grapes,&#8221; suggested Mrs. Mortimer, grim to the
+last.</p>
+
+<p>After breakfast, when Mrs. Mortimer and her father disappeared, Lydia
+found herself with a long morning before her. The doctor telephoned that
+he could not come before noon. Judge Emery, after his proprietary
+good-by kiss, advised her to be quiet and rest. She looked a little
+pale, he thought, and he was afraid that, after her cool ocean voyage,
+she would find the heat of an Ohio September rather trying. Indeed, as
+Lydia idled for a moment over the dismantled breakfast table she was by
+no means moved to activity. Dark shades were everywhere drawn down and
+the house was like a dimly-lighted cave, but through this attempt at
+protection the sun was making itself felt in a slowly rising,
+breathless, moist heat.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia climbed the stairs to her mother&#8217;s room. She was looking forward
+to a long visit, but finding the invalid asleep she turned away from the
+door rather blankly. She was as yet too much a stranger in her own home
+to have at hand the universal trivial half-dozen unfinished tasks that
+save idle women from the perils of uninterrupted thought. The ribbons
+were all run in her pretty underwear; she owed no notes to anyone,
+because she had been at home too short a time to have received any
+letters; her hair had been washed the last day on the steamer, and her
+new dresses needed no mending. Her trunks had been unpacked the day
+before by her mother&#8217;s competent hands, which had also arranged every
+detail of her tasteful room until to touch it would disturb the effect.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia began to experience that uneasy, unsettling discomfort that comes
+to modern people in ordinary modern life if some unusual circumstance
+throws them temporarily on their own resources. She lingered aimlessly
+for some time at the head of the stairs, and then, leaning heavily
+against the rail, began to descend slowly, one step at a time, to
+prolong the transit. Where the stairs turned she noticed a stain on the
+crisp sleeve of her white dress. It came, <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_46" id="pg_46">46</a></span>evidently, from one of the
+grapes she had eaten that morning under the maple tree. A current of
+cool air blew past her. It was the first relief from the stagnation of
+the sultry day and, sitting down on the landing, she lost herself in
+prolonged meditation.</p>
+
+<p>In the obscurity of the darkened hall she was scarcely visible save as a
+spot of light showing dimly through the balustrade, and she sat so still
+that the maid, stepping about below, did not see her. On her part, Lydia
+noticed but absently this slight stir of domestic activity, nor, after a
+time, louder but muffled noises from the dining-room. Even when the door
+to the dining-room opened and quick, light steps came to the foot of the
+stairs, she did not heed them. A confused, hushed sound of someone busy
+about various small operations did not rouse her, and it was not until
+the fall of a large object, clattering noisily on the floor, that she
+became conscious that someone beside the maid was in the hall. She
+leaned forward, and saw that the object which had fallen was the
+newel-post of the stairs. It had evidently been detached from its
+fastenings by the workman who, with his back to her, now knelt over a
+tool-box, fumbling among the tools with resultant little metallic clicks.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia ran down the stairs, finger on lip. &#8220;Hush! Don&#8217;t make any more
+noise than you can help. Mother&#8217;s still asleep.&#8221; At his gaze of
+stupefaction she broke into her charming light laugh, &#8220;Why, I always
+seem to strike you speechless. What&#8217;s the matter with me now?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The other emerged from his surprise with a ready, smiling acceptance of
+her tone, &#8220;I was wondering if I oughtn&#8217;t to apologize to you&mdash;if I
+should ever see you again&mdash;for being so curt this morning. And then you
+spring up out of the ground before me. Well, so I will apologize. I do.
+I&#8217;m very sorry.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They adopted, as in the first part of their earlier talk, the
+half-humorous familiarity of people surprised in an unconventional
+situation, but, in spite of this, the young man&#8217;s apology was not
+without the accent of serious sincerity.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia responded heartily in kind. &#8220;Oh, it was I who <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_47" id="pg_47">47</a></span>was horrid.
+And&mdash;wasn&#8217;t it funny&mdash;I was just thinking&mdash;wondering if I should ever
+have a chance to try to make you see that I didn&#8217;t mean to be so&mdash;&#8221; she
+hesitated, and fell back on iteration again&mdash;&#8220;so horrid.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The fashionable Endbury boarding-school had not provided its graduate
+with any embarrassment of riches in the way of expression for various
+shades of meaning. He answered, lowering his voice as she did, &#8220;Oh, you
+were all right, but I was most objectionable with my impertinent laugh.
+I&#8217;m sorry.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She challenged his sincerity, &#8220;Are you really, really?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, really, really,&#8221; he assured her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And you want to do something nice to make it up to me?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Anything,&#8221; he promised, smiling at her as at a child.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;ve promised! You&#8217;ve promised!&#8221; She indulged herself in a noiseless
+hand-clasp. &#8220;Well, then, the forfeit is to tell me all about it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;All about what?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Goodness gracious! Don&#8217;t you remember? That&#8217;s what we were both horrid
+about. I asked you to tell me about it, and you&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He remembered, evidently with an amusement not entirely free from
+annoyance. &#8220;Oh, I&#8217;m safe. I&#8217;ll never see you to tell you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She sat down on the bottom step and drew her white skirts about her.
+&#8220;What&#8217;s the matter with right now?&#8221; she asked, smiling.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve got to earn my living right now,&#8221; he objected, beginning with a
+swift deftness to bore a tiny hole.</p>
+
+<p>She was diverted for an instant. &#8220;What are you doing to our nice old
+newel-post?&#8221; she asked. &#8220;I thought they said you were going to set up
+the new sideboard.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, that&#8217;s no job at all; it&#8217;s done. Didn&#8217;t you hear me pushing and
+banging things around? Now I&#8217;ve the job before me of fitting the very
+latest thing in newel-posts in place of your old one.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The girl returned to her first attack. &#8220;Well, anyhow, <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_48" id="pg_48">48</a></span>if it&#8217;s a long
+job, it&#8217;s all the better. Go ahead and talk at the same time. You won&#8217;t
+feel you&#8217;re wasting time.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Their low-toned talk and the glimmering light of the hall made them seem
+oddly intimate. Lydia expressed this feeling while Rankin stood looking
+doubtfully at her, a little daunted by the pretty relentlessness of her
+insistence. &#8220;You see, you&#8217;re not nearly so much a stranger to me as I am
+to you. Remember how I sewed and listened. I&#8217;m a grown-up little
+pitcher, and my ears are still large. I was remembering just now, before
+you came in, how strangely you used to talk to Dr. Melton, and I thought
+it wasn&#8217;t so surprising, after all, your doing &#8217;most anything queer.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin laughed as he bent over his tools. &#8220;Little pitchers have tongues,
+too, I see.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Either Lydia felt herself more familiar with her interlocutor than
+before, or one result of her meditation had been the loss of her
+excessive fear of wounding his feelings. She spoke now quite
+confidently, &#8220;But, honestly, what in the world did you do it for?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It?&#8221; He made her define herself.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, you know! Give up everything&mdash;lose your chance in society, and poke
+off into the woods to be a common&mdash;&#8221; In spite of her new boldness she
+faltered here.</p>
+
+<p>He supplied the word, with a flash of mirth. &#8220;Don&#8217;t be afraid to say it
+right out&mdash;even such an awful term as workman, or carpenter. I can bear
+it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I knew it!&#8221; Lydia exclaimed. &#8220;As I was thinking it over on the stairs
+just now, I said to myself that probably you weren&#8217;t a bit apologetic
+about it; probably you had some queer reason for being proud of yourself
+for doing it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He cast a startled look at her. &#8220;You&#8217;re the only person in Endbury with
+imagination enough to guess that.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But why? why? why?&#8221; she urged him, her flexible eyebrows raised in the
+eagerness of her inquiry. &#8220;I feel just as though I were going to hear
+the answer to a perfectly maddeningly unanswerable riddle.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He had another turn in his attempt at evasion. &#8220;It wouldn&#8217;t be polite to
+tell you the answer, for what I&#8217;m <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_49" id="pg_49">49</a></span>trying to do is to get out of being
+what everybody you know thinks is the only way to be&mdash;except Dr. Melton,
+of course.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s the matter with &#8216;all the people I know,&#8217;&#8221; she challenged him
+explicitly.</p>
+
+<p>He laughed and shook his head. &#8220;Oh, I&#8217;ve nothing new to say about them.
+Everybody has said it, from Ecclesiastes to Tolstoi.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They never say anything about just ordinary folks in Endbury that I
+know.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin looked at her whimsically. &#8220;Oh, <i>don&#8217;t</i> they?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Do</i> they?&#8221; Lydia wondered at the possibility. Presently she brought
+out, as a patently absurd supposition, &#8220;You don&#8217;t mean to say that
+Endbury people are wicked?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do you think that none but wicked people are written about in serious
+books? No; Lord, no! I don&#8217;t think they are wicked&mdash;just mistaken.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What about? Now we&#8217;re getting warm. I&#8217;ll guess in a minute.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He looked a little sadly down at her bright, eager face. &#8220;I&#8217;m afraid you
+would never guess. It&#8217;s all gone into your blood. You breathe it in and
+out as you live, every minute.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What? what? what? You can&#8217;t say it, you see, when it comes right down
+to the matter.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, yes, I can; I can ask you if it wouldn&#8217;t be a tragedy if they
+should all be killing themselves to get what they really don&#8217;t want and
+don&#8217;t need, and starving for things they could easily have by just
+putting out their hands.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia&#8217;s blankness was immense.</p>
+
+<p>He said, with ironic triumph: &#8220;You see, when I do say it you can&#8217;t make
+anything out of it.&#8221; After this he turned for a time all his attention
+to his work.</p>
+
+<p>He had evidently reached a critical point in his undertaking. Lydia
+watched in silence the deft manipulations of his strong, brown fingers,
+wondering at the eager, almost sparkling, alertness with which he went
+from one step to another of the process that seemed unaccountably
+complicated to her. After he had finally lifted the heavy piece <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_50" id="pg_50">50</a></span>of wood
+into place, handling its great weight with assurance, and had submitted
+the joint to the closest inspection, he gave a low whistle of
+satisfaction with himself, and stepped back to get the general effect.
+As he did so he happened to glance at the girl, drooping rather
+listlessly on the stair. He paused instantly, with an exclamation of
+dismay.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No; I&#8217;m not going to cry,&#8221; Lydia told him with a very small smile, &#8220;but
+it would serve you right if I did.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The workman wiped his forehead and surveyed her in perplexity. &#8220;What,
+can I do for you?&#8221; he asked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If you&#8217;re really serious in asking that,&#8221; said Lydia with dignity,
+&#8220;I&#8217;ll tell you. You can take for granted that I am not an idiot or a
+child and talk to me sensibly. Dr. Melton does. And you can tell me what
+you started out to&mdash;the real reason why you are a common carpenter
+instead of in the insurance business. Of course if you think it is none
+of my concern, that&#8217;s another matter. But you said you would.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin looked a little abashed by the grave seriousness of this appeal,
+although he smiled at its form. &#8220;You speak as though I had my reason
+tied up in a package about me, ready to hand, out.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia said nothing, but did not drop her earnest eyes.</p>
+
+<p>He thrust his hands into his pockets and returned this intent gaze, a
+new expression on his face. Then picking up a tool, and drawing a long
+breath, he said, with the accent of a man who takes an unexpected
+resolution: &#8220;Well, I <i>will</i> tell you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He returned to his work, tightening various small screws under the
+railing, speaking, as he did so, in a reasonable, quiet tone, with none
+of the touch of badinage which had thus far underlain his manner to the
+girl. &#8220;It&#8217;s very simple&mdash;nothing romantic or sudden about it all. I did
+not like the insurance business as I saw it from the inside, and the
+more I saw of it, the less I liked it. I couldn&#8217;t see how I could earn
+my living at it and arrive at the age of forty with an honest scruple
+left. Not that the insurance business is, probably, any worse than any
+other&mdash;only I knew about <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_51" id="pg_51">51</a></span>it from the inside. So far as I could guess
+the businesses my friends were in weren&#8217;t very different. At least, I
+didn&#8217;t think I could improve things by changing to them. Also, it was
+going to grow more and more absorbing&mdash;or, at least, that was the way it
+affected the older men I knew&mdash;so that at forty I shouldn&#8217;t have any
+other interests than getting ahead of other people in the line of
+insurance.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now, what was I to do about it? I can&#8217;t make speeches, and nobody but
+crack-brained soreheads like me would listen to them if I did. I&#8217;m not a
+great philosopher, with a cure for things. But I didn&#8217;t want to fight so
+hard to get unnecessary things for myself that I kept other people from
+having the necessaries, and didn&#8217;t give myself time to enjoy things that
+are best worth enjoying. What could I do? I bothered the life out of Dr.
+Melton and myself for ages before it occurred to me that the thing to
+do, if I didn&#8217;t like the life I was in, was to get out of it and do
+something harmless, at least, if I didn&#8217;t have gumption enough to think
+of something worth while, that might make things better.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I like the cabinet-maker&#8217;s trade, and I couldn&#8217;t see that practicing it
+would interfere with my growing all the honest scruples that were in me.
+Oh, I know that it&#8217;s the easiest thing in the world for a carpenter to
+turn out bad work for the sake of making a little more money every day;
+I haven&#8217;t any illusions about the sanctity of the hand-crafts. But,
+anyhow, I saw that as a maverick cabinet-maker I could be pretty much my
+own master. If I had strength of mind enough I could be honest without
+endless friction with partners, employers, banks, creditors, employ&eacute;s,
+and all the rest of the spider web of business life. At any rate, it
+looked as though there were a chance for me to lead the life I wanted,
+and I had an idea that if I started myself in square and straight, maybe
+after a little while I could see clearer about how to help other people
+to occupations that would let them live a little as well as make money,
+and let them grow a few scruples into the bargain.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You see, there&#8217;s nothing mysterious about it&mdash;nor interesting. Just
+ordinary. I&#8217;m living the way I do because <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_52" id="pg_52">52</a></span>I&#8217;m not smart enough to think
+of a better way. But one advantage of it is that I have a good deal of
+time to think about things. Maybe I&#8217;ll think of a way to help, later.
+And, anyway, just to look at me is proof that you don&#8217;t <i>have</i> to get
+ground up in the hopper like everybody else or shut the door of the
+industrial squirrel-cage on yourself in order not to starve. Perhaps
+that&#8217;ll give some cleverer person the courage to start out on his own
+tangent.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia drew a long breath at the conclusion of this statement. &#8220;Well&mdash;&#8221;
+she said, inconclusively; &#8220;<i>well!</i>&#8221; After a pause she advanced, &#8220;My
+sister&#8217;s husband is in the insurance business.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You see,&#8221; said the workman, drilling a hole with great rapidity, &#8220;you
+see I ought not to talk to you. I can&#8217;t without being impolite.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia seemed in no haste to assure him that he had not been. She pulled
+absently a loose lock of hair&mdash;a little-girl trick that came back to her
+in moments of abstraction&mdash;and looked down at her feet. When she looked
+up, it was to say with a bewildered air, &#8220;But a man has to earn his
+living.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin made a gesture of impatience, and stopped working to answer this
+remark. &#8220;A living isn&#8217;t hard to earn. Any healthy man can do that. It&#8217;s
+earning food for his vanity, or his wife&#8217;s, that kills the average man.
+It&#8217;s coddling his moral cowardice that takes the heart out of him. Don&#8217;t
+you remember what Emerson says&mdash;Melton&#8217;s always quoting it&mdash;&#8216;Most of our
+expense is for conformity to other men&#8217;s ideas? It&#8217;s for cake that the
+average man runs in debt.&#8217; He must have everything that anyone else has,
+whether he wants it or not. A house ever so much bigger and finer than
+he needs, with ever so many more things in it than belong there. He must
+keep his wife idle and card-playing because other men&#8217;s wives are. He
+must have his children do what everyone else&#8217;s children do, whether it&#8217;s
+bad for their characters or not. Ah! the children! That&#8217;s the worst of
+it all! To bring them up so that these futile complications will be
+essentials of life to them! To <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_53" id="pg_53">53</a></span>teach them that health and peace of mind
+are not too high a price for a woman to pay for what is called social
+distinction, and that a man must&mdash;if he can get it in no other way&mdash;pay
+his self-respect and the life of his individuality for what is called
+success&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia broke in with a sophisticated amusement at his heat. &#8220;Why, you&#8217;re
+talking about Newport, or the Four Hundred of New York&mdash;if there is any
+such thing! The rest of America&mdash;why, any European would say we&#8217;re as
+primitive as Aztecs! They do say so! Endbury&#8217;s not complicated. Good
+gracious! A little, plain, middle-western town, where everybody that is
+anybody knows everybody else!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No; it&#8217;s not complicated compared with European standards, but it&#8217;s
+more so than it was. Why, in Heaven&#8217;s name, should it strain every nerve
+to make itself as complicated as possible as fast as it can? We&#8217;re free
+yet&mdash;we&#8217;re not Europeans so shaken down into a social rut that only a
+red revolution can get us out of it. Why can&#8217;t we decide on a
+rational&mdash;&#8221; He broke off to say, gloomily: &#8220;The devil of it is that we
+don&#8217;t decide anything. We just slide along thinking of something else.
+If people would only give, just once in their lives, the same amount of
+serious reflection to what they want to get out of life that they give
+to the question of what they want to get out of a two-weeks&#8217; vacation,
+there aren&#8217;t many folks&mdash;yes, even here in Endbury that seems so
+harmless to you because it&#8217;s so familiar&mdash;who wouldn&#8217;t be horrified at
+the aimless procession of their busy days and the trivial false
+standards they subscribe to with their blood and sweat.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My goodness!&#8221; broke in Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>The exclamation came from her extreme surprise, not only at the
+extraordinary doctrine enunciated, but at the experience, new to her, of
+hearing convictions spoken of in ordinary conversation. The workman took
+it, however, for a mocking comment on his sudden fluency. He gave a
+whimsical grimace, and said, as he began picking up his tools, &#8220;Ah, I
+shouldn&#8217;t have given in to you. When I <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_54" id="pg_54">54</a></span>get started I never can stop.&#8221;
+His expression altered darkly. &#8220;But I hate all that sort of thing so! I
+<i>hate</i> it!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia shrank back from him, startled, but aroused. &#8220;Well, I hate hate!&#8221;
+she cried with energy. &#8220;It&#8217;s horrid to hate anything at all, but most of
+all what&#8217;s wrong and doesn&#8217;t know it&#8217;s wrong. That needs help, not
+hate.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He had slung his tool-box on his shoulder before she began speaking, and
+now stood, ready for departure, looking at her intently. Even in the dim
+light of the hall she was aware of a wonderful change in his face. She
+was startled and thrilled by the expression of his eyes in the moment of
+silence that followed.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, &#8220;You&#8217;ve given me something to remember,&#8221; he said, his voice
+vibrating, and turned away.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_55" id="pg_55">55</a></span>
+<a name="LYDIAS_GODFATHER_1896" id="LYDIAS_GODFATHER_1896"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER VI</p>
+<p class="l c">LYDIA&#8217;S GODFATHER</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Lydia stood where he left her, listening to the sound of his footsteps
+die down the walk outside. She was still standing there when, some time
+later, the door to the dining-room behind her opened and a tiny elderly
+man trotted across the hall to the stairs. Lydia recognized him before
+he saw that she was there, so that he exclaimed in surprise and pleasure
+as she came running toward him, her face quivering like a child&#8217;s about
+to weep.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, dear Godfather!&#8221; she cried, as she flung herself on him; &#8220;I&#8217;m so
+glad you&#8217;ve come! I never wanted so much to see you!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He was startled to feel that she was trembling and that her cheek
+against his forehead, for she was taller than he, was burning hot. &#8220;Good
+gracious, my dear!&#8221; he said, in the shrill voice his size indicated,
+&#8220;anybody&#8217;d think you were the patient I came to see.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His voice, though high, was very sweet&mdash;a quality that made it always
+sound odd, almost foreign, in the midst of the neutral, colorless
+middle-western tones about him. He spoke with a Southern accent,
+dropping his <i>r&#8217;s</i>, clipping some vowels and broadening others, but
+there was no Southern drawl in the clicking, telegraphic speed of his
+speech. He now looked up at his tall godchild and said without a smile:
+&#8220;If you&#8217;ll kindly come down here where I can get at you, I&#8217;ll shake you
+for being so foolish. You needn&#8217;t be alarmed about your mother.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia recoiled from the little man as impulsively as she had rushed upon
+him. &#8220;Why, how <i>awful</i>!&#8221; she accused herself, horrified. &#8220;I&#8217;d
+<i>forgotten</i> Mother!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_56" id="pg_56">56</a></span>Dr. Melton took off his hat and laid it on the hall shelf. &#8220;I will
+climb up on a chair to shake you,&#8221; he continued cheerfully, &#8220;if already,
+in less than twenty-four hours, you&#8217;re indulging in nerves, as these
+broken and meaningless ejaculations seem to indicate.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He picked up a palm-leaf fan, lost himself in a big hall-chair, and
+began to fan himself vigorously. He looked very hot and breathless, but
+he flowed steadily on.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I can&#8217;t diagnose you yet, you know, without looking at you, the way I
+do your mother, so you&#8217;ll have to give me some notion of what&#8217;s the
+occasion of these alternate seizures and releases of a defenseless
+Lilliputian godfather.&#8221; He made a confident gesture toward the upper
+part of the house with his fan. &#8220;About your mother&mdash;I know without going
+upstairs that she is floored with one or another manifestation of the
+great disease of social-ambitionitis. But calm yourself. It&#8217;s not so bad
+as it seems when you&#8217;ve got the right doctor. I&#8217;ve practiced for thirty
+years among Endbury ladies. They can&#8217;t spring anything new on me. I&#8217;ve
+taken your mother through doily fever induced by the change from
+table-cloths to bare tops, through porti&egrave;re inflammation, through
+afternoon tea distemper, through <i>art-nouveau</i> prostration and mission
+furniture palsy, not to speak of a horrible attack of acute insanity
+over the necessity for having her maids wear caps. I think you can trust
+me, whatever dodge the old malady is working on her.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He had run on volubly, to give Lydia time to recover herself, his keen
+blue eyes fixing her, and now, as she wavered into something like a
+smile at his chatter, he shot a question at her with a complete change
+of manner: &#8220;But what&#8217;s the matter with <i>you</i>?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia started as though he had suddenly clapped her on the shoulder.
+&#8220;I&mdash;why, I&mdash;just&mdash;&#8221; she hesitated, &#8220;why, I don&#8217;t know what <i>is</i> the
+matter with me.&#8221; She brought it out with the most honest surprise in the
+world.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton&#8217;s approval of this answer was immense. &#8220;Why, Lydia, I&#8217;m proud
+of you! You&#8217;re one in a thousand. You&#8217;ll break the hearts of everyone
+who knows you <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_57" id="pg_57">57</a></span>by turning out a sensible woman if you don&#8217;t look out. I
+don&#8217;t believe there&#8217;s another girl in Endbury who would have had the
+nerve to tell the truth and not fake up a headache, or a broken heart,
+or <i>Weltschmerz</i>, or some such trifle, for a reason.&#8221; He pulled himself
+up to his feet. &#8220;Of course, you don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s the matter with you,
+my dear. <i>I</i> do. <i>I</i> know everything, and can&#8217;t do a thing. That&#8217;s me!
+Physically, you&#8217;re upset by Endbury heat after an ocean voyage, and
+mentally it&#8217;s the reaction caused by your subsidence into private life
+after being the central figure of the returned traveler. Last evening,
+now, with that mob of friends and the family pawing at you and trying to
+cram-jam you back into the Endbury box and shut the lid down&mdash;<i>that</i> was
+enough to kill anybody with a nerve in her body. What&#8217;s the history of
+the morning? I hope you slept late.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia shook her head. &#8220;No; I was up ever so early.&mdash;Marietta came over
+to borrow the frames for drying curtains, and stayed to breakfast.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Something about her accent struck oddly on the trained sensitiveness of
+the physician&#8217;s ear. Her tone rang empty, as with something kept back.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Marietta&#8217;s been snapping at you,&#8221; he diagnosed rapidly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, a little,&#8221; Lydia admitted.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor laid the palm-leaf fan aside and took Lydia&#8217;s slim fingers in
+both his firm, sinewy hands. &#8220;My dear, I&#8217;m going to do as I have always
+done with you, and talk with you as though you were a grown-up person
+and could take your share in understanding and bearing family problems.
+Your sister Marietta is not a very happy woman. She has too many of your
+father&#8217;s brains for the life she&#8217;s been shunted into. She might be
+damming up a big river with a finely constructed concrete dam, and what
+she is giving all her strength to is trying to hold back a muddy little
+trickle with her bare hands. The achievement of her life is to give on a
+two-thousand-a-year income the appearance of having five thousand like
+your father. She does it; she&#8217;s a remarkably forceful woman, but it
+frets her. She <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_58" id="pg_58">58</a></span>ought to be in better business, and she knows it, though
+she won&#8217;t admit it. So, don&#8217;t you mind if she&#8217;s sharp-tongued once in a
+while. It&#8217;s when she feels the muddy water oozing through her fingers.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He fancied that Lydia&#8217;s eyes on his were a little blank, perhaps absent,
+and broke off with a short laugh. He was quite hardened to the fact that
+people never understood his fanciful metaphors, but Lydia, as a child,
+had used to have a curious intuitive divination of his meaning. After
+his laugh he sighed and turned the talk.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, and has Flora Burgess been after you to get your impression of
+Endbury as compared with Europe? Your mother said she wanted an
+interview with you for next Sunday&#8217;s <i>Society Notes</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia smiled. The subject was an old joke with them. &#8220;No; she hasn&#8217;t
+appeared yet. I haven&#8217;t seen her&mdash;not since my birthday a year ago, the
+time she described the supper-table as a &#8216;glittering, scintillating mass
+of cut-glass and silver, and yet without what could really be called
+ostentation.&#8217; Isn&#8217;t she delicious! How is the little old thing, anyway?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Still trotting industriously about Endbury back yards sowing the
+dragon&#8217;s teeth of her idiotic ideas and standards.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I remember, you don&#8217;t like her,&#8221; said Lydia. &#8220;She always seems just
+funny to me&mdash;funny and pathetic. She&#8217;s so dowdy, and reverential to
+folks with money, and enjoys other people&#8217;s good times so terrifically.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She&#8217;s like some political bosses&mdash;admirable in private life, but a
+menace to the community just the same.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia laughed involuntarily, in spite of her preoccupation. &#8220;Flora
+Burgess a menace to the community!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor turned away and began to mount the stairs. &#8220;Me and
+Cassandra!&#8221; he called over his shoulder in his high, sweet treble. &#8220;Just
+you wait and see!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He disappeared down the upper hall, finding his way about the darkened
+house with a familiarity that betokened long practice.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_59" id="pg_59">59</a></span>Lydia sat down on the bottom step to wait for his return. The clock in
+the dining-room struck twelve. It came over her with a clap that but
+half a day had passed since she had run out into the dawn. For an
+instant she had the na&iuml;ve, melodramatic instinct of youth to deck out
+its little events in the guise of crises. She began to tell herself with
+gusto that she had passed some important turning-point in her life;
+when, as was not infrequent with her, she lost the thread of her thought
+in a sudden mental confusion which, like a curtain of fog, shut her off
+from definite reflection. Complicated things that moved rapidly always
+tired Lydia. She had an enormous capacity for quiet and tranquillity.
+To-day she felt that more complicated things were moving rapidly inside
+her head than ever before&mdash;as though she had tried to keep track of the
+revolutions of a wheel and had lost her count and could now only stare
+stupidly at the spokes, whirling till they blended into one blur. What
+was this Endbury life she had come back to? What in the world had that
+man been talking about? What a strange person he was! How very bright
+his eyes were when he looked at you&mdash;as though he were, somehow, seeing
+you more than most people did. What did the doctor mean by all that
+about Marietta? It had never occurred to her that the life of anyone
+about her might have been different from what it was. What else was
+there for people to do but what everybody else did? It was all very
+unsettling and, in this heat and loneliness, daunting.</p>
+
+<p>Through this vague discomfort there presently pierced a positive
+apprehension of definite unpleasantness. She would have to tell her
+mother that she had spent the whole morning talking to Mr. Rankin, and
+her mother would be cross, and would say such&mdash;Lydia remembered as in a
+distant dream her supreme content with life of only a few hours earlier.
+It seemed a very bewildering matter to her now.</p>
+
+<p>Ought she so certainly to tell her mother? She lingered for a moment
+over this possibility. Then, &#8220;Oh, of course!&#8221; she said aloud, flushing
+with an angry shame at her moment&#8217;s parley with deceit.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_60" id="pg_60">60</a></span>She heard her mother&#8217;s door open and turned to see the doctor running
+down the stairs, his wrinkled little face very grave. &#8220;You were right,
+Lydia, to be anxious about your mother, and I am an old fool! There is
+no fool like a fluent fool! I&#8217;m afraid she&#8217;s in for quite a siege.
+There&#8217;s no danger, thank Heaven! but I don&#8217;t believe she can be about
+for a month or more. I&#8217;m going to &#8217;phone for a trained nurse. Just see
+that nobody disturbs her, will you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He darted away, leaving Lydia leaning against the newel-post, gasping.
+The clock in the dining-room chimed the quarter-hour. She cried out to
+herself, as she climbed the stairs heavily, that she could not stand it
+to have things happen to her so fast. If all Endbury days were going to
+be like this one&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>She was for a moment brought to a standstill by a realization of depths
+within herself that she had not dreamed of. She realized, horrified,
+that on hearing the doctor&#8217;s verdict her first thought&mdash;gone before it
+was formulated, but still her first thought&mdash;had been one of relief that
+now she need not tell her mother.</p>
+
+<p>It had not occurred to her at all, nor did it now, that she either
+should or should not tell her father.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_61" id="pg_61">61</a></span>
+<a name="OUTSIDE_THE_LABYRINTH_2105" id="OUTSIDE_THE_LABYRINTH_2105"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER VII</p>
+<p class="l c">OUTSIDE THE LABYRINTH</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The Black Rock woods lay glowing under the cloudy autumn sky like a heap
+of live coals, the maples still quivering in scarlet, the chestnuts sunk
+into a clear yellow flame, the oaks, parched by the September heat,
+burnt out into rusty browns. Above them, the opalescent haze of October
+rose like a faint blue smoke, but within the woods the subdued light was
+richly colored, like that which passes through the stained glass of a
+great cathedral. The first of the fallen leaves lay in pools of gold in
+the hollows of the brown earth, where the light breezes had drifted
+them.</p>
+
+<p>It was, for the moment, singularly quiet, so, that, as Lydia walked
+quickly along the footpath, the pleasant rustle of her progress was the
+only sound she heard. Under a large chestnut she paused, gathering her
+amber-colored draperies about her and glancing uncertainly ahead to
+where the path forked. She looked a yellow leaf blown by some current of
+the air unfelt by the rest of the forest and caught against the rough
+bark of the tree. After hesitating for a moment, she drifted slowly
+along the right-hand path, looking about her with dreamy, dazzled eyes.
+From time to time, she stopped and lifted her face to the light and
+color above her, and once she stood a long time leaning against a tree,
+stirring with the tip of her parasol a heap of burning maple leaves.
+Under her drooping hat her face was almost vacant in a wide beatitude of
+harmony with the spirit of day. When she walked on again it was with a
+lighter and lighter step, as though the silence had come to have a
+lovely meaning for her which she feared to disturb.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_62" id="pg_62">62</a></span>The path turned sharply after passing through a thicket of ruddy
+brambles, and she found herself in a little clearing which the haze of
+the upper air descended to fill. The yellow chestnuts stood in a ring
+about the sunburnt grass. It was like a golden cup filled with some
+magic, impalpable draught.</p>
+
+<p>Through this she now saw a rough little house, brown as an oak leaf,
+with a wide veranda, under which, before a work-bench, sat Daniel
+Rankin. His tanned arms moved rhythmically backward and forward, but his
+ruddy head was high, and his eyes, roving about the leafy walls of the
+clearing, caught sight of Lydia as soon as she had turned the corner.
+She stopped short, with a startled gesture, on the edge of the woods,
+but remained standing quietly while Rankin sprang up from his seat and
+walked toward her smiling.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, Miss Emery,&#8221; he called welcomingly. &#8220;I didn&#8217;t recognize you for a
+minute. Every once in a while a young lady or a child loses her way from
+a picnic in the woods and stumbles into my settlement. I always have to
+hurry to show them there&#8217;s no danger of the wild man who lives in that
+house eating them up.&#8221; He came up to her now, and put out his hand with
+a frank pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I wasn&#8217;t afraid,&#8221; said Lydia; &#8220;I was startled for a minute, but I knew
+right away it must be your house. You described it to me, you know.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s very much flattered that you remember its portrait,&#8221; said the
+owner. &#8220;Won&#8217;t you honor it some more by sitting down in its veranda for
+a while? Or must I take you back to your picnic party at once?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia moved on, looking about her at the piles of boards, half hidden by
+vines, at the pool of clear water welling up through white sand in front
+of the house, and at the low rough building, partly covered with
+woodbine ruby-red against the weather-beaten wood.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My picnic party&#8217;s gone home,&#8221; she explained. &#8220;It was only Marietta and
+her little boy, anyhow. My sister thought it was going to rain, and took
+the quickest way <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_63" id="pg_63">63</a></span>home. I told Marietta I&#8217;d walk across and take the
+Garfield Avenue trolley line. I must have taken a wrong turn in the
+path.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They had reached the veranda now, and Lydia sank into the chair which
+Rankin offered her. She smiled her thanks silently, her face still
+steeped in quiet ecstasy, and for a long time she said nothing. The
+quick responsiveness that was at all times her most marked
+characteristic answered this rare mood of Nature with an intensity
+almost frightening in its visible joy.</p>
+
+<p>Rankin also said nothing, looking at her reflectively and stroking his
+close-clipped red beard. Above the faded brown of his work-shirt, his
+face glowed with color. In the silent interval of the girl&#8217;s slow
+emergence from her reverie, his gaze upon her was so steady that when
+Lydia finally glanced up at him he could not for a moment look away. The
+limpid unconsciousness of her eyes changed into a startled look of
+inquiry, as though he had spoken and she had not understood. Then a
+flush rose to her cheeks, she looked down and away in a momentary
+confusion, moved in her chair, and began to talk at random.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So this is where you live. It&#8217;s lovely. It looks like a fairy
+story&mdash;the little house in the wood, you know&mdash;nothing seems real
+to-day&mdash;the woods&mdash;it makes me want to cry, they are so beautiful. I&#8217;ve
+been wondering and wondering what outdoors was looking like. You know
+poor Mother is sick, and though she&#8217;s not so awfully sick, and of course
+we&#8217;ve a trained nurse for her, still I&#8217;ve had to be housekeeper and I
+haven&#8217;t had time to breathe. The second girl left right off because of
+the extra work she thought sickness would make, but it seems to me we&#8217;ve
+had a million new second girls in the three weeks. It&#8217;s been awful! I
+haven&#8217;t had time to get out at all or to see anybody.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She was quite herself now, and confided her troubles with a na&iuml;ve
+astonishment, as though they were new to humanity.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes; I&#8217;ve heard ladies say before that it&#8217;s quite <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_64" id="pg_64">64</a></span>awful,&#8221; agreed her
+companion gravely. He swung himself up to sit on his work-bench, his
+long legs stretched before him, just reaching the ground. &#8220;Envy me,&#8221; he
+went on, smiling; &#8220;I don&#8217;t have to have a second girl, or a first one,
+either.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What <i>do</i> you do?&#8221; asked Lydia, not waiting, however, for an answer,
+but continuing her relieved outpouring of her own perplexities. &#8220;It&#8217;s
+perfectly desperate at home. I haven&#8217;t had a minute&#8217;s peace. This
+afternoon I just got wild, and said I <i>would</i> get away from it for a
+minute, and just ran away. Father&#8217;s nice about it, but he does look
+something fierce when he comes home and finds another one left. He says
+that Mother doesn&#8217;t have to change more than two or three times a year!&#8221;
+She presented this as the superlative of stability.</p>
+
+<p>Rankin laughed again. Lydia felt more and more at her ease. He was
+evidently thinking of her pretty looks and ways rather than of what she
+was saying, and, like all of her sisterhood, this was treatment which
+she thoroughly understood. For the moment she forgot that he was the man
+who had startled and almost shocked her by his unabashed presentation,
+in a conversation with a young lady, of ideas and convictions. She
+leaned back in her chair and put on some of the gracefully imperious
+airs of regnant American young-ladyhood. &#8220;You must show me all about how
+you live, and everything,&#8221; she commanded prettily. &#8220;I&#8217;ve been so curious
+about it&mdash;and now here I am.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She was enchantingly unconscious of the possibility of her having seemed
+to seek him out. &#8220;What a perfectly beautiful piece of wood you have in
+that chair-back.&#8221; She laid her ungloved, rosy finger-tips on a dark
+piece of oak. &#8220;And so this is where you work?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I work everywhere,&#8221; he told her. &#8220;I do all that&#8217;s done, you see.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You must have to walk quite a ways to get your meals, don&#8217;t you?&#8221; Lydia
+turned her white neck to glance inside the house.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_65" id="pg_65">65</a></span>Rankin&#8217;s mouth twitched humorously. &#8220;You&#8217;ll never understand me,&#8221; he
+said lightly. &#8220;I get my meals myself, here.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia turned on him sharply. &#8220;You don&#8217;t <i>cook</i>!&#8221; she cried out.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And wash dishes, and make my bed, and sweep my floor, and, once in a
+great while, dust.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The romantic curiosity died out of the girl&#8217;s eyes into a shocked
+wonder. She glanced at his large brown hands, and seemed about to speak.
+Nothing came from her lips finally, however, beyond the pregnant &#8220;Well!&#8221;
+which seemed the only expression in her vocabulary for extreme surprise.
+Rankin threw back his head, showing a triangle of very white throat
+above his loose collar, and laughed aloud. The sound of his mirth was so
+infectious that Lydia laughed with him, though half uneasily.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s so funny,&#8221; he explained, &#8220;to see the picture of myself I gather
+from your shocked and candid eyes. I&#8217;m so used to my queer ideas
+nowadays that I forget that what seems perfectly natural to me still
+seems perfectly crazy to others.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, not <i>crazy</i>.&#8221; Lydia proffered this negation in so halting an
+accent that Rankin burst into another peal of laughter. &#8220;But it must be
+horrid for you to wash dishes and cook!&#8221; protested Lydia, feeling
+resentful that her inculcated horror of a man&#8217;s &#8220;lowering himself&#8221; to
+woman&#8217;s work should be taken with so little seriousness. She tried to
+rearrange a mental picture which the other was continually destroying.
+&#8220;But I suppose it&#8217;s very picturesque. You cook over an open fire, I
+imagine.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There was a humorous glint in his eye, &#8220;I cook over the best brand of
+oil-stove that money can buy,&#8221; he told her, relentlessly, watching her
+wince from the sordid image. &#8220;I have all the conveniences I can think
+of. All I&#8217;m trying to do is to get myself fed with the least expenditure
+of gray matter and time on my part, and as things are now arranged in
+this particular corner of the country I find I can do it best this way.
+It&#8217;s more work trying to <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_66" id="pg_66">66</a></span>persuade somebody who doesn&#8217;t want to wait on
+me than to jump up and do it myself. Also, having brains, I can
+certainly cook like a house afire.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>At this, Lydia was overcome by that openness to conviction from
+unexpected sources which gave her mother one of her great anxieties for
+her. &#8220;Well, honestly, do you know,&#8221; she said unexpectedly, &#8220;there is a
+lot in that. I&#8217;ve thought ever so many times in the last two weeks that
+if Father would let me wait on the table, for instance, I could get on
+ever so much easier.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And I&#8217;ll just warrant,&#8221; the man went on, &#8220;that I&#8217;ve had more time to
+myself lately than you have, for all I&#8217;ve my living to earn as well as
+the housework.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My goodness!&#8221; cried Lydia, repudiating the comparison. &#8220;That needn&#8217;t be
+saying much for you, for I haven&#8217;t had a minute&mdash;not even to sit with
+Mother as much as I ought.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What did you have to do that kept you from that?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, you&#8217;re no housekeeper, that&#8217;s evident, or you wouldn&#8217;t ask. A man
+<i>never</i> has any idea about the amount of work there is to do in a house.
+Why, set the table, and sweep the parlors, and change the flower vases,
+and dust, and pick up, and dust&mdash;I don&#8217;t know what makes things get so
+dusty. We&#8217;ve got an awfully big house, you know, and of course I want to
+keep everything as nice as if Mother were up. Everybody expects me to do
+that!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I had a great-aunt,&#8221; began Rankin with willful irrelevancy, &#8220;a very
+wonderful old woman who taught me most of what I value. She was
+considered cracked, so maybe that&#8217;s why I am a freak, and she was as
+wise as wise! And she had stories that fitted every occasion. One that
+she used to tell was about a farmer cousin of hers, who had a team of
+spirited young horses that he was breaking. Everybody warned him that if
+they ever ran away they&#8217;d be spoiled for life, and he got carefuller and
+carefuller of them. One day he and his father were haying beside a
+river, and the father, who couldn&#8217;t swim a stroke, fell <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_67" id="pg_67">67</a></span>in. The horses
+were frightened by the splash and began to prance, and the son ran to
+their heads, beside himself with fear. The old man came to the top and
+screamed, &#8216;Help! help!&#8217; and the son answered, fairly jumping up and down
+in his anguish of mind over his poor old father&#8217;s fate, &#8216;Oh, help,
+somebody! Somebody come and help! I can&#8217;t leave my horses!&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He stopped. Lydia slid helplessly into the na&iuml;ve question, &#8220;Well, did
+his father drown?&#8221; before the meaning of the little parable struck her.
+She began to laugh, with her gay, sweet inability to resent a joke made
+at her own expense. &#8220;Don&#8217;t you think you are a good hand at
+sermon-making!&#8221; she mocked him. &#8220;It&#8217;s all very well to preach, but just
+you tell me what you would have done in my place.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I should have left those big rooms, filled with things to dust, and let
+the dust lie on them&mdash;even such an awful thing as that!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia considered this with honest surprise. &#8220;Why, do you know, it never
+occurred to me I could do that!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin nodded. &#8220;It&#8217;s a common hallucination,&#8221; he explained. &#8220;I&#8217;ve had
+it. I have to struggle against it still.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Hallucination?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The notion that you belong to the things that belong to you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia looked at him sidewise out of her clear dark eyes. She was
+beginning to feel more at home in his odd repertory of ideas. &#8220;I
+wonder,&#8221; she mused, &#8220;if that&#8217;s why I always feel so much freer and
+happier in old clothes&mdash;that I don&#8217;t forget that they&#8217;re for me and I&#8217;m
+not for them. But really, you know, dressmakers and mothers and folks
+get you to thinking that you are for clothes&mdash;you&#8217;re made to show them
+off.&#8221; Rankin vouchsafed no opinion as to this problem of young-ladyhood.
+&#8220;Here&#8217;s your sister&#8217;s rain,&#8221; he said instead, pointing across the
+clearing, where against the dark tree-trunks fine, clear lines slanted
+down to the dry grass. <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_68" id="pg_68">68</a></span>Lydia rose in some agitation. &#8220;Why, I didn&#8217;t
+really think it would rain! I thought it was just Marietta&#8217;s&mdash;&#8221; She
+glanced down in dismay at her thin low shoes and the amber-colored silk
+of her ruffled skirt.</p>
+
+<p>Rankin stood up eagerly. &#8220;Ah, I&#8217;ve a chance to do you a service. Just
+step in, won&#8217;t you, a moment and let me skirmish around and see what a
+bachelor&#8217;s establishment can offer to a beautiful young lady who mustn&#8217;t
+get wet.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia moved into the wide, low room, saying deprecatingly, &#8220;It wouldn&#8217;t
+hurt <i>me</i> to get wet, you know. But this dress just came from Paris, and
+I haven&#8217;t had a chance to show it to anybody yet.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin laughed, hastening to draw up a chair before the hearth, where a
+few embers still glowed, their presence explained by the autumnal chill
+which now struck sharply across the room from the open door as the rain
+began to patter on the roof. The girl looked about her in silence,
+apparently with surprise.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, how do you like it?&#8221; asked the master of the house, throwing some
+dry twigs on the fire so that the flame, leaping up, lighted the
+corners, already dusky with the approach of evening. &#8220;It&#8217;s not very
+tidy, is it?&#8221; He began rummaging in a recess in the wall, tumbling out
+coats and shoes and hats in his haste. Finally, &#8220;There!&#8221; he cried in
+triumph, shaking out a rain-coat, &#8220;That will keep your pretty French
+finery dry.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He turned back to the girl, who was sitting very straight in her chair,
+peering about her with wide eyes and a strange expression on her face.
+&#8220;Why, what&#8217;s the matter?&#8221; he asked.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width:363px">
+<a name="illus-001" id="illus-001"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-069.jpg" alt="&#34;YOU SAY BEAUTIFUL THINGS!&#34; HE REPLIED QUIETLY. &#34;MY ROUGH QUARTERS ARE GLORIFIED FOR ME.&#34;" title="" width="363" /><br />
+<span class="caption">&#8220;YOU SAY BEAUTIFUL THINGS!&#8221; HE REPLIED QUIETLY. &#8220;MY ROUGH QUARTERS ARE GLORIFIED FOR ME.&#8221;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_69" id="pg_69">69</a></span>Lydia stood up, with a quick indrawn breath. &#8220;I don&#8217;t know,&#8221; she said,
+&#8220;what it is. It seems as though I&#8217;d been here before. It looks so
+familiar to me&mdash;so good&mdash;&#8221; She went closer to where, still holding out
+the rain-coat, he stood on the other side of a table strewn with papers.
+She leaned on this, fingering a pen and looking at him with a shy
+eagerness. She was struggling, as so often, with an indefinable feeling
+which she had no words to express. &#8220;Don&#8217;t you know,&#8221; she went on, &#8220;every
+once in a while you see somebody&mdash;an old man or woman, perhaps, on the
+street cars, in the street&mdash;and somehow the face goes home to you. It
+seems as though you&#8217;d been waiting to see that face again. Well, it&#8217;s
+just so with this room. It has a face. I like it very&mdash;&#8221; She broke off,
+helplessly inarticulate before the confusion of her thoughts, and looked
+timidly at the man. She was used to kindly, amused laughter when she
+tried, stumblingly, to phrase some of the quickly varying impressions
+which made her life so full of invisible incidents.</p>
+
+<p>But Rankin did not laugh, even kindly. His clear eyes were more than
+serious. They seemed to show him moved to an answering emotion. &#8220;You say
+beautiful things!&#8221; he replied quietly. &#8220;My rough quarters are glorified
+for me. I&#8217;ve been fond of them before&mdash;they&#8217;re the background to a good
+many inward struggles and a considerable amount of inward peace, but
+now&mdash;&#8221; He looked about him with new eyes, noting the dull gleam of gold
+with which the chestnut ceiling answered the searching flicker of the
+fire, the brighter sparkles which were struck out from the gilded
+lettering on the books which lined the walls, and the diamond-like
+flashes from the polished steel of the tools on the work-bench at the
+other end of the room. There was a pause in which the silence within the
+house brought out the different themes composing the rich harmony of the
+rain, the steady, resonant downpour on the roof, the sweet whispers of
+the dried grass under the torrent, the muted thuddings of the big drops
+on the beaten earth of the veranda floor, and the hurried liquid
+overflow of the eaves. It was still light enough to see the fine color
+of the leather that covered the armchairs, and the glossy black of a
+piano, heaped with a litter of music. Near the piano, leaning against
+the wall, a violoncello curved its brown crook-neck over the shapeless
+bag that sheltered it.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia pointed to it. &#8220;You&#8217;re musical!&#8221; she said, as if she had made an
+important discovery.</p>
+
+<p>Rankin roused himself, followed the direction of her <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_70" id="pg_70">70</a></span>gaze, and shook
+his head. &#8220;No; I can&#8217;t play a note,&#8221; he said cheerfully, laying the
+rain-coat down and going to look over the pile of overshoes in a box;
+&#8220;but I like it. My queer old great-aunt left me that &#8217;cello. It had
+belonged to her grandfather. I believe being so old makes it quite
+valuable. The piano belongs to an old German friend of mine who has seen
+better days and has now no place to keep it. Two or three times a week
+he comes out here with an old crony who plays the &#8217;cello, and they make
+music till they get to crying on each other&#8217;s necks.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do you cry, too?&#8221; Lydia smiled at the picture.</p>
+
+<p>Rankin came back to the fire with a pair of rubbers in his hand. &#8220;No;
+I&#8217;m an American. I only blow my nose hard,&#8221; he said gravely.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, it must be lovely!&#8221; She sighed this out ardently, sinking back in
+her chair. &#8220;I love music so it &#8217;most kills me, but I don&#8217;t get very much
+of it. I took piano lessons when I was little, but there were always so
+many other things to do I never got time to practice as much as I wanted
+to, and so I didn&#8217;t get very far. Anyhow, after I heard a good orchestra
+play, my little tinklings were worse than nothing. I wish I could hear
+more. But perhaps it&#8217;s just as well, Mother says. It always gets me so
+excited. I&#8217;m sure I should cry, along with the Germans.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They would like that,&#8221; observed her host, &#8220;above everything.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Father keeps talking about getting one of those player-pianos, but
+Mother says they are so new you can&#8217;t tell what they are going to be.
+She says they may get to be too common.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin looked at her hard. &#8220;Would you like one?&#8221; He asked this trivial
+question with a singular emphasis.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, I haven&#8217;t really thought,&#8221; said Lydia, considering the matter.</p>
+
+<p>The man looked oddly anxious for her answer.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, &#8220;Why, it depends on how much music you can make with them. If
+they are really good, I should want one, of course.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_71" id="pg_71">71</a></span>Rankin smiled, drew a long breath, and fell sober again as if at a
+sudden thought.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t see any oil-stove,&#8221; said the girl, skeptically, looking about
+her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I have a regular kitchen. It&#8217;s there,&#8221; he nodded back of him; &#8220;and
+two rooms beside for me and for Dr. Melton or my Germans, or some of my
+other freak friends when they stay too long and miss the last trolley in
+to town. Oh, I have lots of room.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It looks really rather nice, now I&#8217;m here and all,&#8221; Lydia vaguely
+approved; &#8220;though I don&#8217;t see why you couldn&#8217;t have gone on more like
+other folks and just changed some things&mdash;not been so <i>awfully</i> queer!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin was kneeling before her, holding out a pair of rubbers. At this
+remark he sat back on his heels, and began: &#8220;My great-aunt said that
+there was a man in her town who had such a terrible temper that his wife
+was in perfect terror of him, and finally actually died of fear.
+Everybody was paralyzed with astonishment when, two or three years
+after, one of the nicest girls in town married him. People told her she
+was crazy, but she just smiled and said she guessed she could get along
+with him all right. Everything went well for a week or two, and then one
+day he said the tea was cold and not fit for a pig to drink, and threw
+the cup on the floor. She threw hers down and broke it all to smash. He
+stared and glared, and threw his plate down. She set her lips and banged
+her own plate on the hearth. He threw his knife and fork through the
+window. She threw hers after, and added the water-pitcher for good
+measure.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia&#8217;s astonishment at this point was so heartfelt that the raconteur
+broke off, laughed, and ended hastily, &#8220;I spare you the rest of the
+dinner-service. The upshot of it was that every dish in the house was
+smashed and not a word spoken. Then the man called for his carriage (he
+was a rich man&mdash;that sort usually is), drove to the nearest china-store,
+bought a new set, better than the old, took it back, and lived in peace
+and harmony with his wife ever <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_72" id="pg_72">72</a></span>after. And here is the smallest pair of
+rubbers I can find, and I shall have to tie these on!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia watched the operation in silence. As he finished it and rose to
+his feet again, &#8220;What was that all about?&#8221; she inquired simply.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Compromise,&#8221; he answered. &#8220;There are occasions when it doesn&#8217;t do any
+good.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Does it do such a lot of good to go off in the woods by yourself and do
+your own cooking?&#8221; asked Lydia with something of her father&#8217;s shrewd
+home-thrusting accent. &#8220;What would happen if everybody did that?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin laughed. &#8220;Everybody&#8217;d have a good time, for one thing,&#8221; he
+answered, adding, more seriously, &#8220;The house of Rimmon may be all right
+for some people, but <i>my</i> head isn&#8217;t clear enough.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia looked frankly at a loss. She did not belong to the alert, quickly
+&#8220;bluffing&#8221; type of young lady. &#8220;Rimmon?&#8221; she asked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He&#8217;s in the Bible.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s a good reason why I&#8217;ve never heard of him,&#8221; she said ruefully.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;All I meant by him was that people who conform outwardly to a standard
+they don&#8217;t really believe in, are in danger of getting most awfully
+mixed up. And certainly they don&#8217;t stand any chance of convincing
+anybody else that there&#8217;s anything the matter with the standard. What&#8217;s
+needed isn&#8217;t to upset everything in a heap, but to call people&#8217;s
+attention to the fact that things could be a lot better than they are.
+And that&#8217;s hard to do. And who ever called more people&#8217;s attention to
+that fact than an impractical, unbalanced nobleman who took to cobbling
+shoes for the peace of his soul? There wasn&#8217;t a particle of sense to
+what Tolstoi <i>did</i>, but&mdash;&#8221; He stopped, hesitating in an uncertainty that
+Lydia understood with a touching humility.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, you needn&#8217;t explain who Tolstoi is. I&#8217;ve heard of him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, you mustn&#8217;t imagine I&#8217;m anything like Tolstoi!&#8221; cried the young
+man, laughing aloud at the idea, &#8220;for I <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_73" id="pg_73">73</a></span>don&#8217;t take a bit of stock in
+his deification of working with your muscles. That was an exaggeration
+he fell into in his old age because he&#8217;d been denied his fair share of
+manual work when he was young. If he&#8217;d had to split kindlings and tote
+ashes and hoe corn when he was a boy, I bet he wouldn&#8217;t have thought
+there was anything so sanctifying about callouses on your hands!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, dear! You&#8217;re awfully confusing to me,&#8221; complained Lydia. &#8220;You
+always seem to be making fun of something I thought just the minute
+before you believed in.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin looked intensely serious. &#8220;There isn&#8217;t an impression I&#8217;d be
+sorrier to give you,&#8221; he said earnestly. &#8220;Perhaps the trouble is that
+you don&#8217;t as yet know much about the life I&#8217;ve got out of.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve lived in Endbury all my life,&#8221; protested Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There may still be something for you to learn about the lives of its
+men,&#8221; suggested her companion.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If you think it&#8217;s so wrong, why don&#8217;t you reform it?&#8221; Lydia launched
+this challenge suddenly at him with the directness characteristic of her
+nation.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I have to begin with reforming myself,&#8221; he said, &#8220;and that&#8217;s job enough
+to last me a long while. I have to learn not to care about being
+considered a failure by all the men of my own age who are passing me by;
+and I don&#8217;t mind confessing to you that that is not always easy&mdash;though
+you mustn&#8217;t tell Dr. Melton I&#8217;m so weak. I have to train myself to see
+that they are not really getting <i>up</i> so fast, but only <i>scrambling</i>
+fast over slipping, sliding stones; and then I have to try to find some
+firm ground where I can make a path of my own, up which I can plod in my
+own way.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The tone of the young people, as they talked with their innocent
+grandiloquence of these high matters, might have been taken for that of
+a couple deep in some intimate discussion, so honestly serious and moved
+was it. There was a silence now, also like the pause in a profoundly
+personal talk, in which they looked long into each other&#8217;s eyes.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_74" id="pg_74">74</a></span>The clock struck five. Lydia sprang to her feet. &#8220;Oh, I must hurry on!
+I told Marietta to telephone home that I&#8217;d be there at six.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She still preserved her charming unconsciousness of the
+unconventionality of her situation. A European girl, brought up in the
+strictest ignorance of the world, would still have had intuitions to
+make her either painfully embarrassed or secretly delighted with this
+impromptu visit to a young bachelor; but Lydia, who had been allowed to
+read &#8220;everything&#8221; and the only compromise to whose youth had been fitful
+attempts of the family to remember &#8220;not to talk too much about things
+before Lydia,&#8221; was clad in that unearthly innocence which the advancing
+tide of sophistication has still left in some parts of the United
+States&mdash;that sweet, proud, pathetic conviction of the American girl that
+evil is not a vital force in any world that she knows. The young man
+before her smiled at her in as artless an unconsciousness as her own.
+They might have been a pair of children.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;ve plenty of time,&#8221; he assured her. &#8220;Though I live so far out of
+the world, the Garfield Avenue trolley line is only five minutes&#8217; walk
+away. Oh, I&#8217;m prosaic and commonplace, with my oil-stove and trolley
+cars. There&#8217;s nothing of the romantic reactionary about me, I&#8217;m afraid.&#8221;
+He wrapped the rain-coat about her and took an umbrella.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t you lock up your house when you go away?&#8221; asked Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The poor man laughs in the presence of thieves,&#8221; quoted Rankin.</p>
+
+<p>They stood on the veranda now, looking out into the blue twilight. The
+rain drummed noisily on the roof and the soft swish of its descent into
+the grass rose to a clear, sibilant note. The wind had died down
+completely, and the raindrops fell in long, straight lines like an
+opaque, glistening wall, which shut them off from the rest of the world.
+Back of them, the fire lighted up the empty chair that Lydia had left.
+She glanced in, and, moved by one <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_75" id="pg_75">75</a></span>of her sudden impulses, ran back for
+a moment to cast a rapid glance about the quiet room.</p>
+
+<p>When she returned to take Rankin&#8217;s arm as he held the open umbrella, she
+looked up at him with shining eyes. &#8220;I have made friends with it&mdash;your
+living-room,&#8221; she said.</p>
+
+<p>As they made their way along the footpath, she went on, &#8220;When I get into
+the trolley car I shall think I have dreamed it&mdash;the little house in the
+clearing&mdash;so peaceful, so&mdash;just look at it now. It looks like a little
+house in a child&#8217;s fairy-tale.&#8221; They paused on the edge of the clearing
+and looked back at the pleasant glow shimmering through the windows,
+then plunged into the strip of forest that separated the clearing from
+the open farming country and the main road to Endbury.</p>
+
+<p>Neither of them spoke during this walk. The rain pattered swiftly,
+varying its monotonous refrain as it struck the umbrella, the leaves,
+the little brook that ran beside them, or the stony path. Lydia clung to
+Rankin&#8217;s arm, peering about her into the dim caves of twilight with a
+happy, secure excitement. After her confinement to the house for the
+last fortnight, merely to be out of doors was an intoxication for her,
+and ever since she had left her sister and begun her wanderings in the
+painted woods she had felt the heroine of an impalpable adventure. The
+silent flight through the dripping trees was a fitting end. Except for
+breaking in upon the music of the rain, she would have liked to sing
+aloud.</p>
+
+<p>She thought, flittingly, how Marietta would laugh at her manufacturing
+anything romantic out of the commonplace facts of the insignificant
+episode, but even as she turned away from her sister&#8217;s imagined mocking
+smile, she felt an odd certainty that to Rankin there was also a glamour
+about their doings. It was as though the occasional contact of their
+bodies as they moved along the narrow path were a wordless
+communication.</p>
+
+<p>He said nothing, but as they emerged upon the long treeless road,
+stretching away over the flat country to where <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_76" id="pg_76">76</a></span>the lights of Endbury
+glowed tremulously through the rain, he looked at his companion with a
+quick intensity, as though it were the first time he had really seen
+her.</p>
+
+<p>It was that man&#8217;s look which makes a woman&#8217;s heart beat faster, even if
+she is as inexperienced as Lydia. She was already tingling with an
+undefined emotion, and the shock of their meeting eyes made her face
+glow. It shone through the half-light as though a lamp had been lighted
+within.</p>
+
+<p>They stood silently waiting for the car which flashed a headlight toward
+them far down the track. As it drew near, bounding over the rails,
+humming like a great insect, and bringing visibly nearer and nearer the
+end of their time together, Lydia was aware that Rankin was in the grasp
+of an emotion that threatened to become articulate. The steady advance
+of the car was forcing him to a speech against which he struggled in
+vain. Lydia began to quiver. She felt an expectancy of something lovely,
+moving, new to her, which grew tenser and tenser, as though her nerves
+were the strings of an instrument being pulled into tune for a melody.
+Standing there in the cold, rainy twilight, she had a moment of the
+exultation she had thought was to be so common in her Endbury career.
+She felt warmed through with the consciousness of being lovely, admired,
+secure, supremely fortunate, just as she had thought she would feel; but
+she had not been able to imagine the extraordinary happiness that this,
+or some unrecognized element of the moment, gave to her.</p>
+
+<p>The car was almost upon them; the blinding glare of the headlight showed
+their faces with startling suddenness. She saw in Rankin&#8217;s eyes a
+tenderness that went to her heart. She leaned to him from the steps of
+the car to which he swung her&mdash;she leaned to him with a sweet,
+unconscious eagerness. In the instant before the car moved forward, as
+he stood gazing up at her, he spoke at last.</p>
+
+<p>The words hummed meaningless in Lydia&#8217;s ears, and it was not until some
+time after, in the garish white brilliance of the car, that she
+convinced herself that she had heard aright. Even then, though she still
+saw his face raised to <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_77" id="pg_77">77</a></span>hers, the raindrops glistening on his hair and
+beard, even though she still heard the fervor of his voice, she remained
+incredulous before the enigma of his totally unexpected words. He had
+said, with a solemn note of pity in his voice: &#8220;Ah, my poor child, I am
+so horribly, horribly sorry for you!&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_78" id="pg_78">78</a></span>
+<a name="THE_SHADOW_OF_THE_COMING_EVENT_2701" id="THE_SHADOW_OF_THE_COMING_EVENT_2701"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER VIII</p>
+<p class="l c">THE SHADOW OF THE COMING EVENT</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Judge Emery looked tired and old as he sat down heavily at his
+dinner-table opposite his pretty daughter. The discomfort and
+irregularity of the household for the last two weeks had worn on the
+nerves of a very busy man who needed all of his strength for his work.
+It seemed an evil fate of his, he reflected as he took his napkin out of
+its ring, that whenever he was particularly hard-pressed in his
+profession, domestic turmoil was sure to set in. He was now presiding
+over a suit between the city and the electric railway company, involving
+many intricate details of electrical engineering and accounting methods.
+Until that suit was settled, he felt that it was unreasonable for his
+family to expect him to give time or attention to anything else.</p>
+
+<p>In the absence of other vital interests in his life, he had come to
+focus all his faculties on his profession. On the adroitness of clever
+attorneys he expended the capacity for admiration which, as his life was
+arranged, found no other outlet; and, belonging to the generation before
+golf and bridge and tennis had brought games within the range of
+serious-minded adults, he had the same intent curiosity about the
+outcome of a legal contest that another man might have felt in the
+outcome of a Newport tournament. His wife had long ago learned, so she
+said, that any attempt to catch his mental eye while an interesting
+trial was in progress was as unavailing as to try to call a street gamin
+away from a knot-hole in a fence around a baseball field.</p>
+
+<p>She knew him and all his capabilities very well, his wife told herself,
+and so used was she to the crystallized form <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_79" id="pg_79">79</a></span>in which she had for so
+many years beheld him, that she dismissed, as typically chimerical
+&#8220;notions,&#8221; the speculations of her doctor&mdash;also a lifelong friend of
+her husband&#8217;s&mdash;as to what Judge Emery might have become if&mdash;the doctor
+spoke in his usual highly figurative and fantastic jargon&mdash;&#8220;he had not
+had to hurry so with that wheel in his cage.&#8221; &#8220;When I first knew Nat
+Emery,&#8221; he once said, &#8220;he was sitting up till all hours reading <i>Les
+Miserables</i>, and would knock you down if you didn&#8217;t bow your head at the
+mention of Thackeray. He might have liked music, too. An American isn&#8217;t
+inherently incapable of that, I suppose.&#8221; At which he had turned on
+sixteen-year-old Lydia with, &#8220;Which would you rather have, Lyddy; a
+husband with a taste for Beethoven or one that&#8217;d make you five thousand
+a year?&#8221; Lydia had shudderingly made the answer of sixteen years, that
+she never intended to have a husband of any kind whatever, and Mrs.
+Emery had rebuked the doctor later for &#8220;putting ideas in girls&#8217; heads.&#8221;
+It was an objection at which he had laughed long and loud.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery liked her doctor in spite of not understanding him; but she
+loved her husband because she knew him through and through. In his turn,
+Judge Emery bestowed on his wife an esteem the warmth of which was not
+tempered by his occasional amusement at her&mdash;an amusement which Mrs.
+Emery was far from suspecting. He did heartily and unreservedly admire
+her competence; though he never did justice to her single-handed battle
+against the forces of ignorance and irresponsibility in the kitchen
+until an illness of hers showed that the combat must be continuous,
+though his wisdom in selecting an ambitious wife had shielded him, as a
+rule, from the uproar of the engagement.</p>
+
+<p>This evening, as he looked across the white table-cloth at his daughter,
+he had a sudden qualm of doubt, not unusual in parents, as to the
+capacity of the younger generation to carry on the work begun by the
+older. Of course, he reassured himself, this had scarcely been a fair
+trial. The child had been plunged into the business the day after her
+return, with the added complication of her <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_80" id="pg_80">80</a></span>mother&#8217;s illness; but, even
+making all allowances, he had been dismayed by the thorough-going
+domestic anarchy that had ensued. He was partly aware that what alarmed
+him most was Lydia&#8217;s lack of zest in the battle, an unwillingness to
+recognize its inevitability and face it; a strange, apparently willful,
+blindness to the value of victory. Her father was disturbed by this
+failure to acquiesce in the normal, usual standard of values. He
+recalled with apprehension the revolutionary sayings and doings of his
+second son, which had been the more disconcerting because they flowed
+from the young reactionary in such a gay flood of high spirits. Harry
+had no more shared the reverent attitude of his family toward household
+&aelig;sthetics than toward social values. A house was a place to keep the
+weather from you, he had said laughingly. If you could have it pretty
+and well-ordered without too much bother, well and good; but might the
+Lord protect him from everlastingly making omelets to look at and not to
+eat.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia, to be sure, had ventured no irreverent jokes, and, so far as her
+father could see, had never conceived them; but a few days before she
+had suggested seriously, &#8220;Why can&#8217;t we shut up all of the house we don&#8217;t
+really use, and not have to take care of those big parlors and the
+library when you and I are always in the dining-room or upstairs with
+Mother, now she&#8217;s sick?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Judge Emery had thought of the grade of society which keeps its &#8220;best
+room&#8221; darkened and closed, of the struggles with which his wife had
+dragged the family up out of that grade, and was appalled at Lydia&#8217;s
+unconscious reversion to type. &#8220;Your mother would feel dreadfully to
+have you do that; you know she thinks it very bad form&mdash;very green.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia had not insisted; it ran counter to every instinct in Lydia to
+insist on anything. She had succumbed at the first of his shocked tones
+of surprise; but the suggestion had shown him a glimpse of workings in
+her mind which made him uneasy.</p>
+
+<p>However, to-night there were several cheering circumstances. <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_81" id="pg_81">81</a></span>The doctor
+had left word that, in all probability, Mrs. Emery would be quite
+herself in ten days&mdash;a shorter time than he had feared. Lydia was really
+charming in a rose-colored dress that matched the dewy flush in her
+cheeks; the roast looked cooked as he liked it, and he had heard some
+warm words that day about the brilliancy of young Paul Hollister&#8217;s
+prospects. He took a drink of ice-water, tucked his napkin in the top of
+his vest&mdash;a compromise allowed him by his wife at family dinners, and
+smiled at his daughter. &#8220;Your mother tells me that you&#8217;ve had a letter
+from Paul, saying that he&#8217;ll be back shortly,&#8221; he said with a jocosely
+significant emphasis. &#8220;I suppose we shall hardly be able to get a
+glimpse of you after he&#8217;s in town again.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>At this point, beginning to carve the roast, he had a sinking
+premonition that it was going to be very tough, and though he heroically
+resisted the ejaculation of embittered protest that rose to his lips,
+this magnanimity cost him so dear that he did not think of Lydia again
+till after he had served her automatically, dashing the mashed potato on
+her plate with the gesture of an angry mason slapping down a trowelful
+of mortar. It seemed to him at the moment that the past three weeks had
+been one succession of tough roasts. He took another drink of ice-water
+before he gloomily began on his first mouthful. It was worse than he
+feared, and he was in no mood to be either very imaginative or very
+indulgent to a girl&#8217;s whims when Lydia said, suddenly and stiffly, &#8220;I
+wish you wouldn&#8217;t speak so about Paul. I don&#8217;t know what makes everybody
+tease me so about him!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her father was chewing grimly. &#8220;I don&#8217;t know why they shouldn&#8217;t, I&#8217;m
+sure,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Young folks can&#8217;t expect everybody to keep their eyes
+shut and draw no conclusions. Of course I understand Paul&#8217;s not saying
+anything definite till now, on account of your being so young.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Something of Marietta&#8217;s unsparing presentation of facts was inherited
+from her father, though, under his wife&#8217;s <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_82" id="pg_82">82</a></span>tutelage, he usually spared
+Lydia when he thought of it. At this time he was speaking almost
+absently, his attention divided between the exceptions to his rulings
+taken by the corporation counsel and the quality of his dinner; both
+disturbing to his quiet. He finally gave up the attempt at mastication
+and swallowed the morsel bodily, with a visible gulp. As he felt the
+consequent dull lump of discomfort, he allowed himself his first
+articulate protest. &#8220;Good Heavens! What meat!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia had grown quite pale. She pushed back her plate and looked at her
+father with horrified eyes. &#8220;Father! What a thing to say!&#8221; she finally
+cried out. &#8220;You make me ashamed to look him&mdash;to look anybody in the
+face. Why, I never dreamed of such a thing! I never&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Judge Emery was very fond of his pretty daughter, and at this appeal
+from what he felt to be a very mild expression of justified discontent,
+he melted at once. &#8220;Now, never mind, Lydia, it won&#8217;t kill me. Only as
+soon as your mother gets about again, for the Lord&#8217;s sake have her take
+you to a butcher shop and learn to select meats.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia looked at him blankly. She had the feeling that her father was so
+remote from her that she could hardly see him. She opened her lips to
+speak, but at that moment the maid&mdash;the latest acquisition from the
+employment agency, a slatternly Irish girl&mdash;went through the dining-room
+on her way to answer the door-bell, and her father&#8217;s amused comment cut
+her short. &#8220;Lydia, you&#8217;ll have your guests thinking they&#8217;re at a lunch
+counter if you let that girl go on wearing that agglomeration of hair.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The maid reappeared, sidling into the room, half carrying, half dragging
+a narrow, tall green pasteboard box, higher than herself but still not
+long enough for its contents, which protruded in leafy confusion from
+one end. &#8220;It&#8217;s for you,&#8221; she said bluntly, depositing it beside Lydia
+and retreating into the kitchen.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia looked at it in wonder, turning to crimson confusion when her
+father said: &#8220;From Paul, I suppose. Very nice, I&#8217;m sure. Ring the bell
+for dessert before you <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_83" id="pg_83">83</a></span>open it. Of course you&#8217;re in a hurry to read the
+card.&#8221; He smiled with a tender amusement at the girl, who met his eyes
+with a look of fright. She opened the box, from which arose a column of
+strong, spicy odor, almost like something visible, and na&iuml;vely read the
+card aloud: &#8220;To the little girl grown up at last&mdash;to the young lady I&#8217;ve
+waited so long to see.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She laid the card down beside her plate and kept her eyes upon it,
+hanging her head in silence. Her father began to consume his dessert
+rapidly. The cream in it was delicious, and he ate with appreciation. To
+him, as to many middle-aged Americans, the two vital parts of a meal
+were the meat and the dessert. The added pleasures or comforting
+consolations of soup, salads, vegetables, entr&eacute;es, made dishes, were not
+for him. He ate them, but with a robust indifference. &#8220;Meat&#8217;s business,&#8221;
+he was wont to say, &#8220;and dessert&#8217;s fun. The rest of one&#8217;s victuals is
+society and art and literature and such&mdash;things to leave to the women.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He now stopped his consumption of his dessert and recalled himself with
+an effort to his daughter&#8217;s impalpable difficulties. She was murmuring,
+&#8220;But, Father&mdash;you must be mistaken&mdash; Why, nobody so much as hinted at
+such a&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s your mother&#8217;s doings. She&#8217;d be furious now if she knew I&#8217;d
+spoken right out. But you don&#8217;t want to be treated like a little girl
+all your life, do you?&#8221; He laughed at her speechless embarrassment with
+a kind obtuseness to the horror of youth at seeing its shy fastnesses of
+reserve laid open to indifferent feet. Divining, however, through his
+affection for her, that she was really more than pleasantly startled by
+his bluntness, he began to make everything smooth by saying: &#8220;There
+aren&#8217;t many girls in Endbury who don&#8217;t envy my little Lydia, I guess.
+Paul is considered&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>At this point Lydia rose hurriedly and actually ran away from the sound
+of his voice. She fled upstairs so rapidly that he heard the click of
+her heel on the top step before <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_84" id="pg_84">84</a></span>he could draw his breath. He laughed
+uneasily, finished his dessert in one or two huge mouthfuls, and
+followed her. He was recalled by the ringing of the telephone bell, and
+when he went upstairs again he was smiling broadly. With his lawyer&#8217;s
+caution, he waited a moment outside his wife&#8217;s room, where he heard
+Lydia&#8217;s voice, to see if her mother had hit upon some happy inspiration
+to quiet the girl&#8217;s exaggerated maidenly shyness. He had the tenderest
+indulgence to his daughter&#8217;s confusion, but he was not without a
+humorous, middle-aged realization of the extremely transitory nature of
+this phase of youth. He had lived long enough to see so many blushing
+girls transformed into matter-of-fact matrons that the inevitable end of
+the business was already present to his mind. He was vastly relieved
+that Lydia had a mother to understand her fancies, and upon his wife,
+whom he would not have trusted to undertake the smallest business
+transaction without his advice, he transferred, with a sigh of content,
+the entire responsibility of wisely counseling their daughter. &#8220;Thank
+the Lord, that&#8217;s not my job!&#8221; he had often said about some knotty point
+in the up-bringing of the children. Mrs. Emery had always answered that
+she could not be too thankful for a &#8220;husband who was not a meddler.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Judge now listened at the door to the conversation between the two
+women with a grin of satisfaction.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, my dear, what is there so terrible in having the handsomest and
+most promising young man in Endbury devoted to you? You don&#8217;t need to
+marry him for years and years if you don&#8217;t want to&mdash;or never, if you
+don&#8217;t like him enough.&#8221; She laughed a little, teasingly, &#8220;Perhaps it&#8217;s
+all just our nonsense, and he never has thought of you in that way.
+Maybe when he comes to see you he&#8217;ll tell you about a beautiful girl in
+Urbana or Cincinnati that he&#8217;s engaged to&mdash;and <i>then</i> what would your
+silly father say?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, if I could only think that,&#8221; breathed Lydia, as though she had been
+reprieved from a death sentence. &#8220;Of course! Father was just joking. But
+he startled me so!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He was probably thinking of his horrid law business, <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_85" id="pg_85">85</a></span>darling. When a
+big trial is on he wouldn&#8217;t know me from Eve. He says <i>anything</i> at such
+times.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Judge Emery laughed noiselessly, and quite without resentment at this
+wifely characterization.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia went on: &#8220;It wasn&#8217;t so much what he said, you know&mdash;as&mdash;oh, the
+way he took it for granted&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, don&#8217;t think about it any more, dear; just be your sweet natural
+self when Paul comes to see you the first time&mdash;and don&#8217;t let&#8217;s talk any
+more now. Mother gets tired so easily.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia&#8217;s remorseful outcry over having fatigued her mother seemed a good
+occasion for Judge Emery&#8217;s entrance into the room and for his
+announcement. He felt that she would make an effort to control any
+agitation she might feel, and indeed, beyond a startled gasp, she made
+no comment on his news. Mrs. Emery herself was more obviously stirred to
+emotion. &#8220;To-night? Why, I didn&#8217;t think he&#8217;d be in town for several days
+yet.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He only got in at five o&#8217;clock this afternoon, he said.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The two parents exchanged meaning glances over this chronology, and Mrs.
+Emery flushed and smiled. &#8220;Now, Lydia,&#8221; she said, &#8220;it&#8217;s a perfect shame
+I&#8217;m not well enough to be there when he comes. It would make it easier
+for you. But I wish you&#8217;d say honestly whether you&#8217;d rather have your
+father there or see Paul alone.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Judge Emery&#8217;s face took on an aggrieved look of alarm. &#8220;Good gracious,
+my dear! What good would I be? You know I can&#8217;t be tactful. Besides,
+I&#8217;ve got an appointment with Melton.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia rose from where she knelt by the bed. Her chin was quivering.
+&#8220;Why, you make me feel so&mdash;so queer! Both of you!&mdash;As though it were
+anything&mdash;to see Paul&mdash;when I&#8217;ve known him always.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her mother seized on the r&ocirc;le opened to them by this speech, and said
+quickly: &#8220;Why, of course! Aren&#8217;t we silly! I don&#8217;t know what possesses
+us. When he comes you just run along and see him, and say your father
+and I are sorry not to be there.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_86" id="pg_86">86</a></span>During the next half-hour she made every effort, heroically though
+obviously seconded by her husband, to keep the conversation in a light
+and casual vein, but when the door-bell rang, they all three heard it
+with a start. Mrs. Emery said, very carelessly, &#8220;There he is, dear. Run
+along and remember me to him.&#8221; But she pulled Lydia down to her,
+straightened a bow on her waist with a twitch, loosened a lock of the
+girl&#8217;s shining dark hair, and kissed her with a sudden yearning fervor.</p>
+
+<p>After they were alone, Judge Emery laughed aloud. &#8220;You&#8217;re just as bad as
+I am, Sarah. You don&#8217;t <i>say</i> anything, but&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I know,&#8221; his wife said; &#8220;I can&#8217;t help it!&#8221; She deliberated
+unresignedly over the situation for a moment, and then, &#8220;It seems as
+though I couldn&#8217;t have it so, to be sick just now, when I&#8217;m needed so
+much. This first month is so important! And Lydia&#8217;s getting such a
+different idea of things from what I meant, having this awful time with
+servants, and all. I have a sort of feeling once in a while that she&#8217;s
+getting notions!&#8221; She pronounced the word darkly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Notions?&#8221; Judge Emery asked. He had never learned to interpret his
+wife&#8217;s obscurities when the mantle of intuitions fell on her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, don&#8217;t ask me what kind! I don&#8217;t know. If I knew I could do
+something about it. But she speaks queerly once in a while, and the
+evening of the day she was out with Marietta in the Black Rock woods she
+was&mdash; Do you know, I think it&#8217;s not good for Lydia to be outdoors too
+much. It seems to go to her head so. She gets to looking like
+Harry&mdash;almost reckless, and like some little scampering wild animal.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Judge Emery rose and buttoned his coat about his spare figure. &#8220;Maybe
+she takes a back track, after some of my folks. You know there&#8217;s one
+line in my mother&#8217;s family that was always crazy about the woods. My
+grandfather on my mother&#8217;s side used to go off just as regular as the
+month of May came around, and&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_87" id="pg_87">87</a></span>Mrs. Emery interrupted him with the ruthless and justifiable impatience
+of people at the family history of their relations by marriage. &#8220;Oh, go
+along! And stop and speak to Paul on your way out. Just drop in as you
+pass the door. We don&#8217;t want to really chaperone her. Nobody does that
+yet&mdash;but&mdash;the Hollisters are so formal about their girls&mdash;well, you stop
+in, anyhow. It&#8217;s borne in on me that that&#8217;ll look better, after all.&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_88" id="pg_88">88</a></span>
+<a name="FATHER_AND_DAUGHTER_3029" id="FATHER_AND_DAUGHTER_3029"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER IX</p>
+<p class="l c">FATHER AND DAUGHTER</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the midst of his conference with Dr. Melton, an hour later, it came
+upon Judge Emery with a clap that he had forgotten this behest of his
+wife&#8217;s, plunged deep in legal speculations as he had been, the instant
+he turned from her door. He brought his hand down on the table.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s the matter?&#8221; asked the little doctor, peering up at him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, nothing important&mdash;women&#8217;s cobwebs. I&#8217;m afraid I&#8217;ll have to go,
+though. We can take this up again to-morrow, can&#8217;t we?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;At your service,&#8221; said the doctor; but he pulled with some exasperation
+at a big pile of pamphlets still to be examined.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s something about Lydia&#8217;s receiving a call from Paul Hollister, and
+her mother wanting me to stop in as I left the house and say
+good-evening&mdash;sort of represent the family&mdash;do the proper thing. Don&#8217;t
+it tickle you to see women who used to sleigh-ride from seven to eleven
+every evening in a little cutter just big enough for one and a half,
+begin to wonder if they hadn&#8217;t better chaperone their girls when they
+have callers in the next room?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He stirred up the pamphlets with a discontented look. &#8220;Confound it, I
+wish I could stay! Which one of those has the statistics about the
+accidents when the men aren&#8217;t allowed one day in seven?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;See here, Emery!&#8221; In spite of his evident wish to exhort, the doctor
+continued sitting as he spoke. He was so short that to rise could have
+given him no perceptible <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_89" id="pg_89">89</a></span>advantage over the tall lawyer. &#8220;See here; do
+you know that you have a most unusual girl for a daughter?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I have heard people say that I have a glimmering notion of her merits,&#8221;
+said the other with a humorous gravity.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I don&#8217;t mean pretty, and appealing, and with a good complexion, and
+all that&mdash;and I don&#8217;t mean you don&#8217;t spoil her most outrageously. I mean
+she&#8217;s got the oddest make-up for a modern American girl&mdash;she&#8217;s simple.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t see anything odd about her&mdash;or simple!&#8221; Her father resented the
+adjectives with some warmth.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton answered with his usual free-handed use of language: &#8220;Well,
+it&#8217;s because, like everybody else old and spoiled and stodgy and
+settled, you&#8217;ve no eyes in your head when it comes to something
+important, like young people. Because they&#8217;re all smooth and rosy you
+think they&#8217;re all alike.&#8221; He rushed on, delivering himself as always
+with restless vivacity of gesture, &#8220;I tell you youth is one of the most
+wastefully ignored forces in the world! Talk about our neglecting to get
+the good out of our water-power! The way we shut off the capacity of
+youth to see things as they are, before it gets purblind with our own
+cowardly unreason&mdash;why, it&#8217;s as if we tried to make water run uphill
+instead of turning our mill-wheels with its natural energy.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Judge Emery had listened to a word or two of this harangue and then had
+looked for and found his hat and coat, with which he had invested
+himself, and now stood ready for the street, one hand on the knob of the
+door. &#8220;Well, good-night to you,&#8221; he said pleasantly, as though the
+doctor were not speaking; &#8220;I&#8217;ll try to see you to-morrow.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton jumped to his feet, laughing, ran across the room and caught
+at the other&#8217;s arm. &#8220;Don&#8217;t blame me. Much preaching of true gospel to
+deaf ears has made me yell all the time. You know you don&#8217;t really hear
+me, any more than anyone else.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s no doubt about that, I don&#8217;t!&#8221; acquiesced the Judge frankly.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_90" id="pg_90">90</a></span>&#8220;I will run on, though I know it never does any good. How&#8217;d I begin
+this time? What started me off? What was I saying?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You were saying that Lydia was queer and half-witted,&#8221; said the Judge
+moderately.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I said she was simple&mdash;and by that I mean she&#8217;s so wise you&#8217;d better
+look out or she&#8217;ll find you out. She&#8217;s as dangerous as a bomb. She has a
+scent for essentials. She can tell &#8217;em from all our flummery. I&#8217;m afraid
+of her, and I&#8217;m afraid <i>for</i> her! Remember the fate of the father in the
+<i>Erl-King</i>! He thought, I dare say, that he was doing a fine thing for
+his child, to hurry it along to a nice, warm, dry, safe place!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Judge Emery broke in, impatient of this fantastic word-bandying. &#8220;Oh,
+come, Melton, I can&#8217;t stand here while you spin your paradoxes. I&#8217;ve got
+to get home before young Hollister leaves or my wife won&#8217;t like it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ll go with you, then,&#8221; cried the little doctor, clapping on his hat.
+&#8220;You sha&#8217;n&#8217;t escape me that way. I&#8217;m in full cry after the best figure
+of speech I&#8217;ve hit on in months.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Good Lord!&#8221; The lawyer looked down laughingly at his friend as the two
+set off, a stork beside a sparrow. &#8220;You and your figures!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It came over me with a bang the other day that in Lydia we have in our
+midst that society-destroying child in <i>The Kaiser&#8217;s New Clothes</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Eh?&#8221; said Lydia&#8217;s father blankly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You remember the last scene in that inimitable tale? Where the Kaiser
+walks abroad with all the people shouting and hurrahing for the new
+clothes, and not daring to trust their own eyes, and suddenly a little
+child&#8217;s voice is heard, &#8216;But the Kaiser has nothing on!&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t know what you&#8217;re talking about,&#8221; said the Judge with a patient
+indifference.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, you will know when you hear Lydia say that some day. She
+knows&mdash;she&#8217;ll know! Perhaps you&#8217;ve done well to send her to that idiotic
+finishing school.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_91" id="pg_91">91</a></span>&#8220;Don&#8217;t lay it to me!&#8221; cried the Judge, laughing; &#8220;<i>I</i> didn&#8217;t send
+her&mdash;or not send her. If you were married you&#8217;d know that fathers never
+have anything to say about what their daughters do.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;More fools they!&#8221; rejoined the doctor pointedly. &#8220;But in this case
+maybe it&#8217;s all right. She&#8217;s as ignorant as a Hottentot, of course, but
+perhaps any real education might have spoiled her innate capacity to&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, pshaw!&#8221; The Judge was vaguely uneasy. &#8220;You let Lydia alone. Talk
+your nonsense about something else. There&#8217;s nothing queer about Lydia,
+thank heavens! She&#8217;s just like all young ladies.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s a horrible thing to say about one&#8217;s own daughter!&#8221; cried the
+doctor, falling immediately into the lightly mournful, satirical vein
+that was the alternative to his usual racing talk. &#8220;There won&#8217;t be
+anything queer about her long, that&#8217;s fact. In real life the child is
+never really allowed to complete that sentence. A hundred hands are
+clapped over its mouth, and it&#8217;s hustled, and shaken, and frightened,
+and scolded, till it thinks there&#8217;s something the matter with its
+eyesight. And Lydia&#8217;s a sweet, gentle child, who&#8217;ll want to say whatever
+pleases people she loves&mdash;that&#8217;ll be another bandage over her eyes. And
+she&#8217;s not dowered with an innate fondness for shrieking out
+contradictions at the top of her voice, and unless you&#8217;ve a real passion
+for that you get silenced early in life.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The lawyer laughed with the good-natured contempt of a large, silent man
+for a small, voluble one. &#8220;That&#8217;s a tragedy you can&#8217;t know much about
+from experience, Melton. No cruel force ever silenced you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He paused at the walk leading to his house. A big street light glowed
+and sputtered over their heads. &#8220;Come in, won&#8217;t you, and see Lydia?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No; no cruel force has ever <i>silenced</i> me,&#8221; the doctor mused, putting
+his hands slowly into his pockets, &#8220;but it has bound me hand and foot. I
+talk, and I talk, but do you ever see me doing anything different from
+the worst fools of us all?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_92" id="pg_92">92</a></span>&#8220;Are you coming in?&#8221; The Judge spoke with his absent tolerance of his
+doctor&#8217;s fancies.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, thank you, as the farmer said to the steeple-climber. I&#8217;m going
+home to my lonely office to give thanks to Providence that I&#8217;m not
+responsible for a daughter.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Judge frowned. &#8220;Nonsense! Look at Marietta.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I do,&#8221; said the doctor.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well&mdash;?&#8221; The lawyer was challenging. In the long run the doctor rubbed
+him the wrong way.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I hope you make a better job of bandaging Lydia&#8217;s eyes than you did
+hers.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Judge had turned toward the house. At this he stopped and made an
+irritated gesture. &#8220;Melton, you are enough to give a logical man brain
+fever. You&#8217;re always proclaiming that parents have no real influence
+over their children&#8217;s lives&mdash;that it&#8217;s fate, or destiny, or
+temperament&mdash;and now&mdash;you blame me because Marietta&#8217;s discontented over
+her husband&#8217;s small income.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor looked up quickly, his face twitching. &#8220;You think that&#8217;s the
+cause of Marietta&#8217;s discontent? By Heaven, I wish Lydia could go into a
+convent.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly his many-wrinkled little face set like a mask of tragedy. &#8220;Oh,
+Nat, you know what Lydia&#8217;s always been to me&mdash;like my own&mdash;as
+precious&mdash;Oh, take care of her! take care of her! See, Lydia can&#8217;t
+fight. She can&#8217;t, even if she knew what was going on to fight against&mdash;&#8221;
+His voice broke. He looked up at his tall friend and shivered.</p>
+
+<p>Judge Emery clapped him on the shoulder with a rough friendliness. &#8220;No
+wonder you do miracles in curing women, Marius. You must know their
+insides. You talk like a mother in a fit of the nerves over a sick
+child. In the Lord&#8217;s name, what has Lydia to fight against? If there was
+ever a creature with a happy, successful life before her&mdash; Besides,
+don&#8217;t we all stand ready to do her fighting for her?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Though the night was cool, the doctor took off his hat and wiped his
+forehead. He looked up once as though <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_93" id="pg_93">93</a></span>he were about to speak, but in
+the end he only put his hat back on his head, nodded, and went his way,
+his quick, light, uneven tread waking a faint echo in the empty street.</p>
+
+<p>As the Judge let himself in at the front door, a murmur of voices from
+the brightly-lighted parlor struck gratefully on his ear. He was not too
+late. &#8220;How are you, Hollister?&#8221; he called as he pulled off his overcoat.
+&#8220;Glad to see you back. Let&#8217;s hear all about the Urbana experience.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Hollister&#8217;s dramatic interest in each engagement of his battle for
+success was infectious. Those who knew him, whether they liked him or
+not, waited for news of the results of his latest skirmish as they
+waited for the installments of an exciting serial story.</p>
+
+<p>As the older man entered, the tall, quick-moving young fellow came over
+to the door and shook his hand with energy. The Judge reflected that
+nobody but Hollister could so convey the effect that he was being made
+kindly welcome in his own house; but he did not dislike this vigor of
+personality. He sat down on the chair which his young guest indicated as
+a suitable one, and rubbed his chin, smiling at his daughter. &#8220;Dr.
+Melton sent his love to you, but he wouldn&#8217;t come in.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul looked brightly at Lydia. &#8220;I should hope not! My first evening with
+her! To share it with anybody! Except her father, of course!&#8221; He added
+the last as an afterthought, more with the air of putting the Judge at
+his ease than of excusing himself for an ungraceful slip of the tongue.</p>
+
+<p>The Judge laughed, restraining an impulse to call out, &#8220;You&#8217;re a wonder,
+young man!&#8221; and said instead, &#8220;Well, let&#8217;s hear the news.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia said nothing, but her aspect, always vividly expressive of her
+mood, struck her father as odd. As he glanced at her from time to time
+during the ready, spirited narrative of the young &#8220;captain in the army
+of electricity,&#8221; as he had once called himself, Lydia&#8217;s father felt a
+qualm of uneasiness. Her lips were very red and a little open, as though
+she were breathless from some exertion, and a <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_94" id="pg_94">94</a></span>deep flush stained her
+cheeks. She looked at Paul while he talked animatedly to her father, but
+when he addressed himself to her she looked down or away, meeting her
+father&#8217;s eyes with a curious effect of not seeing him at all. The Judge,
+moved by the oblique, harassing intimations he had been forced to hear
+from the doctor as to the possibility of his not understanding all that
+was in his daughter&#8217;s mind, was oppressed by that most nightmarish of
+emotions for a man of clear-cut intellectual interests&mdash;an apprehension,
+like an imperceptible, clinging cobweb, not to be brushed away. He
+wished heartily that the next year were over and Lydia &#8220;safely married.&#8221;
+Daughters were so much more of a responsibility than sons. They forced
+on one the reality of a world of intangible conditions which one could,
+somehow, comfortably ignore with sons. And yet, how about Harry? Perhaps
+if some one had not ignored with him&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I should have been back ten days ago,&#8221; Paul drew to the end of his
+story, &#8220;but I simply had to wait to oversee those tests myself. Since
+I&#8217;ve adopted that rule of personally checking the inspector&#8217;s work,
+we&#8217;ve been able to report forty per cent. fewer complaints of newly
+installed dynamos to the general office. And you see in this case, from
+the accident, what might have happened.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;By the Lord!&#8221; cried the lawyer, moved in spite of his preoccupations by
+the story of danger the other had been relating, &#8220;I should think it
+would turn your hair white every time a dynamo&#8217;s installed. How did you
+feel when the fly-wheel broke?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The fly-wheel isn&#8217;t on the dynamo, of course,&#8221; corrected Paul, &#8220;so I
+don&#8217;t feel responsible for it in a business way, and that&#8217;s everything.
+As for being frightened, why, it&#8217;s all over so quickly. You don&#8217;t have
+time to take in what&#8217;s happening. You&#8217;re there or you&#8217;re not. And if you
+are, the best thing is to get busy with repairs,&#8221; he added, with a
+simple, manly depreciation of his courage. &#8220;You mustn&#8217;t think it often
+happens, you know; it&#8217;s supposed never to.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_95" id="pg_95">95</a></span>He spoke of the personal side of the matter with a dry brevity which
+contrasted effectively with the unconscious eloquence with which he had
+previously brought before their eyes the tense excitement in the new
+power-house when the wheels first stir to life in incredibly rapid
+revolutions and the mysterious modern genii begins to rush through the
+wires. At no time did Lydia&#8217;s suitor show to better advantage than in
+speaking of his profession. The alertness of his face and the prompt
+decision of his speech suited the subject. His mouth fell into lines of
+grimly fixed purpose which expressed even more than his words when he
+spoke of the rivalry in endurance, patience and daring in the army of
+young electrical engineers, all set, as he was, on crowding one another
+out of the rapidly narrowing road to preferment and the few great golden
+prizes of the profession.</p>
+
+<p>This evening he was more than usually fervent. Judge Emery thought he
+detected in him traces of the same excitement that flamed from Lydia&#8217;s
+cheeks. &#8220;I tell you, Judge, I was wrong when I spoke of the &#8216;army&#8217; of
+electricity. In the army advancement comes only from somebody&#8217;s death,
+and with us it&#8217;s simply a question of who&#8217;s got the most to give. He
+gets the most back&mdash;and that&#8217;s all there is to it. The company&#8217;s bound
+to have the man it can get the most work out of. If you can do two
+ordinary men&#8217;s work, you get two men&#8217;s pay. See? There&#8217;s no limit to the
+application of that principle. Why, our field organizer on the Pacific
+Coast is only a little older than I, and, by Jove! the work they say
+he&#8217;ll turn off is something marvelous! You wouldn&#8217;t believe it. But you
+can train yourself to it, like everything else. To be able to
+concentrate&mdash;not to lose a detail&mdash;to put every ounce of your force into
+it&mdash;that&#8217;s the thing.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He brought one hand down inside the other, and sat for a moment in
+silence as tense with stirring possibilities to the others as to
+himself. The Judge felt moved to a most unusual sensation, as if he were
+a loosened bowstring beside this twanging, taut intensity. He felt
+slightly dismayed to <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_96" id="pg_96">96</a></span>have his unspoken principles carried to this <i>n</i>th
+power. He had given the best of himself, all his thoughts, illusions,
+hopes, endeavors, to his ideal of success, but his ambition had never
+been concentrated enough to serve as a lens through which the rays of
+his efforts might focus themselves into the single beam of devastating
+heat on which Paul counted so certainly to burn away the obstacles
+between himself and success. Various protesting comments rose to his
+lips, which he kept back, disconcerted to find how much they resembled
+certain remarks of Dr. Melton&#8217;s.</p>
+
+<p>The young man stirred, looked at Lydia, and smiled brilliantly. &#8220;I
+mustn&#8217;t keep this little sick-nurse up any later, I suppose,&#8221; he said;
+but for a moment he made no movement to go. He and Lydia exchanged a
+gaze as long and silent as if they had been alone. It occurred to the
+Judge that they both looked dazzled. When Paul rose he drew a long
+breath and shook his head half humorously at his host. &#8220;You and I will
+have to look to our guns, during the next season, to hold our own, won&#8217;t
+we? I&#8217;ve been making Lydia promise to reserve me three dances at every
+single ball this winter, and I think I&#8217;m heroic not to insist on
+more&mdash;but her first season&mdash;!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia said, with her pretty, light laugh, a little shaking now, &#8220;But
+suppose you&#8217;re out of town, setting up some new dynamo or something and
+your three dances come along?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul crossed the room to her, as if drawn irresistibly by the sound of
+her voice. He stood by her, looking down into her eyes (he was very
+tall), bending over her, smiling, pressing, confident, masterful.
+&#8220;You&#8217;re to sit out those three dances and think of me, and think of
+me&mdash;of course! I shall be thinking of you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia&#8217;s little tremulous air of archness dropped under this point-blank
+rejoinder. She flushed, and looked at her father. That unimaginative
+person started toward her as though she had called to him for help, and
+then, ashamed of his inexplicable impulse, turned away confusedly and
+disappeared into the hall.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_97" id="pg_97">97</a></span>Paul took this movement as a frank statement of the older man&#8217;s desire
+to be, for the moment, rid of him. &#8220;Oh, I <i>am</i> going, Judge,&#8221; he called
+after him, unabashed; &#8220;it is just a bit hard to tear myself away&mdash;I&#8217;ve
+been waiting so long for her to get back!&#8221; To Lydia he went on, &#8220;I&#8217;ve
+grown thin and pale waiting for you, while you&mdash;look at yourself, you
+heartless little witch!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He pointed across to a tall mirror in which they were reflected against
+the rich background of his roses. For a moment both the beautiful young
+creatures looked each into his own eyes, mysterious with youth&#8217;s total
+ignorance of its own meaning. Paul took Lydia&#8217;s hand in his, and pointed
+again to their reflections as they stood side by side. He tried to
+speak, but for once his ready tongue was silent. Judge Emery came back
+to the door, a weary patience on his white, tired face.</p>
+
+<p>The young man turned away with a sigh and a smile. &#8220;Yes, yes, Judge, I&#8217;m
+off. Good-night, Lydia. Don&#8217;t forget the theater Wednesday night.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He crossed the room with a rapid, even step, shook hands with the Judge,
+and got himself out of the room with an easy briskness which the older
+man, mindful of his own rustic youth, was half-inclined to envy.</p>
+
+<p>After he and Lydia were left alone he did not venture a word of comment,
+lest he hit on the wrong thing. He went silently about, putting out the
+lights, and locking the windows. Lydia stood where Paul had left her,
+looking at her bright image in the mirror. When the last bulb went out,
+the room was in a flickering twilight, the street arc-light blinking
+uncertainly into the windows. Judge Emery stood waiting for his daughter
+to move. He could scarcely see her form&mdash;her face not at all, but there
+flashed suddenly upon him the memory of her appealing look toward him
+earlier. It shook him as it had then. His heart yearned over her. He
+would have given anything he possessed for the habit of intimate talk
+with her. He put out his hands, but in the twilight she did not see the
+gesture. He felt shy, abashed, horribly ill at ease, <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_98" id="pg_98">98</a></span>torn by his
+tenderness, by his sense of remoteness. He said, uncertainly,
+&#8220;Lydia&mdash;Lydia dear&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She started. &#8220;Oh, yes, of course. It&#8217;s late.&#8221; She passed, brushed
+lightly against him, as he stood trembling with the sense of her
+dearness to him. She began to ascend the stairs. He had felt from her
+the emanation of excitement, guessed that she was shivering like himself
+before a crisis&mdash;and he could find no word to say.</p>
+
+<p>She had passed him as though he were a part of the furniture. He had
+never talked to her about&mdash;about things. He stood at the foot of the
+stairs in the darkness, listening to her light, mounting footfall. Once
+he opened his mouth to call to her, but the habit of a lifetime closed
+it.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She will talk to her mother,&#8221; he told himself; &#8220;her mother will know
+what to say.&#8221; When he followed her up the stairs he was conscious
+chiefly that he was immeasurably tired. Melton, perhaps, had something
+on his side with his everlasting warnings about nervous breakdowns. He
+could not stand long strains as he used to do.</p>
+
+<p>He fell asleep tracing out the thread of the argument presented that day
+by the counsel for the defense.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_99" id="pg_99">99</a></span>
+<a name="CASUS_BELLI_3423" id="CASUS_BELLI_3423"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER X</p>
+<p class="l c">CASUS BELLI</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton looked up in some surprise from his circle of lamplight as
+his goddaughter came swiftly into the room. &#8220;Your mother worse?&#8221; he
+queried sharply.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, no, dear Godfather. I just thought I&#8217;d come over and see you for a
+while. I had a little headache&mdash;Marietta&#8217;s back from Cleveland to-day,
+and she and Flora Burgess are at the house&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;ve said enough. I&#8217;m thankful that you have this refuge to fly to
+from such&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, Flora&#8217;s not so bad as you make her out, the queer, kind little old
+dowdy&mdash;only I didn&#8217;t feel like talking &#8216;parties,&#8217; and &#8216;who&#8217;s who,&#8217;
+to-night&mdash;and their being with Mother made it all right for me to leave
+her.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor took off his eye-shade and showed his little wizened face
+rather paler than usual. &#8220;That&#8217;s a combination that would kill <i>me</i>, and
+your mother not well yet&mdash;still, many folks, many tastes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He looked at Lydia penetratingly. She had taken a chair before the
+soft-coal fire and was staring at it rather moodily. &#8220;Well, Lydia, my
+dear, and how does Endbury strike you now? Speaking of many tastes, what
+are yours going to be like, I wonder?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I wonder,&#8221; she repeated absently.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, at least you know whether the young man who called on you last
+night is to your taste?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia turned her face away and made a nervous gesture. &#8220;Oh, don&#8217;t,
+Godfather!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Very well, I won&#8217;t,&#8221; he said cheerfully, turning to his books with the
+instinct of one who knows his womankind.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_100" id="pg_100">100</a></span>There was a long silence, broken only by the purring of the coal. Then
+Lydia gave a laugh and went to sit on the arm of his chair. &#8220;Of course
+that was what I came to see you about,&#8221; she admitted, her sensitive lips
+quivering into a smile that was not light-hearted; &#8220;but now I&#8217;m here I
+find I haven&#8217;t anything to say. Perhaps you&#8217;d better give me a pink pill
+and send me home to forget all about everything.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton took her fingers and held them closely in his thin, sinewy
+hands. &#8220;Oh, if I could&mdash;if I only could do something for you!&#8221; He
+searched her face anxiously. &#8220;What did young Hollister say that makes
+you so troubled?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She sat down on the edge of his writing-table and reflected. &#8220;It wasn&#8217;t
+anything he <i>said</i>,&#8221; she admitted. &#8220;He was all right, I guess. Father
+had scared the life out of me before he came, by sort of taking it for
+granted&mdash;Oh, you know&mdash;the silly way people do&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, Paul was as nice as could be about that, so far as words go&mdash; He
+didn&#8217;t say a thing embarrassing or&mdash;or hard to answer, but he let me
+<i>see</i>&mdash;all the same! He kept saying what an immense help I&#8217;d be to an
+ambitious man. He said he didn&#8217;t see why I shouldn&#8217;t grow into the
+leader of Endbury society, like the Mrs. Hollister, his aunt, that he
+and his sister live with, you know.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I suppose he&#8217;s right,&#8221; conceded the doctor, reluctantly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, while he was talking about it, it seemed all very well&mdash;you know
+the way he goes at things&mdash;how he makes you feel as though he were a
+locomotive going sixty miles an hour and you were inside the engine cab,
+holding on for dear life?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton shook his head. &#8220;Paul has given me a great variety of
+sensations,&#8221; he admitted, &#8220;but I can&#8217;t say that he ever gave me quite
+this locomotive-cab illusion you speak of.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, he has me, lots of times,&#8221; persisted Lydia. &#8220;It&#8217;s awfully
+exciting&mdash;you don&#8217;t know where you&#8217;re going, <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_101" id="pg_101">101</a></span>and you can&#8217;t stop to
+think, everything tears past you so fast and your breath is so blown out
+of you. You feel like screaming. You forget everything else, you get
+so&mdash;so stirred up and excited. But after it&#8217;s over there&#8217;s always a time
+when things are flat. And this morning, and all day long, I&#8217;ve felt
+very&mdash;different about what he wants and all. I don&#8217;t believe I&#8217;m very
+well, perhaps&mdash;or maybe&mdash;&#8221; she broke off, to say with emotion, &#8220;Oh,
+Godfather, wouldn&#8217;t it be too awful if I should turn out to be without
+ambition.&#8221; She pronounced the word with the reverence for its meaning
+that had been drilled into her all her life, and looked at Dr. Melton
+with troubled eyes.</p>
+
+<p>He thrust his lips out with a grimace habitual to him in moments of
+feeling, and for an instant said nothing. When he spoke his voice broke
+on her name, as it had the night before when he had stood looking up at
+her windows. &#8220;Oh, Lydia!&mdash;Oh, my dear, I&#8217;m terribly afraid of your
+future!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m a little scared of it myself,&#8221; she said tremulously, and hid her
+face on his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>She was the first to speak. &#8220;Wouldn&#8217;t Marietta just scream with laughter
+at us?&#8221; she reminded him. &#8220;We <i>are</i> foolish, too! There&#8217;s nothing in the
+world you could lay your finger on. There&#8217;s nothing anyhow, I guess, but
+nerves. I wouldn&#8217;t dare breathe it to anybody else, but you always know
+how I&#8217;m feeling, anyhow. It&#8217;s as though&mdash;here I am, grown up, and
+there&#8217;s nothing for me to do that&#8217;s worth while&mdash;even if&mdash;even
+if&mdash;Paul&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor took a sudden resolution. &#8220;Why don&#8217;t you talk to your father,
+Lydia? Why don&#8217;t you ask him about&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He was cut short by Lydia&#8217;s gesture of utter wonder. &#8220;<i>Father</i>? Don&#8217;t
+you know that there&#8217;s a big trial on? He couldn&#8217;t tell without figuring
+up, if you should ask him quick, whether I&#8217;m fourteen or nineteen&mdash;or
+nine! Mother wouldn&#8217;t let me, anyhow, even if he could have any idea of
+what I was driving at. She never let us bother him the least bit when
+there was something big happening in <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_102" id="pg_102">102</a></span>his lawyering. I remember that
+time I had pneumonia and nearly died, when I was a little girl, that she
+told him I had just a cold; and he never knew any different for years
+afterward, when I happened to say something about it. She didn&#8217;t want
+him worried when he needed all his wits for some important business.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor looked at her with frowning intensity, and then down at his
+papers. He seemed on the point of some forcible utterance, which he
+restrained with many twitchings of his mouth. Finally he got up and went
+to a window, staring out silently.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I think I&#8217;ll go and look up dear Aunt Julia,&#8221; said Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Very well, my dear,&#8221; said the doctor over his shoulder. &#8220;She&#8217;s in her
+room, I think.&#8221; In exactly the same mild tone, he added, &#8220;Damnation!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What did you say?&#8221; asked Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>He turned toward her, and took up a book from the table. &#8220;I said
+nothing, dear Lydia&mdash;I&#8217;ve nothing to say, I find.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia broke into a light, mocking laugh&mdash;the doctor&#8217;s volubility was an
+old joke&mdash;and began to speak, when a woman&#8217;s voice called, &#8220;Oh, Marius,
+here&#8217;s Mr.&mdash;&mdash; why, Lydia, how did you get in without my seeing you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She entered the room as she spoke&mdash;a middle-aged woman, with large blue
+eyes and graying fair hair, who evidently did her duty by the prevailing
+styles in dress with a comfortable moderation of effort. Lydia&#8217;s mother,
+as the sister of Mrs. Sandworth&#8217;s long-dead husband, thought it
+necessary, from time to time, to endeavor to stir her sister-in-law up
+to a keener sense of what was due the world in the matter of personal
+appearance; but Mrs. Sandworth, born a Melton, had the irritating
+unconcern for social problems of that distinguished Kentucky family. She
+cared only to please her brother Marius, she said, and he never cared
+what she had on, but only what was in her mind&mdash;a remark that had once
+caused Judge Emery to say, in a fit of exasperation with her wandering
+wits, that if she ever had as little on as she had in her mind, he
+guessed Melton would sit up and take notice.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_103" id="pg_103">103</a></span>Lydia now rushed at her aunt, exclaiming, &#8220;Oh, Aunt Julia, how <i>good</i>
+you do look to me! The office door was open and I slipped in that way,
+without ringing the bell.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s four years old, and never been touched, not even the sleeves,&#8221;
+said the other deprecatingly.</p>
+
+<p>Her brother laughed. &#8220;Who did you say was here&mdash;Oh, it&#8217;s you, Rankin;
+come in, come in.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The newcomer was half-way across the room before he saw Lydia. He
+stopped, with a look of extreme pleasure and surprise, which Lydia
+answered with a frank smile.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, have you met my niece?&#8221; asked Mrs. Sandworth, looking from one to
+the other.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, yes; Mr. Rankin&#8217;s my oldest new friend in Endbury. I met him the
+first day I was back.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And when I set up the newel-post&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And I ran on to his house by accident the day Marietta and I were out
+with little Pete, when it rained and I borrowed his overcoat and
+umbrella&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And then I had to call to take them away, of course&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They intoned their confessions like a gay antiphonal chant. A bright
+color had come up in Lydia&#8217;s cheeks. She looked very sunny and
+good-humored, like a cheerful child, an expression which up to that year
+had been habitual to her. Dr. Melton looked at her without speaking.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So, you see,&#8221; she concluded, &#8220;not to speak of several other
+times&mdash;we&#8217;re very well acquainted.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, Marius! Did you ever!&#8221; Mrs. Sandworth appealed to her brother.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I&#8217;ve known about it all along. Rankin and I have discussed Lydia as
+well as other weighty matters, a great many times.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Sandworth&#8217;s easily diverted mind sped off into another channel.
+&#8220;Yes, how you do discuss. I&#8217;m going to look right at the clock every
+minute from now on, so&#8217;s to be sure to remind you of that engagement at
+Judge Emery&#8217;s office at half-past nine. I know what happens when you and
+Mr. Rankin get to talking.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_104" id="pg_104">104</a></span>&#8220;I&#8217;ll not stay long; Miss Emery has precedence.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, don&#8217;t mind me,&#8221; said Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They won&#8217;t&mdash;nor anything else,&#8221; her aunt assured her.</p>
+
+<p>Rankin laughed at this characterization. The doctor did not seem to
+hear. He was brooding, and drumming on the table. From this reverie he
+was startled by the younger man&#8217;s next statement.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve got an apprentice,&#8221; he announced.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Eh?&#8221; queried the doctor with unexpected sharpness.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The fifteen-year-old son of my neighbor, Luigi Carfarone, who works on
+the railroad. The boy&#8217;s been bad&mdash;truant&mdash;street gamin&mdash;all that sort of
+thing, and his mother, who comes in to clean for me sometimes, has been
+awfully anxious about him. But it seems he has a passion for
+tools&mdash;maybe his ancestors were medi&aelig;val craftsmen. Anyhow, he&#8217;s been
+working for me lately, doing some of the simpler jobs, and really
+learning fast. And he&#8217;s been so interested he&#8217;s forgotten all his
+deviltry. So, yesterday, didn&#8217;t he and his father and his mother and
+about a dozen littler brothers and sisters all come in solemn
+procession, dressed in their best, to dedicate him to me and my
+profession, as they grandly call it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, how perfectly lovely!&#8221; cried Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor resumed his drumming morosely. &#8220;Of course you know the end of
+that.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You mean he&#8217;ll get tired of it, and take to robbing chicken-roosts
+again?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not much! He&#8217;ll like it, and stick to it, and bring others, and you&#8217;ll
+extend operations and build shops, and in no time you&#8217;ll go the way of
+all the world&mdash;a big factory, running night and day; you on the keen
+jump every minute; dust an inch thick over your books and music; nerves
+taut; head humming with business schemes to beat your competitors;
+forget your wife most of the time except to give her money; making
+profits hand over fist; suborning legislators to wink at your getting
+special railroad rates for your stuff; can&#8217;t remember how many children
+you have; grand success; notable example of what can be done <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_105" id="pg_105">105</a></span>by
+attention to business; nervous prostration at forty-five; Bright&#8217;s
+disease at fifty; leave a million.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin burst into a great roar of boyish laughter at this prophetic
+flight. The doctor gnawed his lower lip, and looked at him without
+smiling. &#8220;I&#8217;ve got ten million blue devils on my back to-night,&#8221; he
+said.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So I see&mdash;so I see.&#8221; Rankin was still laughing, but as he continued to
+look into his old friend&#8217;s face his own grew grave by reflection. &#8220;You
+don&#8217;t believe all that?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, you won&#8217;t mean to. It&#8217;ll come gradually.&#8221; He broke out suddenly,
+&#8220;Good Heavens, Rankin, give me a serious answer.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Answer!&#8221; The cabinet-maker&#8217;s bewilderment was immense. &#8220;Have you asked
+me anything?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor turned away to his desk with the pettish gesture of a woman
+whose inner thoughts are not divined.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He makes me feel very thick-witted and dense,&#8221; Rankin appealed to the
+two women.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Sandworth exonerated him from blame. &#8220;Oh, nobody ever can make out
+what he&#8217;s driving at. I never try.&#8221; She took out a piece of crochet
+work. &#8220;Lydia, they&#8217;re at it now. I know the voice Marius gets on.
+<i>Would</i> you make this in shell stitch? It&#8217;s much newer, of course, but
+they say it don&#8217;t wash so well.&#8221; As Lydia&#8217;s attention wavered, &#8220;Oh,
+there&#8217;s not a particle of use in trying to make out what they&#8217;re saying.
+They just go on and on.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin was addressing himself to the doctor&#8217;s back. &#8220;I don&#8217;t, you know,
+see anything wicked in making a lot of chairs by machinery instead of a
+few by hand. I&#8217;m no handcraft faddist. I did that in the beginning only
+because I had to begin somehow to earn my living honestly without being
+too tied up to folks, and I couldn&#8217;t think of any other way. But I
+think, now that you&#8217;ve put the idea into my head&mdash;I think it would be a
+good thing to gather the boys of the neighborhood around me&mdash;and, by
+gracious! the girls too! That&#8217;s one of my convictions&mdash;that girls need
+very much the same treatment as boys. <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_106" id="pg_106">106</a></span>And if it should develop into a
+large business (which I doubt strongly), what&#8217;s the harm? The motive
+lying back of it would be different from what I so fear and hate in big
+businesses. You can bet your last cent on one thing, and that is that
+the main idea would not be to make as much furniture as fast as
+possible, as cheap as possible, but to make it good, and to make only as
+much as would leave me and every last one of the folks that work for me
+time and strength to live&mdash;&#8216;leisure to be good.&#8217; Who said that, anyway?
+It&#8217;s fine.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Hymn to Adversity</i>,&#8221; supplied the doctor, who was better read in the
+poets than the younger generation. He added, skeptically, &#8220;Could you,
+though, do any such thing? Wouldn&#8217;t it run <i>you</i>, once you got to
+going?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, if worst came to worst&mdash;&#8221; began Rankin, then changing front, he
+began again: &#8220;My great-aunt&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor fell back in his chair with a groan and a laugh.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes; the same one you may have heard me mention before. She told me
+that all through her childhood her family was saving and pulling
+together to build a fine big house. They worked along for years until,
+when she was a young lady, they finally accomplished it; built a big
+three-story house that was the admiration of the countryside. Then they
+moved in. And it took the women-folks every minute of their time, and
+more, to keep it clean and in order; it cost as much to keep it up,
+heated, furnished, repaired, painted, and everything the way a fine
+house should be, as their entire living used to cost. The fine big
+grounds they had laid out to go with the mansion took so much time to&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You see. You see. That&#8217;s just what I meant,&#8221; broke in the doctor.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, I&#8217;m a near relative of my great-aunt&#8217;s. One day, when all the
+rest of the family was away, she set fire to the house and burned it to
+the ground, with everything in it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She didn&#8217;t!&#8221; broke in Mrs. Sandworth, who had been <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_107" id="pg_107">107</a></span>coaxed to a fitful
+attention by the promise of a coherent story.</p>
+
+<p>Rankin laughed. &#8220;Well, that was the way she told it to me, and I don&#8217;t
+doubt she <i>would</i> have,&#8221; he amended.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor grunted, &#8220;Huh! But would <i>you</i>!&#8221; He went on, &#8220;You couldn&#8217;t
+compete with your rivals, anyhow, if you didn&#8217;t concentrate everything
+on making chairs. Don&#8217;t you know the successful business man&#8217;s best
+advertisement? &#8216;All of my life-strength I&#8217;ve put into the product I
+offer you,&#8217; he says to the public, and it&#8217;s true.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, well, if I couldn&#8217;t do business there&#8217;d be an end of the matter,
+and none of your horrible prophecies would come true.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your wife wouldn&#8217;t let you.&#8221;&mdash;Dr. Melton took up another line of
+attack&mdash;&#8220;she&#8217;d want a motor-car and &#8216;nice&#8217; associates and a fashionable
+school for the children, and a home in the &#8216;respectable&#8217; part of town.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin&#8217;s easy-going manner changed. He sat up and frowned. &#8220;There you
+step on one of my corns, Doctor&#8221;&mdash;he did not apologize for the rustic
+metaphor&mdash;&#8220;I don&#8217;t believe a single, solitary identical word of that.
+It&#8217;s my most hotly held conviction that women are so much like humans
+that you can&#8217;t tell the difference with a microscope. I mean, if they&#8217;re
+interested in petty, personal things it&#8217;s because they&#8217;re not given a
+fair chance at big, impersonal things. Everybody&#8217;s jumping on the
+American woman because she knows more about bridge-whist than about her
+husband&#8217;s business. <i>Why</i> does she? Because he&#8217;s satisfied to have
+her&mdash;you can take my word for it! He likes her to be absorbed in clubs
+and bridge and idiotic little dabblings in near-culture and pseudo-art,
+just for the reason that a busy mother gives her baby a sticky feather
+to play with. It keeps the baby busy. It keeps his wife&#8217;s attention off
+him. It&#8217;s the American man just as much as the woman who&#8217;s mortally
+afraid of a sure-enough marriage with sure-enough shared interests. He
+doesn&#8217;t want to bother with children, or with the servant problem or the
+questions of <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_108" id="pg_108">108</a></span>family life, and he doesn&#8217;t want his wife bothering him in
+his business any more than she wants him interfering with hers. That
+idea of the matter is common to them both.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s a fine, chivalric view of the situation,&#8221; said the doctor
+sardonically. &#8220;Maybe if you&#8217;d practiced as long in as many American
+families as I have, you might have a less idealistic view of your female
+compatriots.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t idealize &#8217;em,&#8221; cried Rankin. &#8220;Good Lord! Don&#8217;t I say they&#8217;re
+just like men? They amount to something if they&#8217;re given something worth
+while to do&mdash;not otherwise.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t you call bringing up children worth while?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You bet I do. So much so that I&#8217;d have the fathers take their full half
+of it. I&#8217;d have men do more inside the house and less outside, and the
+women the other way &#8217;round.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor recoiled at this. &#8220;Oh, you&#8217;re a visionary. It couldn&#8217;t be
+done.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It couldn&#8217;t be done in a minute,&#8221; admitted Rankin.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor mused. &#8220;It&#8217;s an interesting thought. But it&#8217;s not for our
+generation. A new idea is like a wedge. You have to introduce it by the
+thin edge. The only way to get it started is by beginning with the
+children. Adults are hopeless. There&#8217;s never any use trying to change
+them.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, you can&#8217;t fool children,&#8221; said Rankin. &#8220;It&#8217;s no use teaching them
+something you&#8217;re not willing to make a try at yourself. They see through
+that quick enough! What you&#8217;re really after, is what they see and learn
+to go after themselves. If anything&#8217;s to be done, the adults must take
+the first step.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But, as society is organized, the idea is preposterous.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Society&#8217;s been organized a whole lot of different ways in its time. Who
+tells me that it&#8217;s bound to stay this way? I tell you right now, it
+hasn&#8217;t got <i>me</i> bluffed, anyhow! My wife&mdash;if I ever have one&mdash;is going
+to be my sure-enough wife, and my children, <i>my</i> children. I won&#8217;t
+<i>have</i> a business that they can&#8217;t know about, or that doesn&#8217;t leave me
+strength enough to share in all their lives. I can earn enough growing
+potatoes and doing odd jobs of carpentering for that!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_109" id="pg_109">109</a></span>The doctor looked wonderingly at the other&#8217;s kindling face. &#8220;Rankin,&#8221;
+he asked irrelevantly, &#8220;aren&#8217;t there <i>ever</i> moments when you despair of
+the world?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The voice of the younger man had the fine tremor of sincerity as he
+answered, &#8220;Why, good heavens, <i>no</i>, Doctor! That&#8217;s why I dare criticize
+it so.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor looked with an intensity almost fierce into the other&#8217;s
+confident eyes. He laid his thin, sinewy hand on the other&#8217;s big brown
+fist, as though he would fain absorb conviction by contact. &#8220;But I&#8217;m
+sick with the slowness of the progress you talk of&mdash;believe in,&#8221; he
+burst out finally. &#8220;It comes too late&mdash;the advance from our tragic
+materialism; too late for so many that could have profited by it most.&#8221;
+He looked toward Lydia bending over her aunt&#8217;s fancy work. Rankin
+followed the direction of his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes; that&#8217;s what I mean,&#8221; said the doctor heavily, rising from his
+chair. &#8220;That and such thousands of others. Oh, for a Theseus to hunt
+down this Minotaur of false standards and wretched ideas of success! I
+see them, the precious youths and maidens, going in by thousands to his
+den of mean aspirations, and not a hand is raised to warn them. They
+must be silly and tragic because everyone else is!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin shook his head. &#8220;I think I&#8217;m proving that you don&#8217;t have to go
+into the labyrinth&mdash;that you can live in health and happiness outside.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s rather more than that to be done, you&#8217;ll admit,&#8221; said the
+doctor with an uncompromising bitterness.</p>
+
+<p>Rankin colored. &#8220;I don&#8217;t pretend that it&#8217;s much of anything&mdash;what I&#8217;ve
+done.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor did not deny him. He thrust out his lips and rubbed his hand
+nervously over his face. Finally, &#8220;But you have done it, at least,&#8221; he
+brought out, &#8220;and I&#8217;ve only talked. As another doctor has said: &#8216;I&#8217;ve
+never taken a bribe; but there&#8217;s a pale shade of bribery known as
+prosperity.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They fell into a silence, broken by Mrs. Sandworth&#8217;s asking, &#8220;Lydia,
+have your folks got an old mythology book? <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_110" id="pg_110">110</a></span>I studied it at school, of
+course, but it has sort of passed out of my mind. Was it the Minotaur
+that sowed teeth and something else very odd came up that you wouldn&#8217;t
+expect?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia did not smile. &#8220;I don&#8217;t know whether we have the book or not, but
+Miss Slater told us the story of the Minotaur. There&#8217;s a picture of
+Theseus and Ariadne in Europe somewhere&mdash;Munich, I think&mdash;or maybe
+Siena. It was where one of the girls had a sore throat, I remember, and
+we had to stay quite a while. Miss Slater told us about it then.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor stood up. &#8220;Julia, it&#8217;s nearly half-past now. Who remembered
+this time? I&#8217;m off, all of you. Rankin, see that Lydia gets home safely,
+will you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I must go too&mdash;now, with you.&#8221; The girl jumped up. &#8220;I didn&#8217;t
+realize it was so late. They&#8217;ll be wondering at home.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Come along, then, both of you. I&#8217;ll go with you to the corner where I
+take my car.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The chill of the night air sent them along at a brisk gait, Lydia
+swinging easily between them, her head on a level with Rankin&#8217;s, the
+doctor&#8217;s hat on a level with her ear. She said nothing, and the two
+talked across her, disjointed bits of an argument apparently under
+endless discussion between them.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor flung down, with a militant despondency, &#8220;It&#8217;d be no use
+trying to do anything, even if you weren&#8217;t so slothful and sedentary as
+you are! It moves in a vicious circle. Because material success is what
+the majority want, the majority&#8217;ll go on wanting it. Hardy says
+somewhere that it&#8217;s innate in human nature not to desire the undesired
+of others.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin sang out a ringing &#8220;Aw, g&#8217;wan! It&#8217;s innate in human nature to
+murder and steal whenever it pleases, and I guess even Hardy&#8217;d admit
+that those aren&#8217;t the amusements of the majority quite so extensively as
+they used to be&mdash;what? First thing you know people&#8217;ll begin to desire
+things because they&#8217;re worth desiring and not because other folks have
+them&mdash;even so astonishing a flight as that!&#8221; he made <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_111" id="pg_111">111</a></span>a boyish
+gesture&mdash;&#8220;and what a grand time that&#8217;ll be to live in, to be sure!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They were waiting at the corner for the doctor&#8217;s street car, which now
+came noisily down toward them. He watched it advance, and proffered as a
+valedictory, his gloom untempered to the last, &#8220;You&#8217;re a wild man that
+lives in the woods. I&#8217;ve doctored everybody in the world for thirty
+years. Which knows human nature best?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin roared after him defiantly, waking the echoes and startling the
+occupants of the car, &#8220;I do! I do! I do!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The car bore the doctor away, a perversely melancholy little figure,
+contemplating the young people blackly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Whatever do you suppose set him off so?&#8221; Rankin wondered aloud as they
+resumed their rapid, swinging walk through the cold air.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m afraid I did,&#8221; Lydia surmised. &#8220;I had a wretched fit of the blues,
+and I guess he must have caught them from me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin looked down at her keenly, his thoughts apparently quite altered
+by her phrase. &#8220;Ah, he worries a great deal about you,&#8221; he murmured.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia laughed nervously, and said nothing. They walked swiftly in
+silence. The stars were thick above them in the wind-swept autumn night.
+Lydia tilted her head to look up at them once or twice. She saw Rankin&#8217;s
+face pale under the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat, his eyes meeting
+hers in an intent regard like a wordless speech. The fine, cold, austere
+wind swept them along like leaves, whipping their young pulses, chanting
+loudly in the leafless branches of the maples, and filling the dark
+spaces above with a great humming roar. They thrilled responsive to all
+this and to the mood of high seriousness each divined in the other.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia&#8217;s voice, breaking in upon the intimate silence, continued the
+talk, but it was with another note. The mute interval, filled with wind
+and darkness and the light of stars, had swung them up to a higher
+plane. She spoke with an artless sureness of comprehension&mdash;a
+certainty&mdash;they were close in spirit at that moment, and she was not
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_112" id="pg_112">112</a></span>frightened, not even conscious of it. &#8220;Why should the doctor worry?
+<i>What is the matter?</i> Marietta says the trouble with me is that I&#8217;m
+spoiled with having everything that I want.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Have</i> you everything you want?&#8221; Rankin&#8217;s bluntness of interrogation
+was unmitigated.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia looked up at him swiftly, keenly. In his grave face there was that
+which made her break out with an open quivering emotion she had not
+shown even to the doctor&#8217;s loving heart. &#8220;It&#8217;s a weight on my very
+soul&mdash;that there&#8217;s nothing for me to look forward to&mdash;nothing, nothing
+that&#8217;s worth growing up to do. I haven&#8217;t been taught anything&mdash;but I
+know I want to be something better than&mdash;perhaps I can&#8217;t be&mdash;but I want
+to try! I want to try! That&#8217;s not much to ask&mdash;just a chance to try&mdash;But
+I don&#8217;t even know how to get that. I don&#8217;t even dare to speak
+of&mdash;of&mdash;such things. People laugh and say it&#8217;s Sunday-schooley fancies
+that&#8217;ll disappear, that I&#8217;ll forget as I get into living. But I don&#8217;t
+want to forget. I&#8217;m afraid I shall. I want to keep trying. I don&#8217;t
+know&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They did not slacken their swift advance as they talked. They looked at
+each other seriously in the starlight.</p>
+
+<p>Rankin had given an indrawn exclamation as she finished, and after an
+instant&#8217;s pause he said, with a deep emotion, &#8220;Oh, perhaps&mdash;at least we
+both want to try&mdash;<i>Be Ariadne for me!</i> Help me to find the clue to
+what&#8217;s wrong in our lives, and perhaps&mdash;&#8221; He looked down at her, shaken,
+drawing quick breaths. She answered his gaze silently, her face as
+shining white as his.</p>
+
+<p>He went on: &#8220;You shall decide what Ariadne may be or may come to be&mdash;I
+will take whatever you choose to give&mdash;and bless you!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She had a gesture of humility. &#8220;<i>I</i> haven&#8217;t anything to give.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His accent was memorable as he cried, &#8220;You have yourself&mdash;you&mdash;you! But
+you are too gentle! It is hard for you&mdash;it will be too hard for you to
+do what you feel <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_113" id="pg_113">113</a></span>should be done. I could perhaps do the things if you
+would tell me&mdash;help you not to forget&mdash;not to let life make you forget
+what is worth doing and learning!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She put back a mesh of her wind-blown hair to look at him intently, and
+to say again in wonder, &#8220;I&#8217;m not anything. What can you think I&mdash;what
+can you hope&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They were standing now on the walk before her father&#8217;s house. &#8220;I can
+hope&mdash;&#8221; his voice shook, &#8220;I can hope that you may make me into a man
+worthy to help you to be the best that&#8217;s in you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia put out her hand impulsively. It did not tremble. She looked at
+him with radiant, steady eyes. He raised the slim, gloved fingers to his
+lips. &#8220;Whether to leave you, or to try to&mdash;Oh, I would give my life to
+know how best to serve you,&#8221; he said huskily. He turned away, the sound
+of his steps ringing loud in the silent street.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia went slowly up the walk and into the empty hall. She stood an
+instant, her hands clasped before her breast, her eyes closed, her face
+still and clear. Then she moved upstairs like one in a dream.</p>
+
+<p>As she passed her mother&#8217;s door she started violently, and for an
+instant had no breath to answer. Some one had called her name
+laughingly.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, &#8220;Yes,&#8221; she answered without stirring.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, come in, come in!&#8221; cried Marietta mockingly. &#8220;We know all about
+everything. We heard you come up the street, and saw you philandering on
+the front walk. And for all it&#8217;s so dark, we made out that Paul kissed
+your hand when he went away.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There was a silence in the hall. Then Lydia appeared in the door. Mrs.
+Emery gave a scream. &#8220;Why, Lydia! what makes you look so queer?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They turned startled, inquiring, daunting faces upon her. It was the
+baptism of fire to Lydia. The battle, inevitable for her, had begun. She
+faced it; she did not take refuge in the safe, silent lie which opened
+before her, but her courage was a piteous one. In her utter heartsick
+shrinking <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_114" id="pg_114">114</a></span>from the consequences of her answer she had a premonition of
+the weakness that was to make the combat so unequal. &#8220;It was not Paul,&#8221;
+she said, pale in the doorway; &#8220;it was Daniel Rankin.&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class="bookbreak" />
+
+<p class="xl c">BOOK II</p>
+
+<p class="xl c i">IN THE LOCOMOTIVE CAB</p>
+
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_115" id="pg_115">115</a></span>
+<a name="WHAT_IS_BEST_FOR_LYDIA_4040" id="WHAT_IS_BEST_FOR_LYDIA_4040"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XI</p>
+<p class="l c">WHAT IS BEST FOR LYDIA</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The girls who were to be d&eacute;butantes that season, the &#8220;crowd&#8221; or (more
+accurately to quote Madeleine Hollister&#8217;s racy characterization) &#8220;the
+gang,&#8221; stood before Hallam&#8217;s drug store, chattering like a group of
+bright-colored paroquets. They had finished three or four ice-cream
+sodas apiece, and now, inimitably unconscious that they were on the
+street corner, they were &#8220;getting up&#8221; a matin&eacute;e party for the
+performance of the popular actress whom, at that time, it was the
+fashion for all girls of their age and condition to adore. They had
+worked themselves up to a state of hysteric excitement over the
+prospect.</p>
+
+<p>A tall brown-eyed blonde, with the physical development of a woman and
+the facial expression of a child of twelve, cried out, &#8220;I feel as though
+I should swoon for joy to see that darling way she holds her hands when
+the leading man&#8217;s making love to her&mdash;so sort of helpless&mdash;like this&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, Madeleine, that&#8217;s not a <i>bit</i> the way. It&#8217;s so!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The first speaker protested, &#8220;Well, I guess I ought to be able to do it.
+I&#8217;ve practiced for <i>hours</i> in front of the glass doing it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;For mercy&#8217;s sake that&#8217;s nothing. So have I. Who hasn&#8217;t?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Madeleine referred the question to Lydia, &#8220;Lyd has seen her later than
+anybody. She saw her in London. Just think of going to the theater in
+London&mdash;as if it was anywhere. <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_116" id="pg_116">116</a></span>She says they&#8217;re crazy about her over
+there.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Oh, wild!</i>&#8221; Lydia told them. &#8220;Her picture&#8217;s in every single window!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Which one? Which one?&#8221; they clamored, hanging on her answer
+breathlessly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That fascinating one with the rose, where she&#8217;s holding her head
+sideways and&mdash;&#8221; Oh, yes, they had that one, their exclamation cut her
+short, relieved that their collections were complete.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Lyd met a woman on the steamer coming back whose sister-in-law has the
+same hairdresser,&#8221; Madeleine went on.</p>
+
+<p>They were electrified. &#8220;Oh, <i>honestly</i>? Is it her own?&#8221; They trembled
+visibly before solution of a problem which had puzzled them, as they
+would have said, &#8220;for eternities.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Every hair,&#8221; Lydia affirmed, &#8220;and naturally that color.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Their enthusiasm was prodigious, &#8220;How grand! How perfectly grand!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They turned on Lydia with reproaches. &#8220;Here you&#8217;ve been back two months
+and we haven&#8217;t got a bit of good out of you. Think of your having known
+that, all this&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Her mother&#8217;s sick, you know,&#8221; Madeleine Hollister explained.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She hasn&#8217;t been so sick but what Lydia could get out to go buggy-riding
+with your brother Paul ever since he got back this last time.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia, as though she wished to lose herself, had been entering with a
+feverish intensity into the spirit of their lively chatter; but now,
+instead of responding with some prompt, defensive flippancy, she colored
+high and was silent. A clock above them struck five. &#8220;Oh, I must get
+on,&#8221; she cried; &#8220;I&#8217;m down here, you know, to walk home with Father.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They laughed loudly, &#8220;Oh, yes, we know all about this sudden enthusiasm
+for Poppa&#8217;s society. Where are you going to meet Paul?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia looked about at the crush of drays, trolley-cars, <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_117" id="pg_117">117</a></span>and
+delivery-wagons jamming the busy street, &#8220;Well, not here down-town,&#8221; she
+replied, her tone one of satisfied security.</p>
+
+<p>A confused and conscious stir among her companions and a burst of talk
+from them cut her short. They cried variously, according to their
+temperaments, &#8220;Oh, there he comes now!&#8221; &#8220;I think it&#8217;s mean Lydia&#8217;s
+gobbling him up from under our noses!&#8221; &#8220;I used to have a ride or two
+behind that gray while Lydia was away!&#8221; &#8220;My! Isn&#8217;t he a good-looker!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They had all turned like needles to the north, and stared as the
+spider-light wagon, glistening with varnish, bore down on them, looking
+singularly distinguished and costly among the dingy business-vehicles
+which made up the traffic of the crowded street. The young driver guided
+the high-stepping gray with a reckless, competent hand through the most
+incredibly narrow openings and sent his vehicle up against the
+flower-like group of girls, laughing as he drew rein, at the open,
+humorous outcry against him. A chorus of eager recrimination rose to his
+ears, &#8220;Now, Mr. Hollister, this is the first time Lydia&#8217;s been out with
+our crowd since she came home!&#8221; &#8220;You might let her alone!&#8221; &#8220;Go away,
+Paul, you greedy thing!&#8221; &#8220;I haven&#8217;t asked Lydia a single thing about her
+European trip!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, maybe you think,&#8221; he cried, springing out to the sidewalk, &#8220;that
+I&#8217;ve been spending the last year traveling around Europe with Lydia! I
+haven&#8217;t heard any more than you have.&#8221; He threw aside the lap-robe of
+supple broadcloth, and offered his hand to Lydia. A flash of resentment
+at the cool silence of this invitation sprang up in the girl&#8217;s eyes.
+There was in her face a despairing effort at mutiny. Her hands nervously
+opened and shut the clasp of the furs at her throat. She tried to look
+unconscious, to look like the other girls, to laugh, not to know his
+meaning, to turn away.</p>
+
+<p>The young man plunged straight through these pitiful cobwebs. &#8220;Why, come
+on, Lydia,&#8221; he cried with a good-humored pointedness, &#8220;I&#8217;ve been all
+over town looking for <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_118" id="pg_118">118</a></span>you.&#8221; She backed away, looking over her shoulder,
+as if for a lane of escape, flushing, paling. &#8220;Oh, no, no thank you,
+Paul. Not <i>this</i> afternoon!&#8221; she cried imploringly, with a soft fury of
+protest, &#8220;I&#8217;m on my way to Father&#8217;s office. I want to walk home with
+him. I want to see him. I thought it would be nice to walk home with
+him. I see so little of him! I thought it would be nice to walk home
+with him.&#8221; She was repeating herself, stammering and uncertain, but
+achieving nevertheless a steady retreat from the confident figure
+standing by the wagon.</p>
+
+<p>This retreat was cut short by his next speech. &#8220;Oh, I&#8217;ve just come from
+your father. I went to his office, thinking you might be there. He said
+to tell you and your mother that he won&#8217;t be home to dinner to-night at
+all. He&#8217;s got some citations on hand he has to verify.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia had stopped her actual recoil at his first words and now stood
+still, but she still tugged at the invisible chain which held her. She
+was panting a little. She shook her head. &#8220;Well&mdash;anyhow&mdash;I want to see
+him!&#8221; she insisted with a transparently aimless obstinacy like a
+frightened child&#8217;s. &#8220;I want to see my father.&#8221; Paul laughed easily,
+&#8220;Well, you&#8217;d better choose some other time if you want to get anything
+out of him. He had turned everybody out and was just settling to work
+with a pile of law-books before him. You know how your father looks
+under those circumstances!&#8221; He held the picture up to her, relentlessly
+smiling.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia&#8217;s lips quivered, but she said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Paul went on soothingly, &#8220;I&#8217;ve only come to take you straight home,
+anyhow. Your mother wants you. She said she had one of those fainting
+turns again. She said to be sure to bring you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>At the mention of her mother&#8217;s name, Lydia turned quite pale. She began
+to walk slowly back towards the wagon. There was angry, helpless misery
+in her dark eyes, but there was no longer any resistance. &#8220;Oh, if Mother
+needs me&mdash;&#8221; she murmured. She took the offered hand, stepped into the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_119" id="pg_119">119</a></span>wagon and even went through some fitful pretense of responding to the
+chorus of facetious good-bys which rose from the group they were
+leaving.</p>
+
+<p>She said little or nothing in answer to the young man&#8217;s kind, cheerful
+talk, as they drove along one main thoroughfare after another,
+conspicuous by the brilliant, prosperous beauty of their well-fed youth
+and their handsome garb, pointed out by people on the sidewalks,
+constantly nodding in response to greetings from acquaintances. Lydia
+flushed deeply at the first of these salutations, a flush which grew
+deeper and deeper as these features of their processional advance
+repeated themselves. She put her hand to her throat from time to time as
+though it ached and when the red rubber-tired wheels turned noiselessly
+in on the asphalt of her home street, she threw the lap-robe brusquely
+back from her knees as though for an instant escape.</p>
+
+<p>The young man&#8217;s pleasant chat stopped. &#8220;Look here, Lydia,&#8221; he said in
+another tone, one that forced her eyes to meet his, &#8220;look here, don&#8217;t
+you forget one thing!&#8221; His voice was deep with the sincerest sympathy,
+his eyes full of emotion, &#8220;Don&#8217;t you forget, little Lydia, that nobody&#8217;s
+sorrier for you than I am! And I don&#8217;t want anything that&mdash;&#8221; he cried
+out in sudden passion&mdash;&#8220;Good Lord, I&#8217;d be cut to bits before I&#8217;d even
+<i>want</i> anything that wasn&#8217;t best for you!&#8221; He looked away and mastered
+himself again to quiet friendliness, &#8220;You know that, <i>don&#8217;t you</i>, Lydia?
+You know that all I want is for you to have the most successful life
+anyone can?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He leaned to her imploring in his turn.</p>
+
+<p>She drew a quick breath, and moved her head from side to side
+restlessly. Then drawn by the steady insistence of his eyes, she said,
+as if touched by his patient, determined kindness, &#8220;Oh, yes, yes, Paul,
+I realize how awfully good you&#8217;re being to me! I wish I could&mdash;but&mdash;yes,
+of course I see how good you are to me!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He laid his hand an instant over hers, withdrawing it before she herself
+could make the action. &#8220;It makes me <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_120" id="pg_120">120</a></span>happy to have you know I want to
+be,&#8221; he said simply, &#8220;now that&#8217;s all. You needn&#8217;t be afraid. I shan&#8217;t
+bother you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They were in front of the Emery house now. He did not try to detain her
+longer. He helped her down, only repeating as she gave him her gloved
+hand an instant, &#8220;That&#8217;s what I&#8217;m for&mdash;to be good to you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The wagon drove off, the young man refraining from so much as a backward
+glance.</p>
+
+<p>The girl turned to the house and stood a moment, opening and shutting
+her hands. When she moved, it was to walk so rapidly as almost to run up
+the walk, up the steps, into the hall and into her mother&#8217;s presence,
+where, still on the crest of the wave of her resolution, she cried,
+&#8220;Mother, did you really send Paul for me again. Did you <i>really</i>?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, yes, dear,&#8221; said Mrs. Emery, surprised, sitting up on the sofa
+with an obvious effort; &#8220;did somebody say I didn&#8217;t?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I hoped you didn&#8217;t!&#8221; cried Lydia bitterly; &#8220;it was&mdash;horrid! I was out
+with all the girls in front of Hallam&#8217;s&mdash;everybody was so&mdash;they all
+laughed so when&mdash;they looked at me so!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery spoke with dignity, &#8220;Naturally I couldn&#8217;t know where he would
+find you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But, Mother, you <i>did</i> know that every afternoon for two weeks
+you&#8217;ve&mdash;it&#8217;s been managed so that I&#8217;ve been out with Paul.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery ignored this and went on plaintively, &#8220;I didn&#8217;t see that it
+was so unreasonable for an invalid to send whoever she could find after
+her only daughter because she was feeling worse.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia&#8217;s frenzy carried her at once straight to the exaggeration which is
+the sure forerunner of defeat in the sort of a conflict which was
+engaging her. &#8220;<i>Are</i> you feeling any worse?&#8221; she cried in a despairing
+incredulity which was instantly marked as inhumanly unfilial by the
+scared revulsion on her face as well as Mrs. Emery&#8217;s pale glare of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_121" id="pg_121">121</a></span>horror. &#8220;Oh, I didn&#8217;t mean that!&#8221; she cried, running to her mother;
+&#8220;I&#8217;m sorry, Mother! I&#8217;m sorry!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The tears began running down Mrs. Emery&#8217;s cheeks, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know my
+little Lydia any more,&#8221; she said weakly, dropping her head back on the
+pillow.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t know myself!&#8221; cried Lydia, sobbing violently, &#8220;I&#8217;m so unhappy!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery took her in her arms with a forgiveness which dropped like a
+noose over Lydia&#8217;s neck, &#8220;There, there, darling! Mother knows you didn&#8217;t
+mean it! But you must remember, Lydia dearest, if you&#8217;re unhappy these
+days, so is your poor mother.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m making you so!&#8221; sobbed Lydia, &#8220;I know it! something like this
+happens every day! It&#8217;s why you don&#8217;t get well faster! I&#8217;m making you
+unhappy!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It doesn&#8217;t make any difference about me!&#8221; Mrs. Emery heroically assured
+her, &#8220;I don&#8217;t want you to be influenced by thinking about my feelings,
+Lydia. Above everything in the world, I don&#8217;t want you to feel the
+<i>slightest</i> pressure from me&mdash;or any one of the family. Oh, darling, all
+I want&mdash;all any of us want, is what is best for our little Lydia!&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_122" id="pg_122">122</a></span>
+<a name="A_SOP_TO_THE_WOLVES_4287" id="A_SOP_TO_THE_WOLVES_4287"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XII</p>
+<p class="l c">A SOP TO THE WOLVES</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Six o&#8217;clock had struck when Mrs. Sandworth came wearily back from her
+Christmas shopping. It was only the middle of November, but each year
+she began her preparations for that day of rejoicing earlier and
+earlier, in a vain attempt to avoid some of the embittering desolation
+of confusion and fatigue which for her, as for all her acquaintances,
+marked the December festival. She let herself down heavily from the
+trolley-car which had brought her from the business part of Endbury back
+to what was known as the &#8220;residential section,&#8221; a name bestowed on it to
+the exclusion of several other much larger divisions of town devoted
+exclusively to the small brick buildings blackened by coal smoke in
+which ordinary people lived.</p>
+
+<p>As she walked slowly up the street, her arms were full of bundles, her
+heart full of an ardent prayer that she might find her brother either
+out or in a peaceable mood. She loved and admired Dr. Melton more than
+anyone else in the world, but there were moments when the sum total of
+her conviction about him was an admission that his was not a reposeful
+personality. For the last fortnight, this peculiarity had been
+accentuated till Mrs. Sandworth&#8217;s loyalty had cracked at every seam in
+order not to find him intolerable to live with. Moreover, her own kind
+heart and intense partiality for peace in all things had suffered
+acutely from the same suspense that had wrought the doctor to his
+wretched fever of anxiety. It had been a time of torment for
+everybody&mdash;everybody was agreed on that; and Mrs. Sandworth had felt
+that life in the same house with Lydia&#8217;s godfather had given her more
+than her share of misery.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_123" id="pg_123">123</a></span>On this dark November evening she was so tired that every inch of her
+soft plumpness ached. She had not prospered in her shopping. Things had
+not matched. She let herself into the front door with a sigh of relief
+at finding the hall empty. She looked cautiously into the doctor&#8217;s study
+and drew a long breath, peeped into the parlor and, almost smiling, went
+on cheerfully upstairs to her room. From afar, she saw the welcoming
+flicker of the coal fire in her grate, and felt a glow of surprised
+gratitude to the latest transient from the employment agency who was now
+occupying her kitchen. She did not often get one that was thoughtful
+about keeping up fires when nobody was at home. It would be delicious to
+get off her corset and shoes, let down her hair&mdash;there he was, bolt
+upright before the fire, his back to the door. She took in the
+significance of his tense attitude and prepared herself for the worst,
+sinking into a chair, letting her bundles slide at various tangents from
+her rounded surface, and surveying her brother with the utmost
+unresignation. &#8220;Well, what is it now?&#8221; she asked.</p>
+
+<p>He had not heard her enter, and now flashed around, casting in her face
+like a hard-thrown missile, &#8220;Lydia&#8217;s engaged.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>All Mrs. Sandworth&#8217;s lassitude vanished. She flung herself on him in a
+wild outcry of inquiry&mdash;&#8220;Which one? Which one?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He answered her angrily, &#8220;Which do you suppose? Doesn&#8217;t a steam-roller
+make some impression on a rose?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh!&#8221; she cried, enlightened; and then, with widespread solemnity,
+&#8220;Well, think&mdash;of&mdash;that!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not if I can help it,&#8221; groaned the doctor.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But that&#8217;s not fair,&#8221; his sister protested a moment later as she took
+in the rest of his speech.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Heaven knows it&#8217;s not,&#8221; he agreed bitterly.</p>
+
+<p>She stared. &#8220;I mean that Paul hasn&#8217;t been nearly so steam-rollery as
+usual.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor rubbed his face furiously, as though to brush off a
+disagreeable clinging web. &#8220;He hasn&#8217;t had <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_124" id="pg_124">124</a></span>to be. There have been plenty
+of other forces to do his rolling for him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If you mean her father&mdash;you know he&#8217;s kept his hands off
+<i>religiously</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He has that, damn him!&#8221; The doctor raged about the room.</p>
+
+<p>A silent prayer for patience wrote itself on Mrs. Sandworth&#8217;s face.
+&#8220;You&#8217;re just as inconsistent as you can be!&#8221; she cried.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m more than that,&#8221; he sighed, sitting down suddenly on a chair in the
+corner of the room; &#8220;I&#8217;m heartsick.&#8221; He shivered, thrust his hands into
+his pockets and surveyed his shoes gloomily.</p>
+
+<p>One of Mrs. Sandworth&#8217;s cheerful capacities was for continuing
+tranquilly the minute processes of everyday life through every
+disturbance in the region of the emotions. You <i>had</i> to, she said, to
+get them done&mdash;anybody that lived with the doctor. She now took
+advantage of his silence to count over her packages, remove her wraps,
+loosen a couple of hooks at her waist and fluff up the roll of graying
+hair over her forehead. The doctor looked at her.</p>
+
+<p>She answered him reasonably, &#8220;It wouldn&#8217;t help Lydia any if I took it
+off and threw it in the fire, would it? It&#8217;s my best one, too; the
+other&#8217;s at the hairdresser&#8217;s, getting curled.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s not,&#8221; the doctor broke out&mdash;&#8220;it&#8217;s not, Heaven be my judge! that
+<i>I</i> want to settle it. But I did want Lydia to settle it herself.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She has, at last,&#8221; Mrs. Sandworth reminded him, in a little surprise at
+his forgetting so important a fact.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She has <i>not</i>!&#8221; roared the doctor.</p>
+
+<p>His literal-minded sister looked aggrieved bewilderment. She felt a
+bitterness at having been stirred without due cause. &#8220;Marius, you&#8217;re
+unkind. What did you tell me she had for&mdash;when I&#8217;m so tired it seems as
+if I could lie down and die if I&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton knew his sister. He made a rapid plunge <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_125" id="pg_125">125</a></span>through the
+obscurity of her brain into her heart&#8217;s warm clarity, and, &#8220;Oh, Julia,
+if you had seen her!&#8221; he cried.</p>
+
+<p>She leaned toward him, responsive to the emotion in his voice. &#8220;Tell me
+about it, poor Marius,&#8221; she said, yearning maternally over his pain.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I can&#8217;t&mdash;if you had seen her&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But how did you hear? Did she tell you? When did&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I was there at five, and her mother met me at the door. She took me
+upstairs, a finger on her lip, and there she and Marietta said they
+guessed this afternoon would settle things. A week ago, she said, she&#8217;d
+had an up-and-down talk with that dreadful carpenter and as good as
+forbade him the house&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Sandworth had a gesture of intuition. &#8220;Oh, if they&#8217;ve managed to
+shut Lydia off from seeing him&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor nodded. &#8220;That&#8217;s what her mother counted on. She said she
+thought it a sign that Lydia was just infatuated with Rankin&mdash;her being
+so different after she&#8217;d seen him&mdash;so defiant&mdash;so unlike Lydia! But now
+she hadn&#8217;t seen him for a week, and her mother and Marietta had been
+&#8216;talking to her&#8217;&mdash;<i>Julia!</i>&mdash;and then Paul had come to see her every
+evening, and had been just right&mdash;firm and yet not exacting, and ever so
+gentle and kind&mdash;and this afternoon when he came Lydia cried and didn&#8217;t
+want to go down, but her mother said she mustn&#8217;t be childish, and
+Marietta had just taken her right down to the library and left her there
+with Paul, and there she was now.&#8221; The doctor started up and beat his
+thin, corded hand on the mantel. He could not speak. His sister got up
+and laid a tender hand on his shoulder. &#8220;Poor Marius!&#8221; she said again.</p>
+
+<p>He drew a long breath. &#8220;I did not fly at their throats&mdash;I turned and ran
+like mad down the stairs and into the library. It was Rankin I wanted to
+kill for letting his pride come in&mdash;for leaving her there alone with
+those&mdash;I was ready to snatch Lydia up bodily and carry her off to&mdash;&#8221; He
+stopped short and laughed harshly. &#8220;I reach <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_126" id="pg_126">126</a></span>to Lydia&#8217;s shoulder,&#8221; he
+commented on his own speech. &#8220;That&#8217;s me. To see what&#8217;s to be done and&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What <i>was</i> to be done?&#8221; asked Mrs. Sandworth patiently. She was quite
+used to understanding but half of what her brother said and had acquired
+a quiet art of untangling by tireless questionings the thread of
+narrative from the maze of his comments and ejaculations.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There was nothing to be done. I was too late.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You didn&#8217;t burst in on them while Paul was kissing her or anything, did
+you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Paul wasn&#8217;t there.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not there! Why, Marius, you&#8217;re worse than usual. Didn&#8217;t you tell me her
+mother said&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He had been there&mdash;one look at Lydia showed that. She sat there alone
+in the dim light, her face as white&mdash;and when I came in she said,
+without looking to see who it was, &#8216;I&#8217;m engaged to Paul.&#8217; She said it to
+her mother, who was right after me, of course, and then to Marietta.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well&mdash;!&#8221; breathed Mrs. Sandworth as he paused; &#8220;so that was all there
+was to it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, no; they did the proper thing. They kissed her, and cried, and
+congratulated everybody, and her mother said, with an eye on me:
+&#8216;Darling, you&#8217;re <i>not</i> doing this just because you know it&#8217;ll make us so
+very happy, <i>are</i> you?&#8217; Lydia said, &#8216;Oh, no; she supposed not,&#8217; and
+started to go upstairs. But when Marietta said she&#8217;d go and telephone to
+Flora Burgess to announce it, Lydia came down like a flash. It was <i>not</i>
+to be announced she told them; she&#8217;d <i>die</i> if they told anybody! Paul
+had promised solemnly not to tell anybody. Her mother said, of course
+she knew how Lydia felt about it. It <i>was</i> a handicap for a girl in her
+first season. Lydia was half-way up the stairs again, but at that she
+looked down at her mother&mdash;<i>God!</i> Julia, if a child of mine had ever
+looked at me like that&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Sandworth patted him vaguely. &#8220;Oh, people always look white and
+queer in the twilight, you know&mdash;even quite <i>florid</i> complexions.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor made a rush to the door.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_127" id="pg_127">127</a></span>&#8220;But dinner must be ready to put on the table,&#8221; she called after him.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Put it on, then,&#8221; he cried, and disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>A plain statement was manna to Mrs. Sandworth. She had finished her
+soup, and was beginning on her hamburg steak when the doctor came
+soberly in, took his place, and began to eat in silence. She took up the
+conversation where they had left it.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;So it&#8217;s all over,&#8221; she commented, watching his plate to see that he did
+not forget to salt his meat and help himself to gravy.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Nothing&#8217;s ever over in a human life,&#8221; he contradicted her. &#8220;Why do you
+suppose she doesn&#8217;t want it announced?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You don&#8217;t suppose she means to break it off later?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I haven&#8217;t any idea <i>what</i> she means, any more than she has, poor child!
+But it&#8217;s plain that this is only to gain time&mdash;a sop to the wolves.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Wolves!&#8221; cried poor Mrs. Sandworth.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, tigers and hyenas, perhaps,&#8221; he added moderately.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They&#8217;re crazy about Lydia, that whole Emery family,&#8221; she protested.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They are that,&#8221; he agreed sardonically. &#8220;But I don&#8217;t mean only her
+family. I mean unclean prowling standards of what&#8217;s what, as well as&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They&#8217;d lie down and let her walk over them! You know they would&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If they thought she was going in the right direction.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Sandworth gave him up, and drifted off into speculation. &#8220;I wonder
+what she could have found in that man to think of! A girl brought up as
+she&#8217;s been!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Perhaps she was only snatching a little sensible talk where she could
+get it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But they <i>didn&#8217;t</i> talk sensibly. Marietta said Lydia tried, one of the
+times when they were going over it with her, Lydia tried to tell her
+mother some of the things they said that night when he took her home
+from here. Marietta <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_128" id="pg_128">128</a></span>said they were &#8216;too sickish!&#8217; &#8216;Flat Sunday-school
+cant about wanting to be good,&#8217; and all that sort of thing.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That certainly wouldn&#8217;t have tempted <i>Marietta</i> from the path of virtue
+and sharp attention to a good match,&#8221; murmured the doctor. &#8220;Nobody can
+claim that there&#8217;s anything very seductive to the average young lady in
+Rankin&#8217;s fanaticism.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, you admit he&#8217;s a fanatic!&#8221; Mrs. Sandworth seized on a valuable
+piece of driftwood which the doctor&#8217;s tempest had thrown at her feet.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Everybody who&#8217;s worth his salt is a fanatic.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not Paul. Everybody says he&#8217;s so sane and levelheaded.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There isn&#8217;t a hotter one in creation!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Than <i>Paul</i>?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Than Paul.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, Marius!&#8221; she reproached him for levity.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He&#8217;s a fanatic for success.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I don&#8217;t call <i>that</i>&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Nor nobody else in Endbury&mdash;but it is, all the same. And the only
+wonder is that Lydia should have been attracted by Rankin&#8217;s heretical
+brand and not by Paul&#8217;s orthodox variety. It shows she&#8217;s rare.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Good gracious, Marius! You talk as though it were a question of ideas
+or convictions.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s a horrible conception,&#8221; he admitted gravely.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s which one she&#8217;s in love with!&#8221; Mrs. Sandworth emitted this with
+solemnity.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor stood up to go. &#8220;She&#8217;s not in love with either,&#8221; he
+pronounced. &#8220;She&#8217;s never been allowed the faintest sniff at reality or
+life or experience&mdash;how can she be in love?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, they&#8217;re in love with her,&#8221; she triumphed for her sex.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t know anything about Paul&#8217;s inner workings, and as for Rankin, I
+don&#8217;t know whether he&#8217;s in love with her or not. He&#8217;s sorry for
+her&mdash;he&#8217;s touched by her&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Sandworth felt the ground slip from beneath her <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_129" id="pg_129">129</a></span>feet. &#8220;Good
+gracious me! If he&#8217;s not in love with her, nor she with him, what are
+you making all this fuss about?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor thrust out his lips. &#8220;I&#8217;m only protesting in my usual feeble,
+inadequate manner, after the harm&#8217;s all done, at idiots and egotists
+laying their dirty hands on a sacred thing&mdash;the right of youth to its
+own life&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, if you call that a feeble protest&mdash;!&#8221; she called after him.</p>
+
+<p>He reappeared, hat in hand. &#8220;It&#8217;s nothing to what I&#8217;d like to say. I
+will add that Daniel Rankin&#8217;s a man in a million.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Sandworth responded, rather neatly for her, that she should hope so
+indeed, and added, &#8220;But, Marius, she couldn&#8217;t have married him&mdash;really!
+Mercy! What had he to offer her&mdash;compared with Paul? Everybody has
+always said what a <i>suitable</i> marriage&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton crammed his hat on his head fiercely and said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But it&#8217;s so,&#8221; she insisted.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He hasn&#8217;t anything to offer to Marietta, perhaps.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Marietta&#8217;s <i>married</i>!&#8221; Mrs. Sandworth kept herself anchored fast to the
+facts of any case under discussion.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Is</i> she?&#8221; queried the doctor with a sincerity of interrogation which
+his sister found distracting.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, Marius!&#8221; she reproached him again; and then helplessly, &#8220;How did we
+get on to Marietta, anyhow? I thought we were talking of Lydia&#8217;s
+engagement.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I was,&#8221; he assured her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And I was going to ask you really seriously, just straight out, what
+you are so down on the Emerys for? What have they done that&#8217;s so bad?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They&#8217;ve brought her up so that now in her time of need she hasn&#8217;t a
+weapon to resist them.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, Ma&mdash;&#8221; began Mrs. Sandworth despairingly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, then, I will tell you&mdash;I&#8217;ll explain in words of one syllable.
+Mind you, I don&#8217;t undertake to settle the question&mdash;Heaven forbid! It
+may be all right for Marietta <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_130" id="pg_130">130</a></span>Mortimer to kill herself body and soul by
+inches to keep what bores her to death to have&mdash;a social position in
+Endbury&#8217;s two-for-a-cent society, but, for the Lord&#8217;s sake, why do they
+make such a howling and yelling just at the time when Lydia&#8217;s got the
+tragically important question to decide as to whether that&#8217;s what <i>she</i>
+wants? It&#8217;s like expecting her to do a problem in calculus in the midst
+of an earthquake.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Sandworth had a mortal antipathy to figures of speech, acquired of
+much painful experience with her brother&#8217;s conversation. She sank back
+in her chair and waved him off. &#8220;Calculus!&#8221; she cried, outraged;
+&#8220;earthquakes! And I&#8217;m sure you&#8217;re as unfair as can be! You can&#8217;t say her
+father&#8217;s obscured any question. You <i>know</i> he&#8217;s not a dictatorial
+father. His principle is not to interfere at all with his children.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes; that&#8217;s his principle all right. His specialties are in other
+lines, and they have been for a long time. His wife has seen to that.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Sandworth had one of her lucid divinations of the inner meaning of
+a situation. &#8220;Oh, the poor Emerys! Poor Lydia! Oh, Marius, aren&#8217;t you
+glad we haven&#8217;t any children!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Every child that&#8217;s not getting a fair chance at what it ought to have,
+should be our child,&#8221; he said.</p>
+
+<p>He went up to her and kissed her gently. &#8220;Good-night,&#8221; he said.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Where are you going?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To the Black Rock woods.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tell him&mdash;&#8221; she was inspired&mdash;&#8220;tell him to try to see Lydia again.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I was going to do that. But she won&#8217;t be allowed to. It&#8217;s pretty late
+now. She ought to have seen him a great many years ago&mdash;from the time he
+was born.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But she&#8217;s ever so much younger than he,&#8221; cried Mrs. Sandworth after
+him, informingly.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_131" id="pg_131">131</a></span>
+<a name="LYDIA_DECIDES_IN_PERFECT_FREEDOM_4665" id="LYDIA_DECIDES_IN_PERFECT_FREEDOM_4665"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XIII</p>
+<p class="l c">LYDIA DECIDES IN PERFECT FREEDOM</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The maid had announced to Mrs. Emery, finishing an unusually careful
+morning toilet, that Miss Burgess, society reporter of the Endbury
+<i>Chronicle</i>, was below. Before the mistress of the house could finish
+adjusting her well-matched gray pompadour, a second arrival was
+heralded, &#8220;The gentleman from the greenhouse, to see about Miss Lydia&#8217;s
+party decorations.&#8221; And as the handsome matron came down the stairs a
+third comer was introduced into the hall&mdash;Mme. Boyle herself, the best
+dressmaker in town, who had come in person to see about the refitting of
+the d&eacute;butante&#8217;s Paris dresses, the d&eacute;butante having found the change
+back to the climate of Endbury so trying that her figure had grown quite
+noticeably thinner.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It was the one thing necessary to make Maddemwaselle&#8217;s tournoor exactly
+perfect,&#8221; Mme. Boyle told Mrs. Emery. Out of a sense of what was due her
+loyal Endbury customers, Mme. Boyle assumed a guileless coloring of
+Frenchiness, which was evidently a symbol, and no more intended for a
+pretense of reality than the honestly false brown front that surmounted
+her competent, kindly Celtic face.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery stopped a moment by the newel-post to direct Madame to
+Lydia&#8217;s room and to offer up a devout thanksgiving to the kindly
+Providence that constantly smoothed the path before her. &#8220;Oh, Madame,
+just think if it had been a season when hips were in style!&#8221; As she
+continued her progress to what she was beginning to contemplate calling
+her drawing-room, she glowed with a sense of well-being which buoyed her
+up like wings. In common <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_132" id="pg_132">132</a></span>with many other estimable people, she could
+not but value more highly what she had had to struggle to retain, and
+the exciting vicissitudes of the last fortnight had left her with a
+sweet taste of victory in her mouth.</p>
+
+<p>She greeted Miss Burgess with the careful cordiality due to an ally of
+many years&#8217; standing, and with a manner perceptibly but indefinably
+different from that which she would have bestowed on a social equal.
+Mrs. Emery had labored to acquire exactly that tone in her dealings with
+the society reporter, and her achievement of it was a fact which brought
+an equal satisfaction to both women. Miss Burgess&#8217; mother was an
+Englishwoman, an ex-housekeeper, who had transmitted to her daughter a
+sense, rare as yet in America, of the beauty and dignity of class
+distinctions. In her turn Miss Burgess herself, the hard-working,
+good-natured woman of fifty who for twenty years had reported the doings
+of those citizens of Endbury whom she considered the &#8220;gentry,&#8221; had
+toiled with the utmost disinterestedness to build up a feeling, or, as
+she called it, a &#8220;tone,&#8221; which, among other things, should exclude her
+from equality. When she began she was, perhaps, the only person in town
+who had an unerring instinct for social differences; but, like a kindly,
+experienced actor of a minor r&ocirc;le in theatricals, she had silently given
+so many professional tips to the amateur principals in the play, and had
+acted her own part with such unflagging consistency and good-will, that
+she had often now the satisfaction of seeing one of her pupils move
+through her r&ocirc;le with a most edifying effect of having been born to it.</p>
+
+<p>Long ago she had taken the Emerys to her warm heart and she had rejoiced
+in all their upward progress with the sweet unenvious joy of an ugly
+woman in a pretty, much-loved sister&#8217;s successes. Lydia was to her, as
+to Mrs. Emery, a bright symbol of what she would fain have been herself.
+Miss Burgess&#8217; feeling for her somewhat resembled that devout affection
+which, she had read, was felt by faithful old servants of great English
+families for the young ladies of the house. The pathetic completeness of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_133" id="pg_133">133</a></span>her own insignificance of aspect had spared her any uneasy ambitions
+for personal advancement, and it is probable that the vigor of her
+character and her pleasure in industry were such that she had been
+happier in her daily column and weekly five-column <i>Society Notes</i> than
+if she had been as successful a society matron as Mrs. Emery herself.</p>
+
+<p>She lived the life of a creator, working at an art she had invented, in
+a workroom of her own contriving, loyally drawing the shutters to shade
+an unfortunate occurrence in one of the best families, setting forth a
+partial success with its best profile to the public, and flooding with
+light real achievements like Mrs. Hollister&#8217;s rose party (<i>the</i> Mrs.
+Hollister&mdash;Paul&#8217;s aunt, and Madeleine&#8217;s). All that she wrote was read by
+nearly every woman in Endbury. She was a person of importance, and a
+very busy and happy old maid.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery had a great taste for Miss Burgess&#8217; conversation, admiring
+greatly her whole-hearted devotion to Endbury&#8217;s social welfare. She had
+once said of her to Dr. Melton, &#8220;There is what <i>I</i> call a
+public-spirited woman.&#8221; He had answered, &#8220;I envy Flora Burgess with the
+fierce embittered envy I feel for a cow&#8221;&mdash;an ambiguous compliment which
+Mrs. Emery had resented on behalf of her old ally.</p>
+
+<p>Now, as Mrs. Emery added to her greeting, &#8220;You&#8217;ll excuse me just a
+moment, won&#8217;t you, I must settle some things with my decorator,&#8221; Miss
+Burgess felt a rich content in her hostess&#8217; choice of words. There
+<i>were</i> people in Endbury society who would have called him, as had the
+perplexed maid, &#8220;the gentleman from the greenhouse.&#8221; Later, asked for
+advice, she had walked about the lower floor of the house with Mrs.
+Emery and the florist, saturated with satisfaction in the process of
+deciding where the palms should be put that were to conceal the
+&#8220;orchestra&#8221; of four instruments, and with what flowers the mantels
+should be &#8220;banked.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>After the man had gone, they settled to a consideration of <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_134" id="pg_134">134</a></span>various
+important matters which was interrupted by an impassioned call of Madame
+Boyle from the stairs, &#8220;Could she bring Maddemwaselle down to show this
+<i>perfect</i> fit?&#8221;&mdash;and they glided into a rapt admiration of the
+unwrinkled surface of peach-colored satin which clad Lydia&#8217;s slender and
+flexibly erect back. When she turned about so that Madame could show
+them the truly exqueese effect of the trimming at the throat, her face
+showed pearly shadows instead of its usual flower-like glow. As Madame
+left the room for a moment, Miss Burgess said, with a kind, respectful
+facetiousness, &#8220;I see that even fairy princesses find the emotions of
+getting engaged a little trying.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia started, and flushed painfully. &#8220;Oh, Mother&mdash;&#8221; she began.</p>
+
+<p>Her mother cut her short. &#8220;My <i>dear</i>! Miss Burgess!&#8221; she pointed out, as
+who should deplore keeping a secret from the family priest, &#8220;You know
+she never breathes a word that people don&#8217;t want known. And she had to
+be told so she can know how to <i>put</i> things all this winter.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m sure it&#8217;s the most wonderfully <i>suitable</i> marriage,&#8221; pronounced
+Miss Burgess.</p>
+
+<p>A ring at the door-bell was instantly followed by the bursting open of
+the door and the impetuous onslaught of a girl, a tall, handsome,
+brown-eyed blonde about Lydia&#8217;s age, who, wasting no time in greetings
+to the older women, flung herself on Lydia&#8217;s neck with a wild outcry of
+jubilation. &#8220;My dear! Isn&#8217;t it dandy! Perfectly <i>dandy</i>! Paul met me at
+the train last night and when he told me I nearly swooned for joy! Of
+all the tickled sisters-in-law! I wanted to come right over here last
+night, but Paul said it was a secret, and wouldn&#8217;t let me.&#8221; A momentary
+failure of lung-power forced her to a pause in which she perceived
+Lydia&#8217;s attire. She recoiled with a dramatic rush. &#8220;Oh, you&#8217;ve got one
+of them <i>on</i>! Lydia, how insanely swell you do look! Why, Mrs.
+Emery&#8221;&mdash;she turned to Lydia&#8217;s mother with a light-hearted
+unconsciousness that she had not addressed her before&mdash;&#8220;she doesn&#8217;t look
+<i>real</i>, does she!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_135" id="pg_135">135</a></span>There was an instant&#8217;s pause as the three women gazed ecstatically at
+Lydia, who had again turned her back and was leaning her forehead
+against the window. Then the girl sprang at her again. &#8220;Well, my
+goodness, Lydia! I just love you to pieces, of course, but if we were of
+the same complexion I should certainly put poison in your candy. As it
+is, me so blonde and you so dark&mdash;I tell you what&mdash;what we won&#8217;t do this
+winter&mdash;&#8221; She ran up to her again, putting her arms around her neck from
+behind and whispering in her ear.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Burgess turned to her hostess with her sweet, motherly smile.
+&#8220;Aren&#8217;t girls the <i>dearest</i> things?&#8221; she whispered. &#8220;I love to see them
+so young, and full of their own little affairs. I think it&#8217;s dreadful
+nowadays how so many of them are allowed to get serious-minded.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Madeleine was saying to Lydia, &#8220;You sly little thing&mdash;to land Paul
+before the season even began! Where are you going to get your lingerie?
+Oh, <i>isn&#8217;t</i> it fun? If I go abroad I&#8217;ll smuggle it back for you. You
+haven&#8217;t got your ring yet, I don&#8217;t suppose? Make him make it a ruby.
+That&#8217;s ever so much sweller than that everlasting old diamond. He&#8217;s
+something to land, too, Paul is, if I do say it&mdash;not, of course, that
+we&#8217;ve either of us got any money, but,&#8221; she looked about the handsomely
+furnished house, &#8220;you&#8217;ll have lots, and Paul&#8217;ll soon be making it hand
+over fist&mdash;and I&#8217;ll be marrying it!&#8221; She ended with a triumphant
+pirouette her vision of the future, and encountered Madame Boyle,
+entering with a white and gold evening wrap which sent her into another
+paroxysm of admiration. The dressmaker had just begun to say that she
+thought another line of gold braid around the neck would&mdash;when Mrs.
+Emery, looking out of the window, declared the caterer to be approaching
+and that she <i>must</i> have aid from her subordinates before he should
+enter. &#8220;I do <i>not</i> want to have that old red lemonade and sweet crackers
+everybody has, and slabs of ice-cream floating around on your plate.
+Think quick, all of you! What kind of crackers can we have?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_136" id="pg_136">136</a></span>&#8220;Animal crackers,&#8221; suggested Madeleine, with the accent of a remark
+intended to be humorous, drawing Lydia into a corner. &#8220;Now, don&#8217;t make
+Lydia work. She&#8217;s <i>It</i> right now, and everything&#8217;s to be done for her.
+Madame, come over here with that cloak and let&#8217;s see about the&mdash;and Oh,
+you and Lydia, for the love of Heaven tell me what I&#8217;m to do about this
+fashion for no hips, and me with a figure of eight! Lydia, the fit of
+that thing is <i>sublime</i>!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Maddemwaselle, don&#8217;t you see how a little more gold right here&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Here, Lydia,&#8221; called her mother, &#8220;it wasn&#8217;t the caterer after all; it&#8217;s
+flowers for you. Take it over there to the young lady in pink,&#8221; she
+directed the boy.</p>
+
+<p>Madeleine seized on the box, and tore it open with one of her vigorous,
+competent gestures. &#8220;<i>Orchids!</i>&#8221; she shouted in a single volcanic burst
+of appreciation. &#8220;I never had orchids sent me in my life! Paul must have
+telegraphed for them. You can&#8217;t buy them in Endbury. And here&#8217;s a note
+that says it&#8217;s to be answered at once, while the boy waits&mdash;Oh, my! Oh,
+my!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Lydia, dear, here&#8217;s the caterer, after all. Will you just please say
+one thing. Would you rather have the coffee or the water-ices served
+upstairs&mdash;Oh, here&#8217;s your Aunt Julia&mdash;Julia Sandworth, I never needed
+advice more.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Sandworth&#8217;s appearance was the chord which resolved into one burst
+of sound all the various motives emitted by the different temperaments
+in the room. Every one appealed to her at once.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Just a touch of gold braid on the collar, next the face, don&#8217;t you&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why not a real supper at midnight, with creamed oysters and things, as
+they do in the East?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do <i>you</i> see anything out of the way in publishing the details of Miss
+Lydia&#8217;s dress the day before? It gives people a chance to know what to
+look for.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width:361px">
+<a name="illus-002" id="illus-002"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-137.jpg" alt="&#34;NO, NO; I CAN&#39;T--SEE HIM--I CAN&#39;T SEE HIM ANY MORE--&#34;" title="" width="361" /><br />
+<span class="caption">&#8220;NO, NO; I CAN&#39;T&mdash;SEE HIM&mdash;I CAN&#39;T SEE HIM ANY MORE&mdash;&#8221;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_137" id="pg_137">137</a></span>&#8220;How can we avoid that awful jam-up there is on the stairs when people
+begin to&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Sandworth made her way to the corner where Lydia stood, presenting
+a faultlessly fitted back to the world so that Madame Boyle might, with
+a fat, moist forefinger, indicate the spot where a &#8220;soup&ccedil;on&#8221; of gold
+was needed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Please, ma&#8217;am, the gentleman said I was to wait for an answer,&#8221; said
+the messenger boy beside her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And she hasn&#8217;t <i>read</i> it, yet!&#8221; Madeleine was horrified to remember
+this fact.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Turn around, Lydia,&#8221; said Mrs. Sandworth.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia&#8217;s white lids fluttered. The eyes they revealed were lustrous and
+quite blank. Madeleine darted away, crying, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to get pen and
+paper for you to write your note right now.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Lydia,&#8221; said Mrs. Sandworth, in a low tone, &#8220;Daniel Rankin wants to
+speak with you again. Your godfather is waiting here in the hall to know
+if you&#8217;ll see him. He didn&#8217;t want to <i>force</i> an interview on you if you
+didn&#8217;t want it. He wants to see you but he wanted you to decide in
+perfect <i>freedom</i>&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The tragic, troubled, helpless face that Lydia showed at this speech was
+a commentary on the last word. She looked around the room, her eyebrows
+drawn into a knot, one hand at her throat, but she did not answer. Her
+aunt thought she had not understood. &#8220;Just collect your thoughts,
+Lydia&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The girl beat one slim fist inside the other with a sudden nervous
+movement. &#8220;But that&#8217;s what I can&#8217;t do, Aunt Julia. You know how easily I
+get rattled&mdash;I don&#8217;t know what I&#8217;m&mdash;I <i>can&#8217;t</i> collect my thoughts.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As the older woman opened her lips to speak again she cut her short with
+a broken whispered appeal. &#8220;No, no; I can&#8217;t&mdash;see him&mdash;? I can&#8217;t stand
+any more&mdash;tell him I guess I&#8217;ll be all right&mdash;it&#8217;s settled now&mdash;Mother&#8217;s
+told all these&mdash;I like Paul. I <i>do</i> like him! Mother&#8217;s told <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_138" id="pg_138">138</a></span>everybody
+here&mdash;no, no&mdash;I can&#8217;t, Aunt Julia! I <i>can&#8217;t</i>!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Sandworth, her eyes full of tears, opened her arms impulsively, but
+Lydia drew back. &#8220;Oh, let me alone!&#8221; she wailed. &#8220;I&#8217;m so tired!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Madame Boyle caught this through the clatter of voices. &#8220;Why, poor
+Maddemwaselle!&#8221; she cried, her kindly, harassed, fatigued face melting.
+&#8220;Sit down. Sit down. I can show the ladies about this collar just as
+well that way&mdash;if they&#8217;ll ever look.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Sandworth had disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>Madeleine, coming with the pen and ink, was laughing as she told them,
+&#8220;I didn&#8217;t know Dr. Melton was in the house. I ran into him pacing up and
+down in the hall like a little bear, and just now I saw him&mdash;isn&#8217;t he
+too comical! He must have heard our chatter&mdash;I saw him running down the
+walk as fast as he could go it, his fingers in his ears as if he were
+trying to get away from a dynamite bomb before it went bang.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He hasn&#8217;t much patience with many necessary details of life,&#8221; said Mrs.
+Emery with dignity. She turned her criticism of her doctor into a
+compliment to her brother&#8217;s widow by adding, &#8220;Whatever he would do
+without Julia to look after him, I&#8217;m sure none of us can imagine.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He is a very original character,&#8221; said Miss Burgess, discriminatingly.</p>
+
+<p>Madeleine dismissed the subject with a compendious, &#8220;He&#8217;s the most
+killingly, screamingly funny little man that ever lived!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now, <i>ladies</i>,&#8221; implored Madame Boyle, &#8220;one more row&mdash;not solid&mdash;just a
+soup&ccedil;on&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_139" id="pg_139">139</a></span>
+<a name="MIDSEASON_NERVES_4952" id="MIDSEASON_NERVES_4952"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XIV</p>
+<p class="l c">MID-SEASON NERVES</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>&#8220;If I should wait and read my paper here instead of on the cars, do you
+suppose Lydia would be up before I left?&#8221; asked the Judge as he put his
+napkin in the ring and pushed away from the breakfast table.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery looked up, smiling, from a letter, &#8220;&#8216;Of course such a great
+favorite as Miss Emery,&#8217;&#8221; she read aloud, &#8220;&#8216;will be hard to secure, but
+both the Governor and I feel that our party wouldn&#8217;t be complete without
+her. We&#8217;re expecting a number of other Endbury young people.&#8217; And do you
+know who writes that?&#8221; she asked triumphantly of her husband.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How should I?&#8221; answered the Judge reasonably.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mrs. Ex-Governor Mallory, to be sure. It&#8217;s their annual St. Valentine&#8217;s
+day house-party at their old family estate in Union County.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Judge got up, laughing. &#8220;Old family estate,&#8221; he mocked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They are one of the oldest and best families in this State,&#8221; cried his
+wife.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The Governor&#8217;s an old blackguard,&#8221; said her husband tolerantly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The Mallorys&mdash;the Hollisters&mdash;Lydia is certainly,&#8221; began Mrs. Emery,
+complacently.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia&#8217;s father laughed again. &#8220;Oh, with you and Flora Burgess as manager
+and press agent&mdash;! You haven&#8217;t answered my question about whether if I
+waited and&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, she wouldn&#8217;t,&#8221; said Mrs. Emery decisively. &#8220;After dancing so late
+nights, I want her to sleep every minute she&#8217;s not wanted somewhere. <i>I</i>
+have the responsibility of <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_140" id="pg_140">140</a></span>looking after her health, you know. I hope
+she&#8217;ll sleep now till just time to get up and dress for Marietta&#8217;s
+lunch-party at one o&#8217;clock.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The father of the family frowned. &#8220;Is Marietta giving another
+lunch-party for Lydia? They can&#8217;t afford to do so much. Marietta&#8217;s&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;This is a great chance for Marietta&mdash;poor girl! she hasn&#8217;t many such
+chances&mdash;Lydia&#8217;s carrying everything before her so, I mean.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How does Marietta get into the game?&#8221; asked her father obtusely.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery hesitated a scarcely perceptible instant, a hesitation
+apparently illuminating to her husband. He laughed again, the tolerant,
+indifferent laugh he had for his women-folks&#8217; goings-on. &#8220;She thinks she
+can go up as the tail to Lydia&#8217;s kite, does she? She&#8217;d better not be too
+sure. If I don&#8217;t miss my guess, Paul&#8217;ll have a word or two to say about
+carrying extra weight. Gosh! Marietta&#8217;s a fool some ways for a woman
+that has her brains.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He stated this opinion with a detached, impersonal irresponsibility, and
+began to prepare himself for the plunge into the damp cold of the
+Endbury January. His wife preserved a dignified silence, and in the
+middle of a sentence of his later talk, which had again turned on his
+grievance about never seeing Lydia, she got up, went into the hall, and
+began to use the telephone for her morning shopping. Her conversation
+gave the impression that she was ordering veal cutlets, maidenhair
+ferns, wax floor-polish, chiffon ruching, and closed carriages, from one
+and the same invisible interlocutor, who seemed impartially unable to
+supply any of these needs without rather testy exhortation. Mrs. Emery
+was one of the women who are always well served by &#8220;tradespeople,&#8221; as
+she now called them, &#8220;and a good reason why,&#8221; she was wont to explain
+with self-gratulatory grimness.</p>
+
+<p>The Judge waited, one hand on the door-knob, squaring his jaw over his
+muffler, and listening with a darkening face to the interminable
+succession of purchases. After <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_141" id="pg_141">141</a></span>a time he released the door-knob,
+loosened his muffler, and sat down heavily, his eyes fixed on his wife&#8217;s
+back.</p>
+
+<p>After an interval, Mrs. Emery paused in the act of ringing up another
+number, looked over her shoulder, saw him there and inquired uneasily,
+&#8220;What are you waiting for? You&#8217;ll catch cold with all your things on.
+Isn&#8217;t Dr. Melton always telling you to be careful?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She felt a vague resentment at his being there &#8220;after hours,&#8221; as she
+might have put it, so definitely had long usage accustomed her to a
+sense of solitary proprietorship of the house except at certain fixed
+and not very frequent periods. She almost felt that he was eavesdropping
+while she &#8220;ran her own business.&#8221; There was also his remark about
+Marietta and kites, unatoned for as yet. She had not forgotten that she
+&#8220;owed him one,&#8221; as Madeleine Hollister light-heartedly phrased the
+connubial balanced relationship which had come under her irreverent and
+keen observation. A cumulative sharpness from all these causes was in
+her voice as she remarked, &#8220;Didn&#8217;t I tell you that Lydia&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Judge Emery&#8217;s voice in answer was as sharp as her own. &#8220;Look-y here,
+Susan, I bet you&#8217;ve ordered fifty dollars&#8217; worth of stuff since you
+stood there.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, what if I have?&#8221; She was up in arms in an instant against his
+breaking a long-standing treaty between them&mdash;a treaty not tacit, but
+frequently and definitely stated.</p>
+
+<p>They regulated their relations on a sound business basis, they were wont
+to say of themselves, the natural one, the right one. The husband earned
+the money, the wife saw that it was spent to the best advantage, and
+neither needed to bother his head or dissipate his energies about the
+other&#8217;s end of the matter. They had found it meant less friction, they
+said; fewer occasions for differences of opinion. Once, when they had
+been urging this system upon their son George, then about to marry, Dr.
+Melton had made the suggestion that there would be still fewer
+differences of opinion if married people agreed never to see each other
+after the ceremony in the church. There would be no <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_142" id="pg_142">142</a></span>friction at all
+with that system, he added. It was one of his preposterous speeches
+which had become a family joke with the Emerys.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, what if I have?&#8221; Mrs. Emery advanced defiantly upon her husband,
+with this remark repeated.</p>
+
+<p>Judge Emery shared a well-known domestic peculiarity with other
+estimable and otherwise courageous men. He retreated precipitately
+before the energy of his wife&#8217;s counter-attack, only saying sulkily, to
+conceal from himself the fact of his retreat, &#8220;Well, we&#8217;re not
+millionaires, you know.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Did I ever think we were?&#8221; she said, smiling inwardly at his change of
+front. &#8220;If you stand right up to men, they&#8217;ll give in,&#8221; she often
+counseled other matrons. She began to look up another number in the
+telephone book.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If you order fifty dollars&#8217; worth every morning, besides&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Three-four-four&mdash;Weston,&#8221; remarked his wife to the telephone. To her
+husband she said conclusively, &#8220;I thought we were agreed to make Lydia&#8217;s
+first season everything it ought to be. And isn&#8217;t she being worth it?
+There hasn&#8217;t a girl come out in Endbury in <i>years</i> that&#8217;s been so
+popular, or had so much&mdash;&#8221; She jerked her head around to the
+telephone&mdash;&#8220;Three-four-four&mdash;Weston? Is this Mr. Schmidt? I want Mr.
+Schmidt himself. Tell him Mrs. Emery&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Judge broke in, with the air of launching the most startling of
+arguments, &#8220;Well, my salary won&#8217;t stand it; that&#8217;s sure! If this keeps
+up I&#8217;ll have to resign from the bench and go into practice again.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His wife looked at him without surprise. &#8220;Well, I&#8217;ve often thought that
+might be a very good thing.&#8221; She added, with good-humored impatience,
+&#8220;Oh, go along, Nathaniel. You know it&#8217;s just one of your bilious
+attacks, and you will catch cold sitting there with all your&mdash;Mr.
+Schmidt, I want to complain about the man who dished up the ice-cream at
+my last reception. I am going to give another one next week, and I want
+a different&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_143" id="pg_143">143</a></span>&#8220;I won&#8217;t be back to lunch,&#8221; said her husband. The door slammed.</p>
+
+<p>As he turned into the front walk it opened after him, and his wife
+called after him, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to give a dinner party for Lydia&#8217;s girl
+friends here this evening, so you&#8217;d better get your dinner down-town or
+at the Meltons&#8217;. I&#8217;ll telephone Julia that&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Judge stopped, disappointment, almost dismay, on his face. &#8220;I&#8217;m
+going to keep track from now on,&#8221; he called angrily, &#8220;of just how often
+I catch a glimpse of Lydia. I bet it won&#8217;t be five minutes a week.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery evidently did not catch what he said, and as evidently
+considered it of no consequence that she did not. She nodded
+indifferently and, drawing in her head, shut the door.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of the next week the Judge announced that he had put down
+every time he and Lydia had been in a room together, and it amounted to
+just forty-five minutes, all told. Lydia, a dazzling vision in white and
+gold, had come downstairs on her way to a dance, and because Paul, who
+was to be her escort, was a little late, she told her father that now
+was his time for a &#8220;visit.&#8221; This question of &#8220;visiting&#8221; had grown to be
+quite a joke. Judge Emery clutched eagerly at anything in the nature of
+an understanding or common interest between them.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I don&#8217;t know you well enough to visit with you,&#8221; he now said
+laughingly, &#8220;but I&#8217;ll look at you long enough so I&#8217;ll recognize you the
+next time I meet you on the street-car.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia sat down on his knee, lightly, so as not to crumple her gauzy
+draperies, and looked at her father with the whimsical expression that
+became her face so well. &#8220;I&#8217;m paying you back,&#8221; she said gayly. &#8220;I
+remember when I was a little girl I used to wonder why you came all the
+way out here to eat your meals. It seemed so much easier for you to get
+them near your office. Honest, I did.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ah, that was when I was still struggling to get my toes into a crack in
+the wall and climb up. I didn&#8217;t have time <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_144" id="pg_144">144</a></span>for you then. And you&#8217;re very
+ungrateful to bring it up against me, for all I was doing was to wear my
+nose clear off on the grindstone so&#8217;s to be able to buy you such pretty
+trash as this.&#8221; He stroked the girl&#8217;s shimmering draperies, not thinking
+of what he was saying, smiling at her, delighted with her beauty, with
+her nearness to him, with this brief snatch of intimate talk.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ungrateful&mdash;yourself! What am I doing but wearing my nose off on the
+grindstone&mdash;Dr. Melton threatens nervous prostration every day&mdash;so&#8217;s to
+show off your pretty trash to the best advantage. <i>I</i> haven&#8217;t any time
+to bother with <i>you</i> now!&#8221; she mocked him laughingly, her hands on his
+shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, that sounds like a bargain,&#8221; he admitted, leaning back in his
+chair; &#8220;I suppose I&#8217;ve got to be satisfied if you are. <i>Are</i> you
+satisfied?&#8221; he asked with a sudden seriousness. &#8220;How do you like Paul,
+now you know him better?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia flushed, and looked away in a tremulous confusion. &#8220;Why, when I&#8217;m
+with him I can&#8217;t think of another thing in the world,&#8221; she confessed in
+a low, ardent tone.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ah, well, then that&#8217;s all right,&#8221; said the Judge comfortably.</p>
+
+<p>There was a pause, during which Lydia looked at the fire dreamily, and
+he looked at Lydia. The girl&#8217;s face grew more and more absent and
+brooding.</p>
+
+<p>The door-bell rang. &#8220;There he is, I suppose,&#8221; said her father.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But isn&#8217;t it a pity we couldn&#8217;t make connections?&#8221; she asked musingly.
+&#8220;Maybe I&#8217;d have liked you better with your nose on, better even than
+pretty trash.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Eh?&#8221; said Judge Emery. His blankness was so acute that he slipped for
+an instant back into a rusticity he had long ago left behind him. &#8220;What
+say, Lydia?&#8221; he asked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, yes, Paul; I didn&#8217;t hear you come in,&#8221; called the girl, jumping up
+and beginning to put on her wraps.</p>
+
+<p>The young man darted into the room to help her, saying over his
+shoulder: &#8220;Much obliged to you, Judge, for your <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_145" id="pg_145">145</a></span>good word to Egdon,
+March and Company. I got the contract for the equipment of their new
+factory to-day.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Judge screwed himself round in his chair till he could see Paul
+bending at Lydia&#8217;s feet, putting on her high overshoes. &#8220;That&#8217;s quite a
+contract, isn&#8217;t it?&#8221; he asked, highly pleased.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The biggest I ever got my teeth into,&#8221; said Paul, straightening up.
+&#8220;I&#8217;m ashamed to have Lydia know anything about it, though. I didn&#8217;t
+bring a hack to take her to the dance.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I never thought you would,&#8221; cried Lydia, standing up and stamping
+her feet down in her overshoes&mdash;an action that added emphasis to her
+protest. &#8220;I&#8217;d rather walk, it&#8217;s such a little way. I like it better when
+I&#8217;m not costing people money.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;re not like most of your sex,&#8221; said Paul. &#8220;Down in Mexico, when I
+was there on the Brighton job, I heard a Spanish proverb: &#8216;If a pretty
+woman smiles, some purse is shedding tears.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The two men exchanged laughing glances of understanding. Lydia frowned.
+&#8220;That is hateful&mdash;and horrid&mdash;and a <i>lie</i>!&#8221; she cried energetically,
+finding that they paid no attention to her protest.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>I</i> didn&#8217;t invent it,&#8221; Paul exonerated himself lightly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But you laughed at it&mdash;you think it&#8217;s so&mdash;you&mdash;&#8221; She was trembling in a
+sudden resentment at once inexplicable and amusing to the other two.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Highty-tighty! you little spitfire!&#8221; cried her father, laughing. &#8220;I see
+<i>your</i> finish, my boy!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Good gracious, Lydia, how you do fly at a man! I take it back. I take
+it back.&#8221; Paul looked admiringly at his pretty sweetheart&#8217;s flashing
+eyes and crimson cheeks as he spoke.</p>
+
+<p>She turned away and picked up her cloak without speaking.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To tell the truth,&#8221; said Paul, going on with the conversation as though
+it had not been interrupted, and addressing his father-in-law-to-be,
+&#8220;every penny I can rake and scrape <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_146" id="pg_146">146</a></span>is going into the house. Lydia&#8217;s
+such a sensible little thing I knew she&#8217;d think it better to have
+something permanent than an ocean of orchids and candy now. Besides,
+such a belle as she is gets them from everybody else.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery often pointed out to Lydia&#8217;s inexperience that it was rare to
+see a man so magnanimously free from jealousy as her fianc&eacute;.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The architect and I were going over it to-day,&#8221; the young electrician
+went on, &#8220;and I decided, seeing this new contract means such a lot, that
+I would have the panels in the hall carved, after all&mdash;of course if you
+agree,&#8221; he turned to Lydia, but went on without waiting for an answer.
+&#8220;The effect will be much handsomer&mdash;will go with the rest of the house
+better.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They&#8217;d be lots harder to dust,&#8221; said Lydia dubiously, putting a
+spangled web of gold over her hair. The contrast between her aspect and
+the dingy suggestions of her speech made both men laugh tenderly. &#8220;When
+Titania takes to being practical&mdash;&#8221; laughed Paul.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia went on seriously. &#8220;Honestly, Paul, I&#8217;m afraid the house is
+getting too handsome, anyhow&mdash;everything in it. It&#8217;s too expensive,
+I&#8217;m&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Nothing&#8217;s too good for you.&#8221; Paul said this with conviction. &#8220;And
+besides, it&#8217;s an asset. The mortgage won&#8217;t be so very large. And if
+we&#8217;re in it, we&#8217;ll just have to live up to it. It&#8217;ll be a stimulus.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I hope it doesn&#8217;t stimulate us into our graves,&#8221; said Lydia, as she
+kissed her father good-night.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, your families aren&#8217;t paupers on either side,&#8221; said Paul.</p>
+
+<p>A casual remark like this was the nearest approach he ever made to
+admitting that he expected Lydia to inherit money. He would have been
+shocked at the idea of allowing any question of money to influence his
+marriage, and would not have lifted a hand to learn the state of his
+future father-in-law&#8217;s finances. Still, it was evident to the most
+disinterested eye that there were plenty of funds behind <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_147" id="pg_147">147</a></span>the Emery&#8217;s
+ample, comfortable mode of life, and on this point his eyes were keen,
+for all their delicacy.</p>
+
+<p>As the young people paused at the door, Judge Emery took a note-book out
+of his pocket and elaborately made a note. &#8220;Fifty-five minutes in eight
+days, Lydia,&#8221; he called.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of a fortnight he proclaimed aloud that the record was too
+discouraging to keep any longer; he was losing ground instead of
+gaining. He had followed Mrs. Emery to her room one afternoon to make
+this complaint, and now moved about uneasily, trying to bestow his
+large, square figure where he would not be in the way of his wife, who
+was hurrying nervously about to pack Lydia&#8217;s traveling bag. She looked
+very tired and pale, and spoke as though near a nervous outbreak of some
+sort. Didn&#8217;t he know that Lydia had to start for the Mallory Valentine
+house-party this afternoon, she asked with an asperity not directed at
+the Judge&#8217;s complaint, for she considered that negligible, but at Lydia
+for being late. She often became so absorbed and fascinated by her own
+managerial capacity that she was vastly put out by lapses on the part of
+the object of it. She did not spare herself when it was a question of
+Lydia&#8217;s career. Without a thought of fatigue or her own personal tastes,
+she devoted herself with a fanatic zeal to furthering her daughter&#8217;s
+interests. It sometimes seemed very hard to bear that Lydia herself was
+so much less zealous in the matter.</p>
+
+<p>When the girl came in now, flushed and guiltily breathless, Dr. Melton
+trotted at her heels, calling out excuses for her tardiness. &#8220;It&#8217;s my
+fault. I met her scurrying away from a card-party, and she was exactly
+on time. But I walked along with her and detained her.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It was the sunset,&#8221; said Lydia, hurrying to change her hat and wraps.
+&#8220;It was so fine that when Godfather called my attention to it, I just
+<i>stood</i>! I forgot everything! There may have been sunsets before this
+winter, but it seems as though I hadn&#8217;t had time to see one before&mdash;over
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_148" id="pg_148">148</a></span>the ironworks, you know, where that hideous black smoke is all day, and
+the sun turned it into such loveliness&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;ve missed your trolley-car,&#8221; said her mother succinctly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I&#8217;m <i>sorry</i>!&#8221; cried Lydia, in a remorse evidently directed more
+toward displeasing her mother than the other consequences of her delay,
+for she asked in a moment, very meekly, &#8220;Will it make so very much
+difference if I don&#8217;t go till the next one?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;ll miss the Governor. He was coming down to meet those on this car.
+You&#8217;ll have to go all alone. All the rest of the party were on this
+one.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I don&#8217;t care about that,&#8221; cried Lydia. &#8220;If that&#8217;s all&mdash;I&#8217;d ever so
+much rather go alone. I&#8217;m never alone a single minute, and it&#8217;ll rest
+me. The crowd would have been so noisy and carried on so&mdash;they always
+do.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her mother&#8217;s aggrieved disappointment did not disappear. She said
+nothing, bringing Lydia&#8217;s traveling wraps to her silently, and emanating
+disapproval until Lydia drooped and looked piteously at her godfather.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton cried out at this, &#8220;Look here, Susan Emery, you&#8217;re like the
+carpenter that was so proud of his good planing that he planed his
+boards all away to shavings.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery looked at him with a lack of comprehension of his meaning
+equaled only by her evident indifference to it.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I mean&mdash;I thought what you were going in for was giving Lydia a good
+time this winter. You&#8217;re running her as though she were a
+transcontinental railway system.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You can&#8217;t accomplish anything without system in this world,&#8221; said Mrs.
+Emery. She added, &#8220;Perhaps Lydia will find, when she comes to ordering
+her own life, that she will miss her old mother&#8217;s forethought and care.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia flung herself remorsefully on her mother&#8217;s neck. &#8220;I&#8217;m so <i>sorry</i>,
+Mother dear,&#8221; she almost sobbed. Dr. Melton&#8217;s professional eye took in
+the fact that everyone in the room was high-strung and tense. &#8220;The
+middle-of-the-social-season symptom,&#8221; he called it to himself. &#8220;I&#8217;m so
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_149" id="pg_149">149</a></span>sorry, Mother,&#8221; Lydia went on. &#8220;I will be more careful next time. You
+are <i>so</i> good to&mdash;to&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Good Heavens!&#8221; said Dr. Melton. &#8220;All the child did was to give herself
+a moment&#8217;s time to look at a fine spectacle, after spending all a
+precious afternoon on such a tragically idiotic pursuit as cards.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, <i>sunsets</i>!&#8221; Mrs. Emery disposed of them with a word. &#8220;Come, Lydia.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ll go with her, and carry her bag,&#8221; said the doctor.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You made such a good job of getting her here on time,&#8221; said Mrs. Emery,
+unappeased.</p>
+
+<p>The Judge offered to go, as a means of one of his rare visits with
+Lydia, but his wife declared with emphasis that she didn&#8217;t care who went
+or didn&#8217;t go so long as she herself saw that Lydia did not take to
+star-gazing again. It ended by all four proceeding down the street
+together.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;re sure you remember everything, Lydia?&#8221; asked her mother.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Let me see,&#8221; said the girl, laughing nervously. &#8220;Do I? The Governor&#8217;s
+wife is his second, so I&#8217;m to waste no time admiring the first set of
+children. They&#8217;re Methodists, so I&#8217;m to keep quiet about our being
+Episcopalians&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I guess we&#8217;re not Episcopalians enough to hurt,&#8221; commented her father,
+who had never taken the conversion of his women-folks very seriously.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And it&#8217;s my pink cr&ecirc;pe for dinner and tan-colored suit if they have
+afternoon tea. And Mrs. Mallory is to be asked to visit us, but not her
+daughter, because of her impossible husband, and I&#8217;m to play my
+prettiest to the Governor, because he&#8217;s always needing dynamos and such
+in the works, and Paul&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The big car came booming around the corner, and she stopped her category
+of recommendations. The doctor rushed in with a last one as they stepped
+hurriedly toward the rear platform: &#8220;And don&#8217;t forget that your host is
+the most unmitigated old rascal that ever stood in with two political
+machines at once.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Judge swung her up on the platform, the doctor <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_150" id="pg_150">150</a></span>gave her valise to
+the conductor, her mother waved her hand, and she was off.</p>
+
+<p>The two men turned away. Not so Mrs. Emery. She was staring after the
+car in a fierce endeavor to focus her gaze on the interior. &#8220;Who was
+that man that jumped up so surprised to speak to Lydia?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I didn&#8217;t notice anybody,&#8221; said the Judge.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton spoke quickly. &#8220;Lydia&#8217;s getting in a very nervous state, my
+friends; I want you to know that. This confounded life is too much for
+her.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She doesn&#8217;t kill herself getting up in the morning,&#8221; complained her
+father. &#8220;It is a month now since I&#8217;ve seen her at breakfast.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t <i>let</i> her get up,&#8221; said Mrs. Emery. &#8220;I guess if you&#8217;d been up
+till two every morning dancing split dances because you were <i>the</i> belle
+of the season, you&#8217;d sleep late! Besides,&#8221; she went on, &#8220;she&#8217;ll be all
+right as soon as her engagement is announced. The excitement of that&#8217;ll
+brace her up.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Good Lord! It&#8217;s not more excitement she needs,&#8221; began Dr. Melton; but
+they had reached the house, and Mrs. Emery, obviously preoccupied,
+pulled her husband quickly in, dismissing the doctor with a nod.</p>
+
+<p>She drew the Judge hurriedly into the hall, and, &#8220;It was that Rankin!&#8221;
+she cried, the slam of the door underscoring her words, &#8220;and <i>I</i> believe
+Marius Melton knew he was going on that car and made Lydia late on
+purpose.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Judge Emery was in the state in which of late the end of the day&#8217;s work
+found him&mdash;overwhelmingly fatigued. He had not an ounce of superfluous
+energy to answer his wife&#8217;s tocsin. &#8220;Well, what if it was?&#8221; he said.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They&#8217;ll be an hour and a half together&mdash;alone&mdash;more alone than anywhere
+except on a desert island. Alone&mdash;an hour and a half!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, Susan! If Paul can&#8217;t in three months make more headway than Rankin
+can tear down in an hour and a half&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_151" id="pg_151">151</a></span>She raged at him, revolted at the calmness with which he was
+unbuttoning his overcoat and unwinding his muffler, &#8220;You don&#8217;t
+understand&mdash;<i>anything</i>! I&#8217;m not afraid she&#8217;ll elope with him&mdash;Paul&#8217;s got
+her too solid for that&mdash;Rankin probably won&#8217;t say anything of <i>that</i>
+kind! But he&#8217;ll put notions in her head again&mdash;she&#8217;s so impressionable.
+And she says queer things now, once in a while, if she&#8217;s left alone a
+minute. She needs managing. She&#8217;s not like that levelheaded, sensible
+Madeleine Hollister. Lydia has to be guided, and you don&#8217;t see
+anything&mdash;you leave it all to me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She was almost crying with nervous exhaustion. That Lydia&#8217;s course ran
+smooth through a thousand complications was not accomplished without an
+incalculable expenditure of nervous force on her mother&#8217;s part. Dr.
+Melton had several times of late predicted that he would have his old
+patient back under his care again. Judge Emery, remembering this
+prophecy, was now moved by his wife&#8217;s pale agitation to a
+heart-sickening mixture of apprehension for her and of recollection of
+his own extreme discomfort whenever she was sick. He tried to soothe
+her. &#8220;But, Susan, there&#8217;s nothing we can do about it,&#8221; he said
+reasoningly, hanging up his overcoat, blandly ignorant that her
+irritation came largely from his failure to fall in with her conception
+of the moment as a tragic one.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You could <i>care</i> something about it,&#8221; she said bitterly, standing with
+all her wraps on. The telephone bell rang. She motioned him back. &#8220;No; I
+might as well go first as last. It&#8217;ll be something I&#8217;d have to see
+about, anyway.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As he hesitated in the middle of the hall, longing to betake himself to
+a deep easy chair and a moment&#8217;s relaxation, and not daring to do so, he
+was startled by an electric change in his wife&#8217;s voice. &#8220;You&#8217;re at
+Hardville, you say? Oh, Flora Burgess, I could go down on my knees in
+thanksgiving. I want you to run right out as fast as you can and get on
+the next Interurban car from Endbury. Lydia&#8217;s on it&mdash;&#8221; she cast caution
+from her desperately&mdash;&#8220;and I&#8217;ve <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_152" id="pg_152">152</a></span>just heard that there&#8217;s somebody I
+don&#8217;t want her to talk to&mdash;you know&mdash;<i>carpenters</i>&mdash;run&mdash;fly&mdash;never mind
+what they say! Make them talk to you, too!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She turned back to her husband, transfigured with triumph. &#8220;I guess
+that&#8217;ll put a spoke in <i>his</i> wheel!&#8221; she cried. &#8220;Flora Burgess&#8217;s at
+Hardville, and that&#8217;s only half an hour from here. I guess they can&#8217;t
+get very far in half an hour.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Judge considered the matter with pursed lips. &#8220;I wish it hadn&#8217;t
+happened,&#8221; he mused, as unresponsive to his wife&#8217;s relief as he had been
+to her anxiety. &#8220;At first, I mean&mdash;last autumn&mdash;at all.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His wife caught him up with a good humor gay with relief. &#8220;Oh, give you
+time, Nat, and you come round to seeing what&#8217;s under your nose. I was
+wishing it hadn&#8217;t happened long before I knew it had. I breathed it in
+the air before we ever knew she&#8217;d so much as seen him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Melton says he thinks the fellow has a future before him&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, Marius Melton! How many of his swans have stuffed feather pillows!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Judge demurred. &#8220;I often wish I could think he <i>was</i>&mdash;but Melton&#8217;s
+no fool.&#8221; He added, uneasily, &#8220;He&#8217;s been pestering me again about taking
+a long rest&mdash;says I&#8217;m really out of condition.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Perhaps a change of work would do you good&mdash;to be in active practice
+again. You could be your own master more&mdash;take more vacations, maybe.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Judge surveyed her with a whimsical smile. &#8220;I&#8217;d make a lot more
+money in practice,&#8221; he admitted.</p>
+
+<p>If she heard this comment she made no sign, but went on, &#8220;You do work
+too constantly, too. I&#8217;ve always said so! If you&#8217;d be willing to take a
+little more relaxation&mdash;go out more&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Judge Emery shuddered. &#8220;Endbury tea-parties&mdash;!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His wife, half-way up the stairs, laughed down at him. &#8220;Tea-parties!
+There hasn&#8217;t been a tea-party given in Endbury since we were wearing
+pull-backs.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_153" id="pg_153">153</a></span>The laugh was so good-natured that the Judge hoped for a favorable
+opening and ventured to say irrelevantly, as though reverting
+automatically to a subject always in his mind, &#8220;But, honest, Susie,
+can&#8217;t we shave expenses down some? This winter is costing&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She turned on him, not resentfully this time, but with a solemn appeal.
+&#8220;Why, Nat! Lydia&#8217;s season! The last winter we&#8217;ll have her with us, no
+doubt! I&#8217;d go on bread and water afterward to give her what she wants
+now&mdash;wouldn&#8217;t <i>you</i>? What are we old folks good for but to do our best
+by our children?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Judge looked up at her, baffled, inarticulate. &#8220;Oh, of course,&#8221; he
+agreed helplessly, &#8220;we want to do the best by our children.&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_154" id="pg_154">154</a></span>
+<a name="A_HALFHOURS_LIBERTY_5514" id="A_HALFHOURS_LIBERTY_5514"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XV</p>
+<p class="l c">A HALF-HOUR&#8217;S LIBERTY</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Inside the big Interurban car Lydia and Rankin were talking with a
+freedom that enormously surprised Lydia. The man had started up with an
+exclamation of pleasure, had taken her bag, found a vacant seat, put her
+next the window and sat down by her before Lydia, quite breathless with
+the shock of seeing him, could do more than notice how vigorous he
+looked, his tall, spare figure alert and erect, his ruddy hair and
+close-clipped beard contrasting vividly with his dark-blue flannel shirt
+and soft black hat. He was on a business trip, evidently, for on his
+knees he held a tool-box with large ungloved hands, roughened and red.</p>
+
+<p>With his usual sweeping disregard of conventional approaches, he plunged
+boldly into the matter with which their thoughts were at once occupied.
+&#8220;So this was why Dr. Melton insisted I should take this car. Well, I&#8217;m
+grateful to him! It gives me a chance to relieve my mind of a weight of
+remorse I&#8217;ve been carrying around.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia looked at him, relieved and surprised at the hearty spontaneity of
+this opening.</p>
+
+<p>He misunderstood her expression. &#8220;You don&#8217;t mind, do you, my speaking to
+you about last fall&mdash;my saying I am so very sorry I made you all the
+trouble Dr. Melton tells me I did? I&#8217;m really very sorry!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Nothing could have more completely disarmed Lydia&#8217;s acquired fear of him
+as the bogey-man of her mother&#8217;s exhortations. It is true that she was,
+as she put it to herself, somewhat taken down by the contrast between
+her secret thought of him as a wounded, rejected suitor, and this
+clear-eyed, self-possessed, friendly reality before her; <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_155" id="pg_155">155</a></span>but, after a
+momentary feeling of pique, coming from a sense of the romantic,
+superficially grafted on her natural good feeling, she was filled with
+an immense relief. Lydia was no man-eater. In spite of traditional
+wisdom, she, like a considerable number of her contemporaries, was as
+far removed from this stage of feminine development as from a Stone-age
+appetite for raw meat. She now drew a long breath of the most honest
+satisfaction that she had done him no harm, and smiled at Rankin. He
+waited for her to speak, and she finally said: &#8220;It&#8217;s awfully good of you
+to put it that way! I&#8217;ve been afraid you must have been angry with me
+and hurt that I&mdash;so you didn&#8217;t mind at all!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin smiled at little ruefully at her swift conclusion. &#8220;I believe in
+telling the truth, even to young ladies, and I can not say I didn&#8217;t mind
+at all&mdash;or that I don&#8217;t now. But I am convinced that you were right in
+dropping me&mdash;out of the realm of acquaintances.&#8221; His assumption was,
+Lydia saw with gratitude, that they were talking simply about a possible
+acquaintanceship between them. &#8220;It&#8217;s evidently true&mdash;what I told you the
+very first time I saw you. We don&#8217;t belong in the same world.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As he said this, he looked at her with an expression Lydia thought
+severe. She protested, &#8220;What makes you so sure?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Because to live in my world&mdash;even to step into it from time to
+time&mdash;requires the courage to believe in it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And you think I didn&#8217;t?&#8221; asked Lydia. It was an inestimable comfort to
+her to have brought into the light the problem that had so long lain in
+the back of her head, a confused mass of dark conjecture.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Did you?&#8221; he asked steadily. &#8220;You ought to know.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There was silence, while Lydia turned her head away and looked at the
+brown, flat winter landscape jerking itself past the windows as the car
+began to develop speed in the first long, open space between
+settlements. She was trying to remember something distinct about the
+nightmare of misery that had followed her admission of the identity of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_156" id="pg_156">156</a></span>the man who had kissed her hand that starry night in October, but from
+the black chaos of her recollection she brought out only, &#8220;Oh, you don&#8217;t
+realize how things are with a girl&mdash;how many million little ways she&#8217;s
+bound and tied down, just from everybody in the family loving her as&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, yes, I do; I prove I do by saying that you were probably right in
+yielding so absolutely to that overwhelming influence. If you hadn&#8217;t the
+strength to break through it decisively even once, you certainly
+couldn&#8217;t have gotten any satisfaction out of doing things contrary to
+it. So it&#8217;s all right, you see.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia&#8217;s drooping face did not show that she derived the satisfaction
+from this view of her limitations that her companion seemed to expect.
+&#8220;You mean I&#8217;m a poor-spirited, weak thing, who&#8217;d better never try to
+take a step of my own,&#8221; she said with a sorry smile.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t mean anything unkind,&#8221; he told her gently. &#8220;I&#8217;ve succeeded in
+convincing myself that your action of last autumn was the result of a
+deep-rooted instinct for self-preservation&mdash;and that&#8217;s certainly most
+justifiable. It meant I&#8217;d expected too harsh a strength from you&mdash;&#8221; he
+went on with a whimsical smile, which even the steadiness of his eyes
+did not keep from sadness&mdash;&#8220;as though I&#8217;d hoped you could lift a
+thousand-pound weight, like the strong woman in the side-show.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She responded to his attempt at lightness with as plain an undercurrent
+of seriousness as his own. &#8220;Why do you live so that people have to lift
+thousand-pound weights before they dare so much as say good-morning to
+you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Because I don&#8217;t dare live any other way,&#8221; he answered.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s hard on other people,&#8221; Lydia ventured, but retreated hastily
+before the first expression of upbraiding she had seen in his eyes. He
+had so suddenly turned grave with the thought that it had been harder on
+him than on anyone else that she cried out hurriedly, &#8220;But you didn&#8217;t
+help a bit&mdash;you left it all to me&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_157" id="pg_157">157</a></span>She stopped, her face burning in uncertainty of the meaning of her
+words.</p>
+
+<p>Rankin&#8217;s answer came with the swiftness of one who has meditated long on
+a question. &#8220;I&#8217;m glad you&#8217;ve given me a chance to say what&mdash;I&#8217;ve wished
+you might know. I thought it over and over at the time&mdash;and since&mdash;and
+I&#8217;m sure it would not have been honorable&mdash;or delicate&mdash;or right, <i>not</i>
+to leave it all to you. That much was yours to decide&mdash;whether you would
+take the first step. It would have been a crime to have hurried or urged
+you beyond what lay in your heart to do&mdash;or to have overborne you
+against some deep-lying, innate instinct.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia&#8217;s voice was shaking in self-pity as she cried out, &#8220;Oh, if you
+knew what the others&mdash;nobody <i>else</i> was afraid to hurry or urge me to&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She stopped and looked away, her heart beating rapidly with a flood of
+recollections. Rankin&#8217;s lips opened, but he shut them firmly, as though
+he did not trust himself to speak. His large red hands closed savagely
+on the handle of his tool-box. There was a silence between them.</p>
+
+<p>The car began to move more slowly, and the conductor, standing up from
+the seat where he had been dozing, remarked in a conversational tone to
+a woman with two children near him, &#8220;Gardenton&mdash;this is the cross-roads
+to Gardenton.&#8221; Later, as the car stood still under the singing vibration
+of the trolley-wire overhead, he added in the general direction of Lydia
+and Rankin, now the only passengers, &#8220;Next stop is Wardsboro&#8217;!&#8221; His
+voice came to them with a singular clearness in the quiet of the
+momentary stop. They were in the midst of a mournful expanse of bare
+ploughed fields, frozen and brown. The motorman released his brake,
+letting the brass arm swing noisily about, the conductor sat down again,
+and as the car began to move forward again he closed his eyes. He looked
+very tired and, now that an almost instant sleep had relaxed his
+features, pathetically young.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How pale he is,&#8221; said Lydia, wishing to break the silence with a
+harmless remark. &#8220;He looks tired to death.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_158" id="pg_158">158</a></span>&#8220;He probably is just that,&#8221; said Rankin, wincing. &#8220;It&#8217;s sickening, the
+way they work. Seven days a week, most of them, you know.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No; I didn&#8217;t know,&#8221; cried Lydia, shocked. &#8220;Why, that&#8217;s awful. When do
+they see their families?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They don&#8217;t. One of them, whose house isn&#8217;t far from mine, told me that
+he hadn&#8217;t seen his children, except asleep, for three weeks.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But something ought to be done about it!&#8221; The girl&#8217;s deep-lying
+instinct for instant reparation rose up hotly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Are they so much worse off than most American business men?&#8221; queried
+Rankin. &#8220;Do any of them feel they can take the time to see much more
+than the outside of their children; and isn&#8217;t seeing them asleep about
+as&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia cut him short quickly. &#8220;You&#8217;re always blaming them for that,&#8221; she
+cried. &#8220;You ought to pity them. They can&#8217;t help it. It&#8217;s better for the
+children to have bread and butter, isn&#8217;t it&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin shook his head. &#8220;I can&#8217;t be fooled with that sort of talk&mdash;I&#8217;ve
+lived with too many kinds of people. At least half the time it isn&#8217;t a
+question of bread and butter. It&#8217;s a question of giving the children
+bread and butter and sugar rather than bread and butter and father. Of
+course, I&#8217;m a fanatic on the subject. I&#8217;d rather leave off even the
+butter than the father&mdash;let alone the sugar.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But here&#8217;s this very motorman you know about&mdash;what could he do?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They&#8217;re not forced by the company to work seven days a week&mdash;only
+they&#8217;re not given pay enough to let them take even one day off without
+feeling it. This very motorman I was talking with got to telling me why
+he was working so extra hard just then. His oldest daughter is going to
+graduate from the high school and he wants to give her a fine graduating
+dress, as good as anybody&#8217;s, and a graduating &#8216;present.&#8217; It seems that&#8217;s
+the style now for graduating girls. He said he and his wife wanted her
+always to remember that day as a bright spot, and not as a time <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_159" id="pg_159">159</a></span>when
+she was humiliated by being different from other girls.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, my goodness! you&#8217;re not criticizing them for that, are you? I
+think it was just as sweet and lovely of them as can be to realize how a
+girl feels.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin looked at her, smiled slightly, and said nothing. His silence
+made Lydia thoughtful. After a time, &#8220;I see what you mean, of course,&#8221;
+she said slowly, &#8220;that it would be <i>better</i> for her, perhaps&mdash;but if he
+<i>loves</i> her, her father <i>wants</i> to do things for her.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin&#8217;s roar of exasperation at this speech was so evidently directed
+at an old enemy of an argument that Lydia was only for an instant
+startled by it. &#8220;I <i>don&#8217;t</i> say he can do too much for her,&#8221; he cried.
+&#8220;He can&#8217;t! Nobody can do too much for anybody else if it&#8217;s the right
+thing.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And what in the world do you think <i>would</i> be the right thing in this
+case?&#8221; Lydia put the question as a poser.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, of course, to pamper her vanity; to feed her moral cowardice; to
+make her more afraid than ever of senseless public opinion; to deprive
+her of a fine exercise for her spiritual force; to shut her off from a
+sense of her material situation in life until the knowledge of it will
+come as a tragedy to her; to let her grow up without any knowledge of
+her father&#8217;s point of view&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There, there! That&#8217;s enough!&#8221; said Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I didn&#8217;t need to be so violent about it, that&#8217;s a fact,&#8221; apologized
+Rankin.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But you&#8217;re talking of people the way they ought to be,&#8221; objected Lydia,
+apparently drawing again from a stock of inculcated arguments. &#8220;Do you
+really, honestly, suppose that that girl would rather have an
+opportunity to do something for her parents and&mdash;and&mdash;and all that, than
+have a fine dress that would cost a lot and make the other girls
+envious?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, Lydia!&#8221; cried her companion, not noticing the betrayal of a mental
+habit in the slipping out of her name. &#8220;You&#8217;re just in a state of
+saturated solution of Dr. Melton. <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_160" id="pg_160">160</a></span>Don&#8217;t you believe a word he says
+about folks. They&#8217;re lots better than he thinks. The only reason anybody
+has for raging at them for being a bad lot is because they are such a
+good lot! They are so chuck-full of good possibilities! There&#8217;s so much
+more good in them than bad. You think that, don&#8217;t you? You <i>must</i>!
+There&#8217;s nothing to go on, if you don&#8217;t.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As Lydia began to answer she felt herself, as once or twice before when
+with Rankin, suddenly an immeasurable distance from her usual ways of
+mental life. She looked about her upon a horizon very ample and quite
+strange, without being able to trace the rapid steps that had carried
+her away from the close-walled room full of knickknacks and trifles,
+where she usually lived. She drew a deep breath of surprise and changed
+her answer to an honest &#8220;I don&#8217;t believe I know whether I believe you or
+not. I don&#8217;t think I ever thought of it before.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What <i>do</i> you think about?&#8221; The question was evidently too sincere an
+interrogation to resent.</p>
+
+<p>The girl made several beginnings at an answer, stopped, looked out of
+the window, looked down at her shoe-tip, and finally burst into her
+little clear trill of amusement. &#8220;I don&#8217;t,&#8221; she said, looking full at
+Rankin, her eyes shining. &#8220;You&#8217;ve caught me! I can&#8217;t remember a single
+time in my day when I think about anything but hurrying to get dressed
+in time to be at the next party promptly. Maybe some folks can think
+when they&#8217;re hurrying to get dressed, but I can&#8217;t.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin was very little moved to hilarity by this statement, but he was
+too young to resist the contagion of Lydia&#8217;s mirth, and laughed back at
+her, wondering at the mobility of her ever-changing face.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If you don&#8217;t think, what do you <i>do</i>?&#8221; he interrogated with mock
+relentlessness.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Nothing,&#8221; said Lydia recklessly, still laughing.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What do you feel?&#8221; he went on in the same tone, but Lydia&#8217;s face
+changed quickly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh&mdash;lots!&#8221; she said uncertainly, and was silent.</p>
+
+<p>The car began to pass some poor, small houses, and in a <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_161" id="pg_161">161</a></span>moment came to
+a standstill in the midst of a straggling village. The young conductor
+still slept on, his head fallen so far on his shoulder that his
+breathing was difficult. The motorman, getting no signal to go on,
+looked back through the window, putting his face close to the glass to
+see, for it had grown dusky outside and the electric lights were not yet
+turned on. After a look at the sleeping man he glanced apprehensively at
+the two passengers, and then, apparently reassured that they were not
+&#8220;company detectives,&#8221; he pushed open the door. &#8220;This is Wardsboro&#8217;,&#8221; he
+told them as he went down the aisle, &#8220;and the next stop is Hardville.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He was a strong, burly man, and easily lifted the slight, boyish form of
+the conductor to a more comfortable position, propping him up in a
+corner of the seat. The young man did not waken, but his face relaxed
+into peaceful lines of unconsciousness as his head fell back, and his
+breathing became long and regular, like a sleeping child&#8217;s. As the big
+motorman went back to his post, he explained a little sheepishly to the
+two, who had watched his operation in attentive silence, &#8220;It&#8217;s against
+the rules, I know, but there ain&#8217;t anybody but you two here, and he
+don&#8217;t look as though he&#8217;d really got his growth yet. I got a boy ain&#8217;t
+sixteen that looks as old as he does, and ruggeder at that. I reckon the
+long hours are too much for him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do you know him?&#8221; asked Rankin.</p>
+
+<p>The motorman turned his red, weather-beaten face to them from the
+doorway where he stood, pulling on his clumsy gloves. &#8220;Who, me?&#8221; he
+asked. &#8220;No; I never seen him till to-day. He&#8217;s a new hand, I reckon.&#8221; He
+drew the door after him with a rattling slam, rang the bell for himself,
+and started the car forward.</p>
+
+<p>In the warm, vibrating solitude of the car, the two young people looked
+at each other in a silent transport. Lydia&#8217;s dark eyes were glistening,
+and she checked Rankin, about to speak, with a quick, broken &#8220;No; don&#8217;t
+say a word! You&#8217;d spoil it!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There was between them one of the long, vital silences, full of
+certainty of a common emotion, which had once or <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_162" id="pg_162">162</a></span>twice before marked a
+significant change in their relation. Finally, &#8220;That&#8217;s something I shall
+never forget,&#8221; said Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>Rankin looked at her in silence, and then, quickly, away.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s like an answer to what I was saying&mdash;a refutation of what Dr.
+Melton thinks&mdash;about people&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As Rankin still made no answer, she exclaimed in a ravished surprise,
+&#8220;Why, I never saw anything so lovely&mdash;that made me so happy! I feel warm
+all over!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, her face shone through the dusk upon her companion, who could
+now no longer constrain himself to look away from her. He said, his
+voice vibrant with a deep note which instantly carried Lydia back to the
+other time when she had heard it, under the stars of last October, &#8220;It&#8217;s
+only an instrument exquisitely in tune which can so respond&mdash;&#8221; He broke
+off, closed his lips, and, turning away from her, gazed sightlessly out
+at the dim, flat horizon, now the only outline visible in the twilight.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia said nothing, either then or when, after a long pause, he said
+that he would leave the car at the next station.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It has been very pleasant to see you again,&#8221; he said, bending over his
+tool-box, &#8220;and you mustn&#8217;t lay it up against me that I haven&#8217;t
+congratulated you on your engagement. Of course you know how I wish you
+all happiness.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Thank you,&#8221; said Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>Ahead of the car, some lights suddenly winking above the horizon
+announced the approach of Hardville. Rankin stood up, slipped on his
+rough overcoat, and sat down again. He drew a long breath, and began
+evenly: &#8220;I know you won&#8217;t misunderstand me if I try to say one more
+thing. I probably won&#8217;t see you again for years, and it would be a great
+joy to me to be sure that you know how hearty is my good-will to you.
+I&#8217;m afraid you can&#8217;t think of me without pain, because I was the cause
+of such discomfort to you, but I know you are too generous to blame me
+for what was an involuntary hurt. Of course I ought to have known how
+your guardians would feel about your knowing me&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_163" id="pg_163">163</a></span>&#8220;Oh, <i>why</i> should you be so that all that happened!&#8221; cried Lydia
+suddenly. &#8220;If it was too hard for me, why couldn&#8217;t you have made it
+easier&mdash;thought differently&mdash;acted like other people. <i>Would</i> you&mdash;if I
+hadn&#8217;t&mdash;if we had gone on knowing each other?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin turned very white. &#8220;No,&#8221; he said; &#8220;I couldn&#8217;t.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It seems to me,&#8221; said Lydia hurriedly, &#8220;that, without being willing to
+concede anything to their ideas, you ask a great deal of your friends.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; said Rankin, &#8220;I do. It&#8217;s a hard struggle I&#8217;m in with myself and
+the world&mdash;oh, evidently much too hard for you even to look at from a
+distance.&#8221; His voice broke. &#8220;The best thing I can do for you is to stay
+away&mdash;&#8221; He rose, and stepped into the aisle. &#8220;But you are so kind&mdash;you
+will let me serve you in any other way, if I can&mdash;ever. If I can ever do
+something that&#8217;s hard for you to do&mdash;you must know that I stand as ready
+as even Dr. Melton to do it for you if I can.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, for the moment, as Lydia looked up into his kind, strong face,
+his impersonal tenderness made him seem almost such an old, tried friend
+as her godfather; almost as unlikely to expect any intimate personal
+return from her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You must remember,&#8221; he went on, &#8220;the great joy it gave us both to-day
+even to see an act of kindness. Give me an opportunity to do one for you
+if I ever can.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It already seemed to Lydia as though he had gone away from her, as
+though this were but a beneficent memory of him lingering by her side.
+She hardly noticed when he left her alone in the car.</p>
+
+<p>The conductor started up, wakened by the silence, and announced wildly,
+&#8220;Wardsboro&#8217;, Wardsboro&#8217;!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, it ain&#8217;t; it&#8217;s the first stop in Hardville,&#8221; contradicted the
+motorman, sticking his head in through the door. &#8220;Turn on them lights!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As the glass bulbs leaped to a dazzling glare, Lydia blinked and looked
+away out of the window. A moment later an arm laid about her neck made
+her bound up in amazement and confront a small, middle-aged woman, with
+a hat too <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_164" id="pg_164">164</a></span>young for her tired, sallow face, with a note-book in her
+hand and an apologetic expression of affection in her light blue eyes.
+&#8220;I&#8217;m sorry I startled you, Miss Lydia,&#8221; she said. &#8220;I keep forgetting
+you&#8217;re not still a little girl I can pick up and hug.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, you!&#8221; breathed the girl, sitting down again. &#8220;I didn&#8217;t think there
+was anybody in the car with me, you see.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Have you come all the way from Endbury alone, then?&#8221; asked Miss
+Burgess, looking about her suspiciously.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, I have not,&#8221; said Lydia uncompromisingly. &#8220;Mr. Rankin, the
+cabinet-maker, has been with me till just now.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Miss Burgess sat down hastily in the vacant seat by Lydia. &#8220;And he&#8217;s
+coming back?&#8221; she inquired.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No; he got off at Hardville. This <i>is</i> Hardville, isn&#8217;t it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes. I happened to be out reporting a big church bazaar here.&#8221; She
+settled back comfortably. &#8220;What a nice chance for a cozy little visit I
+shall have with you. These long trips on the Interurban are fine for
+talking. Unless I shall tire you? Did Mr. Rankin talk much? What does he
+talk <i>about</i>, anyhow? He&#8217;s always so rude to me that I&#8217;ve never heard
+him say a word except about his work.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia considered for a moment. &#8220;We talked about the street-car
+conductors having such long hours to work,&#8221; she said, &#8220;and later about
+whether people have more bad in them than good.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh!&#8221; said Miss Burgess.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia smiled faintly, the ghost of her whimsical little look of mockery.
+&#8220;We decided that they have more good,&#8221; she said.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Burgess cast about her for a suitable comment. At last, &#8220;Really!&#8221;
+she said.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_165" id="pg_165">165</a></span>
+<a name="ENGAGED_TO_BE_MARRIED_5940" id="ENGAGED_TO_BE_MARRIED_5940"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XVI</p>
+<p class="l c">ENGAGED TO BE MARRIED</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>All over the half-finished house the workmen began to lay down their
+tools. Paul Hollister&#8217;s face broke into a good-humored smile as a moment
+later he caught the faraway five-o&#8217;clock whistles calling from the city.
+He was in a very happy mood these days and the best aspect of the
+phenomena of the world was what impressed him most. As the workmen
+disappeared down the driveway to the main road, running to catch the
+next trolley-car to Endbury, he looked after them with little of the
+usual exasperation of the house-builder whose work they were slighting,
+but with an agreeable sense of their extreme inferiority to him in the
+matter of fixity of purpose. He felt that they symbolized the weakness
+of most of humanity, and promised himself with a comfortable confidence
+an easy and lifelong victory over such feeble adversaries. Of late,
+business had been going even better than ever.</p>
+
+<p>The days had begun to grow appreciably longer with the approach of
+spring, and there had been several noons of an almost summer-like
+mildness, but now, in spite of the fact that the sun was still shining,
+the first chill of the late March evening dropped suddenly upon the
+bare-raftered structure whose open windows and door-spaces offered no
+barrier to the damp breeze. Hollister stirred from his pleasant reverie
+and began to walk briskly about, inspecting the amount of work
+accomplished since his last visit. He kept very close track of the
+industry of his workmen and the competence of his contractor, and
+Lydia&#8217;s father admired greatly the way in which his future son-in-law
+did not allow himself to be &#8220;done&#8221; by those past masters of <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_166" id="pg_166">166</a></span>the art. It
+argued well for the future, Judge Emery thought, and he called Lydia&#8217;s
+attention to the trait with approval.</p>
+
+<p>Before the wide aperture which was to be the front door, the owner of
+the house stopped and looked eagerly out toward the road. It was near
+the time when Lydia had promised to be there, and he meant to see her
+and run to meet her when she first turned in upon the ground that was to
+be her home. It was the first time that Lydia had happened to visit the
+new house alone. Either her mother or Hollister&#8217;s sister had accompanied
+her on the two or three other occasions, but to-day she telephoned that
+Mrs. Emery had been really out-and-out forbidden by Dr. Melton to get
+out of bed for two or three days, and as for Madeleine&mdash;at this point
+Madeleine had snatched the receiver from Lydia&#8217;s hand and had informed
+her brother that Madeleine was going to be busy with <i>her</i> young man and
+couldn&#8217;t get off to chaperone people that had been as long engaged as he
+and Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>That was part of the bright color of the world to Paul&mdash;his sister&#8217;s
+recent engagement to their uncle&#8217;s partner in the iron works, a very
+prosperous, young-old bachelor of fifty-odd, whose intense preoccupation
+with business had never been pierced by any consciousness of the other
+sex until Madeleine had, as she proclaimed in her own vernacular, &#8220;taken
+a club to him.&#8221; It was a very brilliant match for her, and justified her
+own prophecy concerning herself that she was not to be satisfied with
+any old-fashioned, smooth-running course for true love. &#8220;It must shoot
+the chutes, or nothing,&#8221; she was accustomed to say, in her cheerful,
+high-spirited manner.</p>
+
+<p>Paul thought, with self-approval, that, for orphans of the poorer branch
+of the Hollister family, he and Madeleine had not done badly with their
+lives thus far.</p>
+
+<p>He looked again impatiently toward the entrance to the grounds. A
+trolley-car had just rattled by on the main road. If Lydia was on it,
+she would appear at that turning under the trees. No; evidently she had
+not been on <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_167" id="pg_167">167</a></span>that one. The harsh jar of the trolley&#8217;s progress died away
+in the distance and no Lydia appeared. He had fifteen minutes to wait
+for the next one.</p>
+
+<p>He drew out a note-book and began jotting down some ideas about the
+disposition of the five acres surrounding the house. He was ambitious to
+have the appearance of a country estate and avoid the &#8220;surburban&#8221; look
+which would be so fatally easy to acquire in the suburban place. He
+decided that he would not as yet fence in his land. The house was the
+last one of a group of handsome residences that had lately sprung up in
+the vicinity of the new Country Club, and to the south was still open
+country, so that without a fence, he reflected, he could have himself,
+and convey tacitly to others, the illusion of owning the wide sweep of
+meadow and field which stretched away a mile or more to a group of beech
+trees.</p>
+
+<p>He jumped down lightly from the porch, as yet but sketchily outlined in
+joists and rafters, and stood in a litter of shavings, bits of board and
+piles of yellow earth, with a kindling eye. He had that happy prophetic
+vision of the home-builder which overlooks all present deficiencies and
+in an instant, with a confident magic, erects all that the slow years
+are to build. He saw a handsome, well-kept house, correctly colonial in
+style, grounds artfully laid out to increase the impression of space, a
+hospitable, smoothly run interior, artistic, homelike, admired.</p>
+
+<p>A meadow-lark near him began to tinkle out its pretty silver notes. The
+sun set slowly below the smoky horizon; a dewy peace fell about the
+deserted place. Paul had his visions of other than material elements in
+his future and Lydia&#8217;s. Such a dream came to him there, standing in the
+dusk before the germ of his home to be. He saw himself an alert man of
+forty-five, a good citizen, always on the side of civic honor; a good
+captain of industry, quick to see and reward merit; a good husband who
+loved and cherished his wife as on the day he married her, and protected
+her from all the asperities of reality; a good father&mdash;he had almost an
+actual vision of the children <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_168" id="pg_168">168</a></span>who would carry on his work in
+life&mdash;girls of Lydia&#8217;s beauty and sweetness, boys with his energy and
+uprightness&mdash;and there was Lydia, too, the Lydia of twenty years from
+now&mdash;in the full bloom of physical allurement still, a gracious hostess,
+a public-spirited matron, lending the luster of his name to all worthy
+charities indorsed by the best people, laying down with a firm good
+taste dictates as to the worthy social development of the town. Before
+this vision there rose up in him the ardent impulse to immediate effort
+which is the sign manual of the man of action. He stirred and flung his
+arm out.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s all up to me,&#8221; he said aloud. &#8220;I can do it if I go after it hard
+enough. I&#8217;ve got to make good for Lydia&#8217;s sake and mine. She must have
+the best I can get&mdash;the very best I know how to get for her.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A sound behind him made him catch his breath. He was trembling as he
+turned about and saw Lydia coming swiftly up the driveway. &#8220;Good
+Heavens, how I love her!&#8221; he thought as he ran down to meet her.</p>
+
+<p>He was trembling when he took her in his arms, folding her in that close
+embrace of surprised rapture at finding everything real, and no dream,
+which is the unique joy of betrothal. He would not let her speak for a
+moment, pressing his lips upon hers. When he released her, she cried in
+a whisper, &#8220;Oh, it&#8217;s wonderful how when you&#8217;re close to me everything
+else just isn&#8217;t in the world!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s being in love, Lydia,&#8221; Paul told her with a grave thankfulness.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t mean,&#8221; she went on, with her ever-present effort to express
+honestly her meaning, &#8220;I don&#8217;t mean just&mdash;just being really
+close&mdash;having your arms around me, though that always makes me forget
+things, too&mdash;but being&mdash;<i>feeling</i> close, you know&mdash;inside. Not having
+any inner corner where we&#8217;re not together&mdash;the way we are now&mdash;the way I
+knew we should be when I saw you running down to meet me. I always know
+the minute I see you whether it&#8217;s going to be this way.&#8221; She added, a
+little wistfully, &#8220;Sometimes, you know, it isn&#8217;t.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_169" id="pg_169">169</a></span>Paul lifted her up to the porch and led her across into the hallway.
+Here he took her in his arms again and said with a shaken accent:
+&#8220;Dearest Lydia, dearest! I wish it were always the way you want it&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia dropped her head back on his shoulder and looked at him earnestly.
+In the half-light, white and clear from the freshly plastered walls, her
+face was like alabaster. &#8220;Dear Paul, isn&#8217;t that what getting married
+means&mdash;to learn how to be really, really close to each other all the
+time. There isn&#8217;t anything else worth getting married for, is there?
+<i>Is</i> there?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her lover looked down into her eyes, into her sweet, earnest face, and
+could not speak. Finally, his hand at his throat, &#8220;Oh, Lydia, you&#8217;re too
+good for me!&#8221; he said huskily. &#8220;You&#8217;re too good for any man!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, no, no!&#8221; she protested with a soft energy. &#8220;I&#8217;m weak, as weak as
+water. You must give me a lot of your strength or I&#8217;ll go under.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;God knows I&#8217;ll give you anything I have.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then, never let things come between us&mdash;never, never, never! I&#8217;m all
+right as long as I&#8217;m close to you. If we just keep that, nothing else
+can matter.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They were silent, standing with clasped hands in the passage-way that
+was to be the thoroughfare of their common life. It was a moment that
+was to come back many times to Lydia&#8217;s memory during later innumerable,
+hurried daily farewells. The thought of the significance of the place
+came to her mind now. She said softly, &#8220;This must be a foretaste of what
+we&#8217;re to have under this roof. How good it seems not to be in a hurry
+to&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>With a start Paul came to himself from his unusual forgetfulness of his
+surroundings. &#8220;We <i>ought</i> to be in a hurry now, dearest. Dr. Melton
+keeps me stirred up all the time to take care of you, and I&#8217;m sure I&#8217;m
+not doing that to let you stand here in this cold evening air. Come, let
+me show you&mdash;the closet under the stairs, you know, and the place for
+the refrigerator.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia yielded to his care for her with her sweet passivity, <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_170" id="pg_170">170</a></span>echoed his
+opinion about the details, and ran beside him down the driveway, to
+catch the next car to Endbury, with a singular light grace for a tall
+woman encumbered with long skirts.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of their haste, they missed the car and were obliged to wait
+for a quarter of an hour beside the tracks. They talked cheerfully on
+indifferent topics, the sense of intimate comradeship gilding all they
+said. In their hearts was fresh the memory of the scene in the new
+house. They looked at each other and smiled happily in the intervals of
+their talk.</p>
+
+<p>Paul was recapitulating to Lydia the advantages of the location of their
+house. &#8220;We are in the vanguard of a new movement in American life,&#8221; he
+said, &#8220;the movement away from the cities. Madeleine tells me that she
+and Lowder are planning a house at the other end of this street, and you
+can be sure they know what they are about.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia did not dissent from this opinion of her future sister-in-law, but
+she interrupted Paul a moment later, to say fondly, &#8220;<i>Oh</i>, but I&#8217;m glad
+that you aren&#8217;t fifty-five and bald and with lots of money!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul laughed. &#8220;Madeleine&#8217;ll get on all right. She knows what she&#8217;s
+about. It&#8217;s a pair of them.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, I am church-thankful that that is not what <i>we</i> are about!&#8221;
+exclaimed Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>Her lover voiced the extreme content with his lot which had been his
+obsession that day. &#8220;We have <i>everything</i>, darling. We shall have all
+that Madeleine and old Lowder have and we have now all this heavenly
+happiness that they&#8217;ll never know&mdash;or miss,&#8221; he added, giving them their
+due.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I didn&#8217;t mean that,&#8221; protested Lydia. &#8220;It seems to me that being like
+them and being like us are two contradictory things. You <i>can&#8217;t</i> be both
+and have the things that go with both. And what I&#8217;m so thankful for is
+that we&#8217;re us and not them.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul laughed. &#8220;You just see if there&#8217;s anything so contradictory. <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_171" id="pg_171">171</a></span>Trust
+me. You just see if you don&#8217;t beat Madeleine on her own ground yet.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t <i>want</i>&mdash;&#8221; began Lydia; but Paul had gone back to his first
+theme and was expanding it for her benefit. &#8220;Yes; we&#8217;re getting the
+English idea. In twenty years from now you&#8217;ll find the social center of
+every moderate-sized American city shifted to some such place as this.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia craned her neck down the tracks impatiently. &#8220;I hope we don&#8217;t miss
+a trolley car every day of those twenty years,&#8221; she said, laughing.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We&#8217;ll have an automobile,&#8221; he said. Then, reflecting that this was a
+somewhat exaggerated prophecy, he went on, with the honesty he meant
+always to show Lydia (so far as should be wise), &#8220;No; I&#8217;m afraid we
+sha&#8217;n&#8217;t, either&mdash;not for some time. It&#8217;ll take several years to finish
+paying altogether for the house, and we&#8217;ll have to pull hard to keep up
+our end for a time. But we&#8217;re young, so much won&#8217;t be expected of
+us&mdash;and if we just dig in for a few years now while we&#8217;re fresh, we can
+lie back and&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, <i>gracious</i>!&#8221; said Lydia, &#8220;who wants an automobile, anyhow! Only I
+wish the trolley didn&#8217;t take so long. It&#8217;s going to take the best part
+of an hour, you know; the ten or twelve minutes to get here from the
+house, the two or three minutes to wait, the thirty minutes on the car,
+the ten minutes to your office&mdash;and then all that turned inside out when
+you come back in the evening.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I&#8217;ll be able to do a lot of business figuring in that time. It
+won&#8217;t be wasted.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They fell into happy picture-making of their future. Lydia wanted to
+have chickens and a garden, she said. She&#8217;d always wanted to be a
+farmer&#8217;s wife&mdash;an idea that caused Paul much laughter. They revised the
+plans for the furnishing of the hall&mdash;the china closet could stand
+against the west wall of the dining-room; why had they not thought of
+that before? The little room upstairs was to be a sewing-room &#8220;Although
+I hate sewing,&#8221; cried Lydia, &#8220;and nowadays, when ready-mades are so
+cheap and good&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_172" id="pg_172">172</a></span>&#8220;Nobody expected you to make yourself tailored street dresses,&#8221; said
+Paul; &#8220;but don&#8217;t I all the time hear Madeleine and my aunt saying how
+the &#8216;last <i>chic</i> of a costume, the little indefinable touches that give
+a toilet distinction,&#8217; they have to fuss up themselves out of bits of
+lace and ribbon and fur and truck?&#8221; He was quoting, evidently, with an
+amused emphasis.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia leaned to him, her eyes wide in a mock solemnity. &#8220;Paul, I have a
+horrible confession to make to you. I <i>loathe</i> the &#8216;last <i>chic</i>, the
+little indefinable touches that give a toilet,&#8217; and so forth! It makes
+me sick to spend my time on them. What difference does it make to real
+folks if their toilets <i>aren&#8217;t</i> &#8216;and so forth!&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She looked so deliciously whimsical with her down-drawn face of
+rebellious contrition that Paul was enchanted. &#8220;And this I learn when
+it&#8217;s too late for me to draw back!&#8221; he cried in horror. &#8220;Woman! woman!
+this tardy confession&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, there are lots of other confessions. Just wait.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Out with them!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t know <i>anything</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s something,&#8221; admitted Paul.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And you must teach me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, this docile little 1840 wife! Don&#8217;t you know the suffragists will
+get you if you talk meek like that? What do you want to know? Volts, and
+dynamos, and induction coils?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Everything,&#8221; said Lydia comprehensively, &#8220;that you know. Books,
+politics, music&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Lord! what a hash! What makes you think I know anything about such
+things?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, you went through Cornell. You must know about books. And you&#8217;re a
+man, you must know about politics; and as for music, we&#8217;ll learn about
+that together. Aunt Julia and Godfather are going to give us a
+piano-player&mdash;though I know they can&#8217;t afford it, the dears!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;People <i>are</i> good to us.&#8221; Paul&#8217;s flush of gratitude for his good
+fortune continued.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_173" id="pg_173">173</a></span>&#8220;You like music, don&#8217;t you?&#8221; asked Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I guess so; I don&#8217;t know much about it. Some crazy German post-grads at
+Cornell used to make up a string quartette among themselves and play
+some things I liked to hear&mdash;I guess it was pretty good music, too. They
+were sharks on it, I know. Yes; now I think of it, I used to like it
+fine. Maybe if I heard more&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, the evenings together!&#8221; breathed Lydia. &#8220;Doesn&#8217;t it take your
+breath away to think of them? We&#8217;ll read together&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul saw the picture. &#8220;Yes; there&#8217;re lots of books I&#8217;ve always meant to
+get around to.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They were silent, musing.</p>
+
+<p>Then Paul laughed aloud. Lydia started and looked at him inquiringly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I was just thinking how old married folks would laugh to hear us
+infants planning our little castles in Spain. You know how they always
+smile at such ideas, and say every couple starts out with them and after
+about six months gets down to concentrating on keeping up the furnace
+fire and making sure the biscuits are good.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia laid her hand eagerly on his arm. &#8220;But don&#8217;t let&#8217;s, Paul! Please,
+<i>please</i> don&#8217;t let us! Just because everybody else does is no reason why
+we <i>have</i> to. You&#8217;re always saying folks can make things go their way if
+they try hard enough&mdash;you&#8217;re so clever and&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I&#8217;m a wonder, I know! You needn&#8217;t tell me how smart I am.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But, Paul, I&#8217;m in earnest&mdash;I mean it&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The car had arrived by this time and he swung her up to the platform.
+Like other moderns they were so accustomed to spend a large part of
+their time in being transported from place to place that they were quite
+at home in the noisy public conveyance, and after a pause to pay fares,
+remove wraps, and nod to an acquaintance or two, they went on with their
+conversation as though they were alone. People looked approvingly at the
+comely, well-dressed young couple, so na&iuml;vely absorbed in each other,
+and speculated <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_174" id="pg_174">174</a></span>as to whether they were just married or just about to
+be.</p>
+
+<p>After they were deposited at the corner nearest the Emery house, the
+change to the silent street, up which they walked slowly, reluctant to
+separate, took them back to their first mood of this loveliest of all
+their hours together&mdash;the sweet intimacy of their first meeting in the
+new house.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia felt herself so wholly in sympathy with Paul that she was moved to
+touch upon something that had never been mentioned between them. &#8220;Paul,
+dear,&#8221; she said, her certainty that he would understand, surrounding her
+with an atmosphere of spiritual harmony which she recognized was the
+thing in all the world which mattered most to her, &#8220;Paul dear, I never
+told you&mdash;there&#8217;s nothing to tell, really&mdash;but when I went to the
+Mallory&#8217;s house-party in February I rode from here to Hardville with Mr.
+Rankin and had a long talk with him. You don&#8217;t mind, do you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her lover drew her hand within his arm and gave it an affectionate
+pressure. &#8220;You may not know things, Lydia, as you say, but you are the
+<i>nicest</i> girl! the straightest! I knew that at the time&mdash;Miss Burgess
+told me. But I&#8217;m glad you&#8217;ve given me a chance to say how sorry I was
+for you last autumn when everybody was pestering you so about him. I
+knew how you felt&mdash;better than you did, I&#8217;ll bet I did! I wasn&#8217;t a bit
+afraid. I knew you could never care for anybody but me. Why, you&#8217;re
+<i>mine</i>, Lydia, I&#8217;m yours, and that&#8217;s all there is to it. You know it as
+well as I do.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>I know it when I&#8217;m with you</i>,&#8221; she told him with a bravely honest,
+unspoken reservation.</p>
+
+<p>He laughed his appreciation of her insistent sincerity. &#8220;Well, when
+you&#8217;re married won&#8217;t you be with me all the time? So that&#8217;s fixed! And
+as for meeting somebody by accident on the street-cars&mdash;why, you foolish
+darling, you&#8217;re not marrying a Turk, or an octopus&mdash;but an American.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia was silent, but her look was enough to fill the pause richly. She
+was savoring to the full the joy of close <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_175" id="pg_175">175</a></span>community of spirit which had
+been so rare in her pleasant life of material comfort, and she was
+saying a humble prayer that she might be good enough to be worthy of it,
+that she might be wise enough to make it the daily and hourly atmosphere
+of her life with Paul.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What are you thinking about, darling?&#8221; asked the other.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I was thinking how lovely it&#8217;s going to be to be really married and
+come to know each other well. We don&#8217;t know each other at all yet,
+<i>really</i>, you know.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul was brought up short, as so often with Lydia, by an odd,
+disconcerted feeling, half pleasure, half shock, from the discovery in
+her of pages that he had not read, germs of ideas that had not come from
+him. &#8220;Why, darling Lydia, what do you mean? We know each other through
+and through!&#8221; he now protested. It gave a tang of the unexpected to her
+uniform sweetness, this always having a corner still to turn which kept
+her out of his sight. Paul was used to seeing most women achieve this
+effect of uncertainty by the use of coquetry, and in the free-and-easy
+give and take between young America of both sexes, he had learned with a
+somewhat cynical shrewdness to discount it. He entered into the game,
+but, in his own phrase, he always knew what he was about. Lydia, on the
+contrary, often penetrated his armor by one of these shafts, barbed by
+her complete unconsciousness of any intent. He felt now, with a
+momentary anguish, that he could never be sure of her belonging quite to
+him until they were married, and cried out upon her idea almost angrily,
+&#8220;I don&#8217;t know what you mean! We know each other now.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, no, we don&#8217;t,&#8221; she insisted. &#8220;There are lots of queer fancies in me
+that you&#8217;ll only find out by living with me&mdash;and, Oh, Paul! the fine,
+noble things I <i>feel</i> in you! But I can see the whole of them only by
+seeing you day by day. And then there are lots of things that aren&#8217;t in
+us, really, yet, but only planted. They&#8217;ll grow&mdash;we&#8217;ll grow&mdash;Paul,
+to-day is an epoch. We&#8217;ve passed a new milestone.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How do you mean?&#8221; he asked.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_176" id="pg_176">176</a></span>&#8220;The way we&#8217;ve felt&mdash;the way we&#8217;ve talked&mdash;of real things&mdash;out there in
+our own&mdash;&#8221; She laughed a little, a serene murmur of drollery which came
+to her when she was at peace. &#8220;We&#8217;ve been engaged since November, but we
+only got engaged to be married to-day&mdash;just as our wedding&#8217;s to be in
+June, but goodness knows when our marriage will be.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul smiled at her tenderly. &#8220;If I&#8217;d known the date was so uncertain as
+that I shouldn&#8217;t have dared to go so far in my house-building.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, it&#8217;s all right so far,&#8221; she reassured him, smiling; &#8220;but we must
+pitch in and finish it. Why, that&#8217;s just it, Paul&mdash;&#8221; she was struck with
+the aptness of her illustration&mdash;&#8220;that&#8217;s just it. We&#8217;ve got the rafters
+and joists up now; maybe before we&#8217;re married, if we&#8217;re good, we can get
+the roof on so it won&#8217;t rain on us; but all the finishing, all that
+makes it good to live in, has got to be done after the wedding.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He did not know exactly what she was talking about, but he made up for
+vagueness by fervor. &#8220;After we are married,&#8221; he cried, &#8220;I&#8217;ll move
+mountains and turn stones to gold.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But the first thing to do is to lay floors for us to walk on,&#8221; Lydia
+told him.</p>
+
+<p>For answer, he drew her into his arms and closed her mouth with a kiss.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_177" id="pg_177">177</a></span>
+<a name="CARDDEALING_AND_PATENT_CANDLES_6385" id="CARDDEALING_AND_PATENT_CANDLES_6385"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XVII</p>
+<p class="l c">CARD-DEALING AND PATENT CANDLES</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Spring had come with its usual hotly advancing rush upon the low-lying,
+sheltered southerly city. There had been a few days of magical warmth,
+full of spring madness, when every growing thing had expanded leaves
+with furious haste, when the noise of children playing in the street
+sounded loud through newly-opened windows, when, even on city streets,
+every breath of the sweet, lively air was an intoxicating potion. Then,
+with a bound, the heat was there. Evenings and nights were still cool,
+but noons were as oppressive as in July. The scarcely expanded leaves
+hung limp in a summer heat.</p>
+
+<p>All during that eventful winter, Mrs. Emery had frequently remarked to
+her sister-in-law that Lydia&#8217;s social career progressed positively with
+such brilliancy that it was like &#8220;something you read about.&#8221; Mrs.
+Sandworth invariably added the qualifying clause, &#8220;But in a very nice
+book, you know, with only nice people in it, where everything comes out
+nicely at the end.&#8221; Her confidence in literature as a respectable source
+of pleasure was not so guileless as Mrs. Emery&#8217;s. It had been cruelly
+shaken by dipping into some of the Russian novels of the doctor&#8217;s.</p>
+
+<p>Not infrequently the two ladies felt, with a happy importance, that they
+were the authors of the book and that the agreeable episodes and
+dramatic incidents which had kept the flow of the narrative so sparkling
+were the product of their own creative genius. When April came on, and
+Lydia agreed to the announcement of her engagement, they felt the need
+of some remarkable way of signaling that important event and of closing
+her season with a burst of <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_178" id="pg_178">178</a></span>glory. For her season had to end! Dr. Melton
+said positively that if Lydia had another month of the life she had been
+leading he would not be responsible for the consequences. &#8220;She has a
+fine constitution, inherited from her farmer grandparents,&#8221; he said,
+smiling to see Mrs. Emery wince at this uncompromising statement of
+Lydia&#8217;s ancestry, &#8220;but her nervous organization is too fine for her own
+good. And I warn you right now that if you get her nerves once really
+jangled, I shall take to the woods. You can just give the case to
+another doctor. It would be too much for <i>me</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The girl herself insisted that she felt perfectly well and able to stand
+more than when she first began going out. She affirmed this with some
+impatience, her eyes very bright, her cheeks flushed, whenever her
+godfather protested against a new undertaking. &#8220;When you get going, you
+<i>can&#8217;t</i> stop,&#8221; she told him, shaking off his detaining hand. Mrs. Emery
+told the doctor that he&#8217;d forgotten the time when he was young or he&#8217;d
+remember that all girls who&#8217;d been popular at all&mdash;let alone a girl like
+Lydia&mdash;looked thin and worn by the end of the season; but during the
+last week of April, when the first hot days had arrived, a small
+incident surprised her into thinking that perhaps the doctor had some
+right on his side.</p>
+
+<p>Not that there was in itself anything so very alarming about a nervous
+explosion from a girl so high-strung and susceptible as Lydia. The
+startling thing was that this explosion proceeded, so far as her mother
+could see, from nothing at all, from the idlest of chance remarks by
+Mrs. Sandworth, as always, whitely innocent of the smallest intention to
+wound.</p>
+
+<p>She and Mrs. Emery were much given to watching Lydia dress for the
+innumerable engagements that took her away from the house. They made a
+pretext of helping her, but in truth they were carried away by the
+delight in another&#8217;s beauty which is more common among women than is
+generally imagined. They took the profoundest interest in the selection
+of the toilet she should wear, and regarded with a <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_179" id="pg_179">179</a></span>charmed surprise the
+particular aspect of Lydia&#8217;s slim comeliness which it brought out. They
+could not decide whether they liked her best in clinging, picture
+costumes, big hats, plumes, trailing draperies, and the like, or
+dashing, jaunty effects. Once in the winter, after she had left them on
+her way to an evening skating party and they had seen her from the
+window join Hollister and add her skates to those glittering on his
+shoulder, Mrs. Sandworth promulgated one of her unexpected apothegms:
+&#8220;Do you know what we are, Susan Emery? We&#8217;re a couple of old children
+playing with a doll.&#8221; Mrs. Emery protested with an instant, reproving
+self-justification: &#8220;<i>You</i> may be&mdash;you&#8217;re not her mother; but I
+understand Lydia through and through.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery felt that if Lydia had overheard that remark of her aunt&#8217;s
+her excitement and resentment might have been natural; but the one which
+led to the distressing little scene in late April was as neutral as an
+ordinary morning salutation. The two were watching Lydia dress for a
+luncheon which Mrs. Hollister&mdash;<i>the</i> Mrs. Hollister&mdash;was giving in her
+honor. It was about noon of a warm day, and the air that came in at the
+open windows was thrillingly alive with troubling, disquieting
+suggestions of the new life of spring. Lydia, however, showed none of
+the languor which the sudden heat had brought to the two elder women.
+She was a little late, and her hurry had sent a high color to her
+cheeks, the curves of which were refined to the most exquisite subtlety
+by the loss of flesh so deplored by Dr. Melton. She was used, by this
+time, to dressing in a hurry, but her fingers trembled a little, and she
+tried three times before she could coil her dark silky hair smoothly.
+She was frowning a little with the fixity of her concentration as she
+turned to snatch up her long gloves and she did not hear Mrs.
+Sandworth&#8217;s question until it had been repeated,</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I said, Lydia, is it to be bridge this afternoon?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t know,&#8221; said Lydia with the full stop of absent indifference.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Didn&#8217;t Mrs. Hollister say?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_180" id="pg_180">180</a></span>&#8220;Maybe she did. I didn&#8217;t notice.&#8221; The girl was tugging at her glove.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, anyhow,&#8221; said her mother, &#8220;since everybody&#8217;s giving you
+card-parties, I should think you&#8217;d want to practice up and learn how to
+deal better. It&#8217;s queer,&#8221; she went on to Mrs. Sandworth, &#8220;Lydia&#8217;s so
+deft about so many things, that she should deal cards so badly.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, goodness! As if there was nothing better to do than that!&#8221; cried
+Lydia, beginning on the other glove.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, what <i>have</i> you to do that&#8217;s better?&#8221; asked her aunt in some
+astonishment. &#8220;Lydia, my dear, your collar is pinned the least bit
+crooked. Here, just let me&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia had stopped short, her glove dangling from her wrist. &#8220;Why, what a
+horrible thing to say!&#8221; She brought this out with a tragic emphasis,
+immensely disconcerting to her two elders.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Horrible!&#8221; protested Mrs. Sandworth.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, horrible,&#8221; insisted the girl. She had turned very pale. &#8220;The very
+way you say it and don&#8217;t think anything about it, <i>makes</i> it horrible.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Sandworth began to doubt her own senses. &#8220;Why, what did I say?&#8221; she
+appealed to Mrs. Emery in bewildered interrogation, but before the
+latter could answer Lydia broke out: &#8220;If I really believed that, why,
+I&#8217;d&mdash;I&#8217;d&mdash;&#8221; She hesitated, obviously between tragic consequences, and
+then, to the great dismay of her companions, began to cry, still
+standing in the middle of the floor, her glove dangling from her slim,
+white wrist.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t Lydia! Oh, don&#8217;t, dear! You&#8217;ll make yourself look like a fright
+for the luncheon.&#8221; Mrs. Emery ran to her daughter with a solicitude in
+which there was considerable irritation. &#8220;You&#8217;re perfectly exhausting,
+taking everything that deadly serious way. Don&#8217;t be so <i>morbid</i>! You
+know your Aunt Julia didn&#8217;t mean anything. She never does!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia pulled away and threw herself on the bed, still sobbing, and
+protesting that she could not go to the luncheon; and in the end Mrs.
+Emery was obliged to make <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_181" id="pg_181">181</a></span>the profoundest apologies over the telephone
+to a justly indignant hostess.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime Lydia was undressed and put to bed by Mrs. Sandworth,
+who dared not open her mouth. The girl still drew long, sobbing breaths,
+but before her aunt left the room she lay quiet, her eyes closed. The
+other was struck by the way her pallor brought out the thinness of her
+lovely face. She hovered helplessly for a moment over the bed. &#8220;Is there
+anything I can do for you, dearie?&#8221; she asked humbly.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia shook her head. &#8220;Just let me be quiet,&#8221; she murmured.</p>
+
+<p>At this, Mrs. Sandworth retreated to the door, from which she ventured a
+last &#8220;Lydia darling, you know I&#8217;m sorry if I said anything to hurt&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia raised herself on her elbow and looked at her solemnly. &#8220;It wasn&#8217;t
+what you <i>said</i>; it was what it <i>meant</i>!&#8221; she said tragically.</p>
+
+<p>With this cryptic utterance in her ears, Mrs. Sandworth fled downstairs,
+to find her sister-in-law turning away from the telephone with a frown.
+&#8220;Mrs. Hollister was very much provoked about it, and I don&#8217;t blame her.
+It&#8217;s hard to make her understand we couldn&#8217;t have given her a <i>little</i>
+warning. And&mdash;that&#8217;s the most provoking part&mdash;I didn&#8217;t dare say Lydia is
+really sick, when, as like as not, she&#8217;ll be receiving company this
+evening.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You wouldn&#8217;t want her sick, just so it would be easier to explain,
+would you?&#8221; asked Mrs. Sandworth with her eternal disconcerting
+innocence.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery relieved her mind by snapping at her sister-in-law with the
+violence allowed to an intimate of many years&#8217; standing, &#8220;Good gracious,
+Julia! you&#8217;re as bad as Lydia! Turning everything people say into
+something quite different&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Sandworth interrupted hastily, &#8220;Susan, tell me, for mercy&#8217;s sake,
+what did I say? The last thing I remember passing my lips was about her
+collar&#8217;s being a little crooked,&mdash;and just now she told me, as though it
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_182" id="pg_182">182</a></span>was the crack of Doom, that it wasn&#8217;t what I said, but what it meant,
+that was so awful. What in the world does she mean?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery sank into a seat with a gesture of utter impatience. &#8220;Mean?
+Mean nothing! Didn&#8217;t you ever know an engaged girl before?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, I&#8217;m sure when I was engaged I never&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, yes, you did; you <i>must</i> have. They all do. It&#8217;s nerves.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But a moment later she contradicted her own assurance with a sigh of
+unresignation. &#8220;Oh, dear! why can&#8217;t Lydia be just bright and wholesome
+and fun-loving and <i>natural</i> like Madeleine Hollister!&#8221; She added
+darkly, &#8220;I just feel in my bones that this has something to do with that
+Rankin and his morbid ideas.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Sandworth was startled. &#8220;Good gracious! You don&#8217;t suppose she&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No; of course I don&#8217;t! I never thought of such a thing. You ought to
+see her when she is with Paul. She&#8217;s just <i>fascinated</i> by him! But you
+know as well as I do that ideas go right on underneath all that!&#8221; Her
+tone implied a disapproval of their tenacity of life. &#8220;And yet, Lydia&#8217;s
+really nothing unusual! Before they get married and into social life,
+and settled down and too busy to think, most girls have a queer spell.
+Only most of them take it out on religion. Oh, why couldn&#8217;t she have met
+that nice young rector&mdash;if she had to meet somebody to put ideas into
+her head&mdash;instead of an anarchist.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, it&#8217;s certainly all past now,&#8221; Mrs. Sandworth reassured her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes; hasn&#8217;t it been a lovely winter! Everybody&#8217;s been so good to Lydia.
+Everything&#8217;s succeeded so! But I suppose Dr. Melton&#8217;s right. We ought to
+call her season over, except for the announcement party&mdash;and the
+wedding, of course&mdash;and oh, dear! There are so many things I&#8217;d planned
+to do I can&#8217;t possibly get in now. It seems strange a child of mine
+should be so queer and have such notions.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_183" id="pg_183">183</a></span>However, after the two had talked over the plans for a great evening
+garden-party in the Emery &#8220;grounds&#8221; and Mrs. Emery&#8217;s creative eye had
+seen the affair in a vista of brilliant pictures, she felt more
+composed. She went up quietly to Lydia&#8217;s door and looked in.</p>
+
+<p>The girl was lying on her back, her wide, dark eyes fixed on the
+ceiling. Something in the expression of her face gave her mother a throb
+of pain. She yearned over the foolish, unbalanced young thing, and her
+heart failed her, in that universal mother&#8217;s fear for her child of the
+roughnesses of life, through which she herself has passed safely and
+which have given savor to her existence. In her incapacity to conceive
+other roughnesses than those she could feel herself, she was, it is
+probable, much like the rest of humankind. She advanced to the bed, her
+tenderest mother-look on her face, and cut Lydia off from speech with
+gentle wisdom. &#8220;No, no, dear; don&#8217;t try to talk. You&#8217;re all tired out
+and nervous and don&#8217;t know&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia had begun excitedly: &#8220;I&#8217;ve been feeling it for a long time, but
+when Aunt Julia said right out that I didn&#8217;t know how to do anything
+better than&mdash;that I was only good to&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her mother laid a firm, gentle hand over the quivering mouth, and said
+in a soothing murmur, &#8220;Hush, hush! darling. It wasn&#8217;t anything your poor
+foolish Aunt Julia said. It isn&#8217;t anything, anyhow, but being up too
+much and having too much excitement. People get to thinking all kinds of
+queer things when they&#8217;re tired. Mother knows. Mother knows best.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She had prepared a glass of bromide, and now, lifting Lydia as though
+she were still the child she felt her to be, she held it to her lips.
+&#8220;Here, Mother&#8217;s poor, tired little girl&mdash;take this and go to sleep;
+that&#8217;s all you need. Just trust Mother now.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia took the draught obediently, but she sighed deeply, and fixed her
+mother with eyes that were unrelentingly serious.</p>
+
+<p>When Mrs. Emery looked in after half an hour, she <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_184" id="pg_184">184</a></span>saw that Lydia was
+still awake, but later she fell asleep, and slept heavily until late in
+the afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>On her appearance at the dinner-table, still languid and heavy-eyed, she
+was met with gentle, amused triumph. &#8220;There, you dear. Didn&#8217;t I tell you
+what you needed was sleep. There never was a girl who didn&#8217;t think a
+sick headache meant there was something wrong with her soul or
+something.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Judge Emery laughed good-naturedly, as he sliced the roast beef, and
+said, with admiration for his wife, &#8220;It&#8217;s a good thing my high-strung
+little girl has such a levelheaded mother to look after her. Mother
+knows all about nerves and things. She&#8217;s had &#8217;em&mdash;all kinds&mdash;and come
+out on top. Look at her now.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia took him at his word, and bestowed on her mother a long look. She
+said nothing, and after a moment dropped her eyes listlessly again to
+her plate. It was this occasion which Mrs. Emery chose to present to the
+Judge her plans for the expensive garden-party, so that in the animated
+and, at times, slightly embittered discussion that followed, Lydia&#8217;s
+silence was overlooked.</p>
+
+<p>For the next few days she stayed quietly indoors, refusing and canceling
+engagements. Mrs. Emery said it was &#8220;only decent to do that much after
+playing Mrs. Hollister such a trick,&#8221; and Lydia did not seem averse. She
+sewed a little, fitfully, tried to play on the piano and turned away
+disheartened at the results of the long neglect&mdash;there had been no time
+in the season for practice&mdash;and wandered about the library, taking out
+first one book then another, reading a little and then sitting with
+brooding eyes, staring unseeingly at the page. Once her mother, finding
+her thus, inquired with some sharpness what book she was reading to set
+her off like that. &#8220;It&#8217;s a book by Maeterlinck,&#8221; said Lydia, &#8220;that
+Godfather gave me ever so long ago, and I&#8217;ve never had time to read it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do you like it? What&#8217;s it about?&#8221; asked her mother, suspiciously.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_185" id="pg_185">185</a></span>&#8220;I can&#8217;t understand it,&#8221; said Lydia, &#8220;when I&#8217;m reading it. But when I
+look away and think, I can, a little bit. I love it. It makes me feel
+like crying. It&#8217;s all about our inner life.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My dear Lydia, you put your hat right on and go over to have a little
+visit with Marietta. What you need is a little fresh air and some
+sensible talk. I&#8217;ve been too busy with my invitation list to visit with
+you as I ought. Marietta&#8217;ll be real glad to see you. Here&#8217;s your hat.
+Now, you run right along, and stop at Hallam&#8217;s on the way and get
+yourself an ice-cream soda. It&#8217;s hot, and that&#8217;ll do you good.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As Lydia was disappearing docilely out of the door, her mother stopped
+before going back to her desk and the list of guests for the
+garden-party, which had been torturing her with perplexity, to say, &#8220;Oh,
+Lydia, don&#8217;t forget to ask Marietta to order the perforated candles.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Perforated&mdash;!&#8221; said Lydia blankly, pausing at the door.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes; don&#8217;t you remember, the last time Mrs. Hollister called here she
+told us all about them.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, I don&#8217;t remember,&#8221; said Lydia, with no shade of apology in her
+tone.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, my dear! You&#8217;re getting so absent-minded! Do you mean to say you
+didn&#8217;t take in anything of what she was talking about? It&#8217;s a new kind,
+that has holes running through it so the melted wax runs down the
+inside! Why, we were talking about them the whole time she was here that
+last call.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia opened the door, observing vaguely, &#8220;Oh, yes; I do seem to
+remember something. It was a very dull visit, anyhow.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery returned to her list, pursing up her lips and wagging her
+head. &#8220;You&#8217;ll have to learn, dearie, that it&#8217;s little details like that
+that make the difference between success and failure.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We have electric light and gas,&#8221; said Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery looked up in astonishment and a little vexation. <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_186" id="pg_186">186</a></span>She, too,
+had nerves these days. &#8220;Why, Lydia, what&#8217;s the matter with you? You know
+nobody uses those for table decoration.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>We</i> could,&#8221; said Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, my dear child, I never knew before there was a contrary streak in
+you, like your father. What in the world possesses you all of a sudden
+to object to candles?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s not candles&mdash;it&#8217;s the idea of&mdash;Oh, all the fuss and bother, when
+everybody&#8217;s so tired, and the weather&#8217;s so hot, and it&#8217;s going to cost
+too much anyhow.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, what would you have us fuss and bother about, if not over having
+everything nice when we entertain?&#8221; Mrs. Emery&#8217;s air of enforced
+patience was strained.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia surveyed her from the hall in silence. &#8220;That&#8217;s just it&mdash;that&#8217;s
+just it,&#8221; she said finally, and went away.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery laid down her pen to laugh to herself over the queer ways of
+children. &#8220;They begin to have notions with their first teeth, and I
+suppose they don&#8217;t get over them till <i>their</i> first baby begins to
+teethe.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When Lydia arrived at her sister&#8217;s house, she found that competent
+housekeeper engaged in mending the lace curtains of her parlor. She had
+about her a battery of little ingenious devices to which she called
+Lydia&#8217;s attention with pride. &#8220;I&#8217;ve taught myself lace-mending just by
+main strength and awkwardness,&#8221; she observed, fitting a hoop over a torn
+place, &#8220;and it&#8217;s not because I have any natural knack, either. If
+there&#8217;s anything I hate to do, it&#8217;s to sew. But these curtains do go to
+pieces so. I wash them myself, to be careful, but they are so fine.
+Still,&#8221; she cast a calculating eye on the work before her, &#8220;I&#8217;ll be
+through by the end of this week, anyhow&mdash;if that new Swede will only
+stay in the kitchen that long!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She bent her head over her work again, holding it up to the light from
+time to time and straining her eyes to catch the exact thread with her
+almost impalpably fine needle. Lydia sat and fanned herself, looking
+flushed and tired from the walk in the heat, and listening in silence to
+Mrs. Mortimer&#8217;s account of the various happenings <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_187" id="pg_187">187</a></span>of her household:
+&#8220;And didn&#8217;t I find that good-for-nothing negro wench had been having
+that man&mdash;and goodness knows how many others&mdash;right here in the house. I
+told Ralph I never would have another nigger&mdash;but I shall. You can&#8217;t get
+anything else half the time. I tell you, Lydia, the servant problem is
+getting to be something perfectly terrible&mdash;it&#8217;s&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia broke in to say, &#8220;Why don&#8217;t you buy new ones?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Mortimer paused with uplifted needle to inquire wildly, &#8220;New
+<i>what</i>?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;New curtains, instead of spending a whole week in hot weather mending
+those.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Good gracious, child! Will you ever learn anything about the cost of
+living! I think it&#8217;s awful, the way Father and Mother have let you grow
+up! Why, it would take half a month&#8217;s salary to reproduce these
+curtains. I got them at a great bargain&mdash;but even then I couldn&#8217;t afford
+them. Ralph was furious.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You could buy muslin curtains that would be just as pretty,&#8221; suggested
+Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, those curtains are the only things with the least distinction in
+my whole parlor! They <i>save</i> the room.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;From what?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;From showing that there&#8217;s almost nothing in it that cost anything, to
+be sure! With them at the window, it would never enter people&#8217;s heads to
+think that I upholstered the furniture myself, or that the pictures
+are&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why shouldn&#8217;t they think so, if you did?&#8221; Lydia proffered this
+suggestion with an air of fatigued listlessness, which, her sister
+thought, showed that she made it &#8220;simply to be contrary.&#8221; Acting on this
+theory, she answered it with a dignified silence.</p>
+
+<p>There was a pause. Lydia tilted her head back against the chair, and
+looked out of the window at the new green leaves of the piazza vine.
+Mrs. Mortimer&#8217;s thin, white, rather large hands drew the shining little
+needle back and forth with a steady, hurrying industry. It came into her
+mind that their respective attitudes were symbolical of <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_188" id="pg_188">188</a></span>their lives,
+and she thought, glancing at Lydia&#8217;s drooping depression, that it would
+be better for her if she were obliged to work more. &#8220;Work,&#8221; of course,
+meant to Marietta those forms of activity which filled her own life.
+&#8220;<i>I</i> never have any time for notions,&#8221; she thought, the desperate,
+hurrying, straining routine of her days rising before her and moving
+her, as always, to rebellion and yet to a martyr&#8217;s pride.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia stirred from her listless pose and came over to her sister,
+sitting down on a stool at her feet. &#8220;Marietta, dear, please let me talk
+to you. I&#8217;m so miserable these days&mdash;and Mother won&#8217;t let me say a word
+to her. She says it&#8217;s spring fever, and being engaged, and the end of
+the season, and everything. Please, <i>please</i> be serious, and let me tell
+you about it, and see if you can&#8217;t help me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her tone was so broken and imploring that Mrs. Mortimer was startled.
+She was, moreover, flattered that Lydia should come to her for advice
+rather than to her parents. She put her arm around her sister&#8217;s
+shoulders, and said gently, &#8220;Why, yes, dear; of course; anything&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then stop sewing and listen to me&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But I can sew and listen, too.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, Etta, <i>please</i>! That&#8217;s just the kind of thing that gets me so wild.
+Just a little while!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The harassed housekeeper cast an anxious eye on the clock, but loyally
+stifled the sigh with which she laid her work aside. Lydia apologized
+for interrupting her. &#8220;But I do want you to really think of what I am
+saying. Everybody&#8217;s always so busy thinking about <i>things</i>! Oh, Etta,
+I&#8217;m just as unhappy as I can be&mdash;and so scared when I think about&mdash;about
+the future.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Mortimer&#8217;s face softened wonderfully. She stroked Lydia&#8217;s dark
+hair. &#8220;Why, poor dear little sister! Yes, yes, darling, I know all about
+it. I felt just so myself the month before I was married, and Mother
+couldn&#8217;t help me a bit. Either she had forgotten all about it, or else
+she never had the feeling. I just had to struggle along through without
+anybody to help me or to say a word. <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_189" id="pg_189">189</a></span>Oh, I&#8217;m so glad I can help my
+little sister. <i>Don&#8217;t</i> be afraid, dear! There&#8217;s nothing so terrible
+about it; nothing to be scared of. Why, once you get used to it you find
+it doesn&#8217;t make a bit of difference to you. Everything&#8217;s just the same
+as before.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia lifted a wrinkled brow of perplexity to this soothing view of
+matrimony. &#8220;I don&#8217;t know what you&#8217;re talking about, Etta!&#8221; she cried in
+a bewilderment that seemed to strike her as tragic.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why&mdash;why, being married! Wasn&#8217;t that what you meant?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, no! <i>No!</i> Nothing so definite as that! I couldn&#8217;t be afraid of
+Paul&mdash;why should I be? I&#8217;m just frightened of&mdash;everything&mdash;what
+everybody expects me to do, and to go on doing all my life, and never
+have any time but to just hurry faster and faster, so there&#8217;ll be more
+things to hurry about, and never talk about anything but <i>things</i>!&#8221; She
+began to tremble and look white, and stopped with a desperate effort to
+control herself, though she burst out at the sight of Mrs. Mortimer&#8217;s
+face of despairing bewilderment, &#8220;Oh, don&#8217;t tell me you don&#8217;t see at all
+what I mean. I can&#8217;t say it! But you <i>must</i> understand! Can&#8217;t we somehow
+all stop&mdash;<i>now</i>! And start over again! You get muslin curtains and not
+mend your lace ones, and Mother stop fussing about whom to invite to
+that party&mdash;that&#8217;s going to cost more than he can afford, Father
+says&mdash;it makes me <i>sick</i> to be costing him so much. And not fuss about
+having clothes just so&mdash;and Paul have our house built little and plain,
+so it won&#8217;t be so much work to take care of it and keep it clean. I
+would so much rather look after it myself than to have him kill himself
+making money so I can hire maids that you <i>can&#8217;t</i>&mdash;you say yourself you
+can&#8217;t&mdash;and never having any time to see him. Perhaps if we did, other
+people might, and we&#8217;d all have more time to like things that make us
+nicer to like&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>At this perturbing jumble of suggestions, Mrs. Mortimer&#8217;s head whirled.
+She took hold of the arms of her <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_190" id="pg_190">190</a></span>chair as if to steady herself, but,
+conscientiously afraid of discouraging the girl&#8217;s confidence, she nodded
+gravely at her, as if she were considering the matter. Lydia sprang up,
+her eyes shining. &#8220;Oh, you dear! You <i>do</i> see what I mean! You see how
+dreadful it is to look forward to just that&mdash;being so desperately
+troubled over things that don&#8217;t really matter&mdash;and&mdash;and perhaps having
+children, and bringing them up to the same thing&mdash;when there must be so
+many things that do matter!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>To each of these impassioned statements her sister had returned an
+automatic nod. &#8220;I see what you mean,&#8221; she now put in, a statement which
+was the outward expression of a thought running, &#8220;Mercy! Dr. Melton&#8217;s
+right! She&#8217;s perfectly wild with nerves! We must get her married as soon
+as ever we can!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia went over to the window, and stood looking out as she talked, now
+with an excited haste, now with a dragging note of fatigue in her voice.
+Her need of sympathy was so great that she did a violence to the
+reticence she had always kept, even with herself. She wondered aloud if
+it were not perhaps Daniel Rankin and his queer ideas that lay at the
+bottom of her trouble. She added, whirling about from the window, &#8220;For
+mercy&#8217;s sake! don&#8217;t go and think I am in love with him, or anything! I
+haven&#8217;t so much as thought of him all winter! I see, now that Mother&#8217;s
+pointed it out to me, how domineering he really was to me last autumn.
+I&#8217;m just crazy about Paul, too! When I&#8217;m with him he takes my breath
+away! But maybe&mdash;maybe I can&#8217;t forget Mr. Rankin&#8217;s <i>ideas</i>! You know he
+talked to me so much when I was first back&mdash;and if somebody would just
+argue me out of them, the way he did into them! I don&#8217;t believe I&#8217;d ever
+have thought it queer to live the way we do, just to have more things
+and get ahead of other people&mdash;if he hadn&#8217;t put the idea into my head.
+But nobody else will even <i>talk</i> about it! They laugh when I try to.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She came over closer to the matron, and said imploringly, her voice
+trembling, &#8220;I don&#8217;t <i>want</i> to be queer, Marietta! <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_191" id="pg_191">191</a></span>What makes me? I
+don&#8217;t like to have queer ideas, different from other people&#8217;s&mdash;but every
+once in a while it all comes over me with a rush&mdash;what&#8217;s the <i>good</i> of
+all we do?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Poor Lydia propounded this question as though it were the first time in
+the world&#8217;s history that it had passed the lips of humanity. Her
+curious, puzzled distress rose up in a choking flood to her throat, and
+she stopped, looking desperately at her sister.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Mortimer nodded again, calmly, drew a long breath, and seemed about
+to speak. Lydia gazed at her, her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright with
+unshed tears&mdash;all one eager expectancy. The older woman&#8217;s eyes wandered
+suddenly for an instant. She darted forward, clapped her hands together
+once, and then in rapid succession three or four times. Then rolling
+triumphantly something between her thumb and forefinger, she turned to
+Lydia. The little operation had not taken the third of a moment, but the
+change in the girl&#8217;s face was so great that Mrs. Mortimer was moved to
+hasty, half-shamefaced, half-defiant apology. &#8220;I <i>was</i> listening to you,
+Lydia! I <i>was</i> listening! But it&#8217;s just the time of year when they lay
+their eggs, and I have to fight them. Last year my best furs and Ralph&#8217;s
+dress suit were perfectly <i>riddled</i>! You know we can&#8217;t afford new.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia rose in silence and began pinning on her hat. Her sister, for all
+her vexation over the ending of the interview, could hardly repress a
+smile of superior wisdom at the other&#8217;s face of tragedy. &#8220;Don&#8217;t go,
+Lyddie, don&#8217;t go!&#8221; She tried to put her arms around the flighty young
+thing. &#8220;Oh, dear Lydia, cultivate your sense of humor! That&#8217;s all that&#8217;s
+the matter with you. There&#8217;s nothing else! Look here, dear, there <i>are</i>
+moths as well as souls in the world. People have to be on the lookout
+for them,&mdash;for everything, don&#8217;t you see?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They look out for <i>moths</i>, all right,&#8221; said Lydia in a low tone. She
+submitted, except for this one speech, in a passive silence to her
+sister&#8217;s combination of petting and <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_192" id="pg_192">192</a></span>exhortation, moving quietly toward
+the door, and stepping evenly forward down the walk.</p>
+
+<p>She had gone down to the street, leaving Mrs. Mortimer still calling
+remorseful apologies, practical suggestions, and laughing comments on
+her &#8220;tragedy way of taking the world.&#8221; At the gate, she paused, and then
+came back, her face like a mask under the shadow of her hat.</p>
+
+<p>Marietta stood waiting for her with a quizzical expression. Under her
+appearance of lightly estimating Lydia&#8217;s depression as superficial, she
+had been sensible of a not unfamiliar qualm of doubt as to her own
+manner of life, an uneasy heaving of a subconscious self not always
+possible to ignore; but, as was her resolute custom, she forced to the
+front that perception of the ridiculous which she had urged on her
+sister. She bit her lips, to conceal a smile at Lydia&#8217;s mournful
+emphasis as she went on: &#8220;I forgot to tell you, Marietta, what I was
+sent over for. You&#8217;re to be sure to order the perforated candles. It&#8217;s
+the kind that has holes down the middle, so the wax doesn&#8217;t look mussy
+on the outside, and it&#8217;s very, very important to have the right kind of
+candles.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Mortimer, willfully amused, looked with an obstinate smile into her
+sister&#8217;s troubled eyes as Lydia hesitated, waiting, in spite of herself,
+for the understanding word.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;re a darling, Lyddie,&#8221; said the elder woman, kissing her again;
+&#8220;but you are certainly <i>too</i> absurd!&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class="bookbreak" />
+
+<p class="xl c">BOOK III</p>
+
+<p class="xl c i">A SUITABLE MARRIAGE</p>
+
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_193" id="pg_193">193</a></span>
+<a name="TWO_SIDES_TO_THE_QUESTION_6978" id="TWO_SIDES_TO_THE_QUESTION_6978"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XVIII</p>
+<p class="l c">TWO SIDES TO THE QUESTION</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Lydia&#8217;s unmarried life had given her but few abstract ideas for the
+regulation of conduct, and fewer still ideals of self-discipline, but
+chief among the small assortment that she took away from her mother&#8217;s
+house had been the high morality of keeping one&#8217;s husband unworried by
+one&#8217;s domestic difficulties. &#8220;Domestic difficulties&#8221; meant, apparently,
+anything disagreeable that happened to one. Not only her mother, but all
+the matrons of her acquaintance had concentrated on the extreme
+desirability of this wifely virtue. &#8220;It pays! It pays!&#8221; Mrs. Emery had
+often thus chanted the praises of this quality in her daughter&#8217;s
+presence. &#8220;I&#8217;ve noticed ever so many times that men who have to worry
+about domestic machinery and their children don&#8217;t get on so well. Their
+minds are distracted. Their thoughts <i>can&#8217;t</i> be, in the nature of
+things, all on their business.&#8221; She was wont to go on, to whatever
+mother she was addressing, &#8220;We know, my dear Mrs. Blank, don&#8217;t we, how
+perfectly distracting the problems are in bringing up children&mdash;to say
+nothing of servants. How much energy would men have for their own
+affairs if they had to struggle as we do, I&#8217;d like to know! Besides, if
+one person&#8217;s got to be bothered with such things, she might as well do
+it all and be done with it. It&#8217;s easier, besides, to have only one head.
+Men that interfere about things <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_194" id="pg_194">194</a></span>in the house are an abomination. You
+can&#8217;t keep from quarreling with them&mdash;angels couldn&#8217;t.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She had once voiced this universally recognized maxim before Dr. Melton,
+who had cut in briskly with a warm seconding of her theory. &#8220;Yes,
+indeed; in the course of my practice I have often thought, as you do,
+that it would be easier all around if husbands didn&#8217;t board with their
+wives at all.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery had stared almost as blankly as Mrs. Sandworth herself might
+have done. &#8220;I never said such a crazy thing,&#8221; she protested.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Didn&#8217;t you? Perhaps I don&#8217;t catch your idea then. It seemed to be that
+every point of contact was sure to be an occasion for friction between
+husband and wife, and so, of course, the fewer they were&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, bother take you, Marius Melton!&#8221; Mrs. Emery had quite lost patience
+with him. &#8220;I was just saying something that&#8217;s so old, and has been said
+so often, that it&#8217;s a bromide, actually. And that is that it&#8217;s a poor
+wife who greets her tired husband in the evening with a long string of
+tales about how the children have been naughty and the cook&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, yes, yes; now I see. Of course. The happiest ideal of American
+life, a peaceful exterior presented to the husband at all costs, and the
+real state of things kept from him because it might interfere with his
+capacity to pull off a big deal the next day.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery had boggled suspiciously at this version of her statement,
+but finding, on the whole, that it represented fairly enough her idea,
+had given a qualified assent in the shape of silence and a turning of
+the subject.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia had not happened to hear that conversation, but she heard
+innumerable ones like it without Dr. Melton&#8217;s footnotes. On her wedding
+day, therefore, she conceived it an essential feature of her duty toward
+Paul to keep entirely to herself all of the dismaying difficulties of
+housekeeping and keeping up a social position in America. She knew, as a
+matter of course, that they would be dismaying. <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_195" id="pg_195">195</a></span>The talk of all her
+married friends was full of the tragedies of domestic life. It had
+occurred to her once or twice that it was an odd, almost a pathetic,
+convention that they tried to maintain about their social existence&mdash;a
+picture of their lives as running smoothly with self-adjusting machinery
+of long-established servants and old social traditions; when their every
+word tragically proclaimed the exhausting and never-ending personal
+effort that was required to give even the most temporary appearance of
+that kind. &#8220;We all know what a fearful time everybody has trying to give
+course dinners&mdash;why need we pretend we don&#8217;t?&#8221; she had thought on
+several painful occasions; but this, like many of her fancies, was a
+fleeting one. There had been as little time since her wedding day as
+before it for leisurely speculation. The business of being <i>the</i> bride
+of a season had been quite as exciting and absorbing as being <i>the</i>
+d&eacute;butante.</p>
+
+<p>The first of February, six months after her marriage, found her as thin
+and restlessly active as she had been on that date a year before. It was
+at that time that she had the first intimation of a great change in her
+life, and since the one or two obscure and futile revolts of her
+girlhood, nothing had moved her to more rebellious unresignation than
+the fact that her life left her no time to take in the significance of
+what was coming to her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, my dear! Isn&#8217;t it too good!&#8221; said her mother, clasping her for a
+moment as they stood, after removing their wraps, in the dressing-room
+of a common acquaintance. &#8220;Aren&#8217;t you the lucky, lucky thing!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t know. I don&#8217;t know a thing about it,&#8221; Lydia returned
+unexpectedly, though her face had turned a deep rose, and she had smiled
+tremulously. &#8220;Ever since Dr. Melton told me it was probably so, I&#8217;ve
+been trying to get a moment&#8217;s time to think it over, but you&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s something to <i>feel</i>, not to think about!&#8221; cried her mother. &#8220;You
+don&#8217;t need time to feel.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But I&#8217;d like to think about everything!&#8221; cried Lydia, as they moved
+down the stairs. &#8220;I get things wrong just feeling about them. But I&#8217;m
+not quick to think, and I <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_196" id="pg_196">196</a></span>never have any time&mdash;they&#8217;re always so many
+other things to do and to think about&mdash;the dinner, getting Paul off in
+time in the morning, how badly the washwoman does up the table linen&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, Lydia! Why will you be so contrary? Everybody says <i>laundress</i>
+now!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&mdash;And however Paul and I can pay back all the social debts we&#8217;ve
+incurred this winter. Everybody&#8217;s invited us. It makes me wild to think
+of how we owe everybody.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, you can give two or three big receptions this spring and clear
+millions off the list. And then a dinner party or two for the more
+exclusives. You won&#8217;t need to be out of things till June&mdash;with the
+fashion for loose-fitting evening gowns; you&#8217;re so slender. And you&#8217;ll
+be out again long before Christmas. It&#8217;s very fortunate having it come
+at this time of year.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia looked rather dazed at this brisk and matter-of-fact disposing of
+the matter, and seemed about to make a comment, but the bell rang for
+card-playing to begin and Mrs. Emery hurried to her table.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia had meant to ask her mother&#8217;s sympathy about another matter that
+for the time was occupying her own thoughts, but there was no other
+opportunity for further speech between them during the card party&mdash;Mrs.
+Emery devoting herself with her usual competent energy to playing a good
+game. She played much better bridge than did either of her daughters.
+She liked cards, liked to excel and always found easy to accomplish what
+seemed to her worth doing. Marietta also felt that to avoid being
+&#8220;queer&#8221; and &#8220;different&#8221; one had to play a good hand, but, as she herself
+confessed, it made her &#8220;sick&#8221; to give up to it the necessary time and
+thought. As for Lydia, she got rid of her cards as fast as possible, as
+if with the deluded hope that when they were all played, she might find
+time for something else. On the afternoon in question her game was more
+unscientific than usual. Criticism was deterred from articulate
+expression by the common feeling in regard to her, assiduously fostered
+by Flora Burgess&#8217; continuous references to <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_197" id="pg_197">197</a></span>her in <i>Society Notes</i> as
+the coming social ruler of Endbury&#8217;s smart set. There was as yet, to be
+sure, no visible indication whatever of such a capacity on Lydia&#8217;s part,
+but the printed word&mdash;particularly Miss Burgess&#8217; printed word&mdash;was not
+to be doubted. Madeleine Hollister, however (now soon to be Madeleine
+Lowdor), was no respecter of personages, past or future. At the
+appearance of an especially unexpected and disappointing card from her
+sister-in-law&#8217;s hand, she pounced upon her with: &#8220;Lydia, what <i>are</i> you
+thinking about?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My washwoman&#8217;s grandson,&#8221; burst out Lydia, laying down her cards with a
+careless negligence, so that everyone could see the contents of her
+hand. &#8220;Oh, Madeleine! I&#8217;m so worried about her, and I wish you&#8217;d&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She got no further. Madeleine&#8217;s shriek of good-natured laughter cut her
+short like a blow in the face. The other ladies were laughing, too.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, Lydia! You are the most original, unexpected piece in the world!&#8221;
+cried her sister-in-law. &#8220;You&#8217;ll be the death of me!&#8221; She appealed to
+the other players at their table: &#8220;Did you ever hear anything come out
+funnier?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>To the players at the next tables, who were looking with vague,
+reflected smiles at this burst of merriment, she called: &#8220;Oh, it&#8217;s too
+killing! Lydia Hollister just played a trump on a trick her partner had
+already taken, and when I asked what in the world she was thinking
+about&mdash;meaning, of course&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia sat silent, looking at her useless cards during the rest of the
+narration of her comic speech. She was reflecting rather sadly that she
+had been very foolish to think, even in a thoughtless impulse, of
+telling Madeleine the story she had so impetuously begun. After a time
+it came to her, as a commentary of the little incident, that neither
+could she get anything from Marietta in the matter. At the end of the
+party, she and her mother walked together to the street-cars, but she
+still said nothing of what was in her mind. She would not admit to
+herself that her <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_198" id="pg_198">198</a></span>mother would receive it as she felt sure Marietta and
+Madeleine would, but&mdash;she dared not risk putting her to the test. It was
+a period in Lydia&#8217;s life when she was constantly in fear of tests
+applied to the people she loved and longed to admire.</p>
+
+<p>During the half-hour&#8217;s noisy journey out to Bellevue&mdash;the unhackneyed
+name that had been selected for the new and fashionable suburb she
+inhabited&mdash;she had eliminated from this crisis in her mind, one by one,
+all the people in her circle. Dr. Melton was out of town. Otherwise she
+would have gone to him at once. Mrs. Sandworth without her brother was a
+cipher with no figure before it. Her father?&mdash;she realized suddenly that
+it was the first time she had ever thought of going to her father with a
+perplexity. No; she knew too little about his view of things. She had
+never talked with him of anything but the happenings of the day. Flora
+Burgess&mdash;devoted Flora? Lydia smiled ruefully as she thought of the
+attitude Flora Burgess would be sure to take.</p>
+
+<p>It finally came to the point where there was no one left but Paul; and
+Paul ought not to be worried with domestic questions lest his capacity
+for business be impaired. She had a deep inculcated sense of the
+necessity and duty of &#8220;doing her share,&#8221; as the phrase had gone in the
+various exhortations addressed to her before her marriage. The next few
+years would be critical ones in Paul&#8217;s career, and the road must be
+straight and clear before his feet&mdash;the road that led to Success. No one
+had voiced a doubt that this road was not coincident with all other
+desirable ones; no one had suggested that the same years would be
+critical in other directions and would be certain to be terribly and
+irrevocably determinative of his future relation to his wife.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia, ardently and na&iuml;vely anxious to find something &#8220;worth doing,&#8221;
+therefore had settled on this one definite duty. She had wrestled in a
+determined silence with the many incompetent and degenerate negresses,
+with the few impertinent Americans, with the drunken Irish and insolent
+Swedes, who had filed in and out of her kitchen ever since <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_199" id="pg_199">199</a></span>her
+marriage. Suburban life was a new thing in Endbury, and &#8220;help&#8221; could see
+no advantages in it. She had strained every nerve to make them appear to
+Paul, as well as to the rest of the world, the opposite of what they
+were; and to do herself, furtively, when Paul was not there, those of
+their tasks they refused or neglected. Every effort was concentrated, as
+in her mother&#8217;s and sister&#8217;s households, on keeping a maid presentable
+to open the door and to wait on the table, rather than to perform the
+heavier parts of the daily round. Those Lydia could do herself, or she
+could hire an unpresentable older scrubwoman to do them. She often
+thought that if she could but employ scrubwomen all the time, the
+problem would be half solved. But the achievement of each day was,
+according to Endbury standards, to keep or get somebody into the kitchen
+who could serve a course dinner, even if the mistress of the house was
+obliged to prepare it.</p>
+
+<p>She had never dreamed of feeling herself aggrieved, or even surprised,
+by this curious reverse side to her outward brilliant life. All her
+married friends went through the same experience. Madeleine, it is true,
+announced that she was going to make Lowdor import two Japanese servants
+a year, and dismiss them when they began to get American ideas; but
+Madeleine was quite openly marrying Lowdor for the sake of this and
+similar advantages. Lydia felt that her own problems were only the usual
+lot of her kind, and though she was nearly always sick at heart over
+them, she did not feel justified in complaining&mdash;least of all to Paul.</p>
+
+<p>But this present trouble&mdash;this was not just a question of help. For the
+last month they had been floating in the most unexpected lull of the
+domestic whirlwind. The intelligence office had sent out Ellen&mdash;Ellen,
+the deft-handed cook, the silent, self-effacing, competent servant of
+every housekeeper&#8217;s dreams. Her good luck seemed incredible. Ellen was
+perfection, was middle-aged and settled, never went out in the evenings,
+kept her kitchen spotlessly clean, trained the rattle-headed second
+girls who came and went, <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_200" id="pg_200">200</a></span>to be good waitresses and made pastry that
+moved Paul, usually little preoccupied about his food provided there was
+plenty of meat, to lyric raptures. The difference she made in Lydia&#8217;s
+life was inconceivable. It was as though some burdensome law of nature
+had been miraculously suspended for her benefit. She gauged her past
+discomfort by her present comfort.</p>
+
+<p>And yet&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>From the first Lydia had had an uneasy feeling in the presence of her
+new servant, a haunting impression when her back was turned to Ellen
+that if she could turn quickly enough, she would see her cook with some
+sinister aspect quite other than the decent, respectful mask she
+presented to her mistress. The second girl of the present was a
+fresh-faced, lively young country lass, whom Ellen herself had secured,
+and whose rosy child&#8217;s face had been at first innocence itself; but now
+sometimes Lydia overheard them laughing together, a laughter which gave
+her the oddest inward revulsion, and when she came into the kitchen
+quickly she often found them looking at books which were quickly whisked
+out of sight.</p>
+
+<p>And then, a day or so before, old Mrs. O&#8217;Hern, her washwoman, had come
+directly to her with that revolting revelation of Ellen&#8217;s influence on
+her grandson, little Patsy. At the recollection of the old woman&#8217;s face
+of embittered anguish, Lydia shuddered. Oh, if she could only tell Paul!
+He was so loving and caressing to her&mdash;perhaps he would not mind being
+bothered this once&mdash;she did not know what to think of such things&mdash;she
+did not know what to do, which way to turn. She was startled beyond
+measure at having real moral responsibility put on her.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps Paul could think of something to do.</p>
+
+<p>He was waiting for her when she entered the house, having come in from
+an out-of-town trip on an earlier train than he had expected to catch.
+He dropped his newspaper and sprang up from his chair to put his arms
+about her and gloat over her beauty. &#8220;You&#8217;re getting prettier every day
+of your life, Lydia,&#8221; he told her, ruffling her soft <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_201" id="pg_201">201</a></span>hair, and kissing
+her very energetically a great many times. &#8220;But pale! I must get some
+color into your cheeks, Melton says&mdash;how&#8217;s this for a way?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He seemed to Lydia very boyish and gay and vital. She caught at him
+eagerly&mdash;he had been away from home three days&mdash;and clung to him. &#8220;Oh,
+Paul! How much good it does me to have you here, close! You are <i>so</i>
+much nicer than a room of women playing the same game of cards they
+began last September!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul shouted with laughter&mdash;his pleasant, hearty mirth. &#8220;I&#8217;m appreciated
+at my full worth,&#8221; he cried.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, how I loathe cards!&#8221; cried Lydia, taking off her hat.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s better than the talk you&#8217;d get from most of the people there, I
+bet,&#8221; conjectured Paul, taking up his newspaper again. &#8220;Cards are a
+blessing <i>that</i> way, compared with conversation.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, dear, I suppose so!&#8221; Lydia stopped a moment in the doorway. &#8220;But
+doesn&#8217;t it seem a pity that you never see anybody but people who&#8217;d bore
+you to death if you didn&#8217;t stop their mouth with cards?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s the way of the world,&#8221; remarked Paul comfortably, returning to
+the news of the day.</p>
+
+<p>The little friendly chat gave Lydia courage for her plan of asking her
+husband&#8217;s advice about her perplexity, but, mindful of traditional
+wisdom, she decided, as she thriftily changed her silk &#8220;party dress&#8221; for
+a house-gown of soft wool, that she would wait until the mollifying
+influence of dinner had time to assert itself. She wondered fearfully,
+with a quick throb of her heart, how he would receive her confidence.
+When she called him to the table she looked searchingly into his strong,
+resolute, good-natured face, and then, dropping her eyes, with an
+indrawn breath, began her usual fruitless endeavors to learn from him a
+little of what had occupied his day&mdash;his long, mysterious day, spent in
+a world of which he brought back but the scantiest tidings to her.</p>
+
+<p>As usual, to-night he shook his shoulders impatiently at <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_202" id="pg_202">202</a></span>her
+questioning. &#8220;Oh, Lydia darling, don&#8217;t talk shop! I&#8217;m sick and tired of
+it after three days of nothing else. I want to leave all that behind me
+when I come home. That&#8217;s what a home is for!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia did not openly dissent from this axiom, though she murmured
+helplessly: &#8220;I feel so awfully shut out. It is what you think about most
+of the time, and I do not know enough about it even to imagine&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul leaned across the table to lay an affectionate hand on his wife&#8217;s
+slim fingers. &#8220;Count your mercies, my dear. It&#8217;s all grab, and snap, and
+cutting somebody&#8217;s throat before he has a chance to cut yours. It
+wouldn&#8217;t please you if you did know anything about it&mdash;the business
+world.&#8221; He drew a long breath, and went on appreciatively with his
+cutlet&mdash;Lydia had learned something about meats since the year
+before&mdash;&#8220;You are a very good provider, little girl; do you know it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I love to,&#8221; said Lydia. She added reflectively: &#8220;Wouldn&#8217;t it be
+nice if things were so I could do the cooking myself and not have to
+bother with these horrible creatures that are all you can get usually?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul laughed at the fancy. &#8220;That&#8217;s a high ambition for my wife, I must
+say!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We&#8217;d have better things to eat even than Ellen gives us,&#8221; said Lydia
+pensively. &#8220;If I had a little more time to put on it, I could do
+wonders, I&#8217;m sure of it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t doubt that,&#8221; said her husband gallantly; &#8220;but did you ever know
+anybody who <i>was</i> her own cook?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, not except in between times, when they couldn&#8217;t get anybody
+else,&#8221; confessed Lydia. &#8220;But lots of people I know who do go through the
+motions of keeping one would be better off without one. They can&#8217;t
+afford it, and&mdash;Oh, I wish we were poorer!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul was highly amused by this flight of fancy. &#8220;But we&#8217;re as poor as
+poverty already,&#8221; he reminded her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We&#8217;re poor for buying hundred-dollar broadcloth tailor-made suits for
+me, and cut glass for the table, but we&#8217;d have plenty if I could wear
+ready-made serge at&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_203" id="pg_203">203</a></span>Paul laughed outright. &#8220;Haven&#8217;t you ever noticed, my dear, that the
+people who wear ready-made serge are the ones who could really
+comfortably afford to wear calico wrappers? It goes right up and down
+the scale that way. Everybody is trying to sing a note above what he
+can.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I know it does&mdash;but does it <i>have</i> to? Wouldn&#8217;t it be better if
+everybody just&mdash;why doesn&#8217;t somebody begin&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s the law of progress, of upward growth,&#8221; pronounced Paul.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia was impressed by the pontifical sound of this, though she ventured
+faintly: &#8220;Well, but does progress always mean broadcloth and cut glass?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>We</i> have the wherewithal to cultivate our minds!&#8221; said Paul, laughing
+again. &#8220;Weren&#8217;t the complete works of the American essayists among our
+wedding presents!&#8221; He referred to an old joke between them, at which
+Lydia laughed loyally, and the talk went on lightly until the meal was
+over.</p>
+
+<p>As they walked away from the table together Lydia said to herself,
+&#8220;Now&mdash;now&mdash;&#8221; but Paul began to laugh as he told an incident of
+Madeleine&#8217;s light-hearted, high-handed tyranny over her elderly fianc&eacute;,
+and it seemed impossible for Lydia to bring out her story of mean and
+ugly tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>As usual the evening was a lively one. Some acquaintances from the
+&#8220;younger married set&#8221; of Bellevue dropped in for a game of cards,
+Madeleine and &#8220;old Pete&#8221; Lowdor came out to talk over the plans for
+their new handsome house at the end of the street and at Paul&#8217;s
+suggestion Lydia hastily got together a chafing-dish supper for the
+impromptu party which prolonged itself with much laughter and many
+friendly wranglings over trumps and &#8220;post-mortems&#8221; until after midnight.
+Paul was in the highest of gay spirits as he stood with his pretty wife
+on the porch, calling good-nights to his guests disappearing down the
+starlit driveway. He inhaled the odor of success sweet and strong in his
+nostrils.</p>
+
+<p>As they looked back into the house, they saw the faithful Ellen clearing
+away the soiled dishes, her large, white, disease-scarred <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_204" id="pg_204">204</a></span>face
+impassive over her immaculate and correct maid&#8217;s dress.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Isn&#8217;t she a treasure!&#8221; cried the master of the house. &#8220;To sit up to
+this hour!&#8221; He started, &#8220;What&#8217;s that?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>From the shadow of the house a slim lad&#8217;s figure shambled out into the
+driveway. As he passed the porch where Paul stood, one strong arm
+protectingly about Lydia, he looked up and the light from the open door
+struck full on a white, purposeless, vacant smile. The upward glance
+lost for him the uncertain balance of his wavering feet. He reeled,
+flung up his arms and pitched with drunken soddenness full length upon
+the gravel, picking himself up clumsily with a sound of incoherent, weak
+lament. &#8220;Why, it&#8217;s a drunken man&mdash;in <i>our driveway</i>!&#8221; cried Paul, with
+proprietary indignation. &#8220;Get out of here!&#8221; he yelled angrily at the
+intruder&#8217;s retreating back. When he turned again to Lydia he saw that
+one of her lightning-swift changes of mood had swept over her. He was
+startled at her pale face and burning, horrified eyes, and remembering
+her condition with apprehension, picked her up bodily and carried her up
+the stairs to their bedroom, soothing her with reassuring caresses.</p>
+
+<p>There, sitting on the edge of their bed, her loosened hair falling about
+her white face, holding fast to her husband&#8217;s hands, Lydia told him at
+last; hesitating and stumbling because in her blank ignorance she knew
+no words even to hint at what she feared&mdash;she told him who Patsy was,
+the blue-eyed, fifteen-year-old boy, just over from Ireland, ignorant of
+the world as a child of five, easily led, easily shamed, by his fear of
+appearing rustic, into any excess&mdash;and then she told him what the boy&#8217;s
+grandmother had told her about Ellen. It was a milestone in their
+married life, her turning to him more intimately than she would have
+done to her mother, her breaking down the walls of her lifelong
+maiden&#8217;s reserve and ignorance. She finished with her face hidden in his
+breast. What should she do? What <i>could</i> she do?</p>
+
+<p>Paul took her into the closest embrace, kissed her shut <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_205" id="pg_205">205</a></span>eyes in a
+passion of regret that she should have learned the evil in the world, of
+relieved belittling of the story, Lydia&#8217;s portentous beginning of which
+had quite startled him, and of indignation at &#8220;Mrs. O&#8217;Hern&#8217;s foul
+mouth&mdash;for you can just be sure, darling Lydia, that it&#8217;s all nothing
+but rowings among the servants. Probably Ellen won&#8217;t let Mrs. O&#8217;Hern
+take her usual weekly perquisite of sugar and tea. Servants are always
+quarreling and the only way to do is to keep out of their lies about
+each other and let them fight it out themselves. You never can have any
+idea of who&#8217;s telling the truth if you butt in and try to straighten it,
+and the Lord knows that Ellen&#8217;s too good a cook and too much needed in
+this family until the new member arrives safely, to hurt her feelings
+with investigating any of Mrs. O&#8217;Hern&#8217;s yarns. Just you refuse to listen
+to servants&#8217; gossip. If you&#8217;d been a little less of a darling,
+inexperienced school-girl, you&#8217;d have cut off such talk at the first
+words. Just you take my word for it, you dear, you sweetheart, you best
+of&mdash;&#8221; he ran on into ardent endearments, forgetting the story himself,
+blinding and dazzling Lydia with the excitement which always swept her
+away in those moments when Paul was her passionate, youthful lover.</p>
+
+<p>She tried to revert to the question once or twice later, but now Paul
+alternated between shaming her laughingly for her gullibility and making
+fun of her &#8220;countrified&#8221; interest in the affairs of her servants. &#8220;But,
+Paul, Mrs. O&#8217;Hern says that Patsy doesn&#8217;t <i>want</i> to drink and&mdash;and go to
+those awful houses&mdash;his father died of it&mdash;only Ellen makes him, by&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul tried to close the discussion with a little impatience at her
+attempt to press the matter. &#8220;Every Irish boy drinks more or less, you
+little goose. That&#8217;s nothing! Of course it&#8217;s too bad to have you <i>see</i> a
+drunken man, but it&#8217;s nothing so tragic. If he didn&#8217;t drink here, he
+would somewhere else. The only thing we have to complain about that I
+can see, is having the cook&#8217;s followers drunk&mdash;but Ellen&#8217;s such a
+miracle of competence we must overlook that. As for the rest of Mrs.
+O&#8217;Hern&#8217;s dirty stories, they&#8217;re spite work <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_206" id="pg_206">206</a></span>evidently.&#8221; As Lydia looked
+up at him, her face still anxious and drawn, he ended finally, &#8220;Good
+gracious, Lydia, don&#8217;t you suppose I know&mdash;that my experience of the
+world has taught me more about human nature than you know? You act to me
+as though you trusted your washwoman&#8217;s view of things more than your
+husband&#8217;s. And now what you want to do, anyhow, is to get some rest. You
+hop into bed, little rabbit, and go to sleep. Don&#8217;t wait for me; I&#8217;ve
+got a lot of figuring to do.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When he went to bed, a couple of hours later, Lydia was lying quietly
+with closed eyes, and he did not disturb her; but afterward he woke out
+of a sound sleep and sat up with a sense that something was wrong. He
+listened. There was not a sound in the room or in the house. Apparently
+Lydia was not wakened by his startled movement. She lay in a profound
+immobility.</p>
+
+<p>But something about her very motionlessness struck a chill to his heart.
+Women in her condition sometimes had seizures in the night, he had
+heard. With a shaking hand, he struck a match and leaned over her. He
+gave a loud, shocked exclamation to see that her eyes were open, steady
+and fixed, like wide, dark pools. He threw the match away, and took her
+in his arms with a fond murmur of endearments. &#8220;Why, poor little girl!
+Do you lie awake and worry about what&#8217;s to come?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia drew a painful breath. &#8220;Yes,&#8221; she said; &#8220;I worry a great deal
+about what&#8217;s to come.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He kissed her gently, ardently, gently again. &#8220;You mustn&#8217;t do that,
+darling! You&#8217;re all right! Melton said there wasn&#8217;t one chance in a
+thousand of anything but just the most temporary illness, without any
+complications. It won&#8217;t be so bad&mdash;it&#8217;ll be soon over, and think what it
+means to us&mdash;dearest&mdash;dearest&mdash;dearest!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia lay quiet in his arms. She had been still so long that he thought
+her asleep, when she said, in a whisper: &#8220;I hope it won&#8217;t be a girl!&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_207" id="pg_207">207</a></span>
+<a name="LYDIAS_NEW_MOTTO_7480" id="LYDIAS_NEW_MOTTO_7480"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XIX</p>
+<p class="l c">LYDIA&#8217;S NEW MOTTO</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Lydia&#8217;s two or three big receptions, of which her mother had spoken with
+so casual a confidence, came off, while not exactly with nonchalant
+ease, still, on the whole, creditably. It is true that Dr. Melton had
+stormed at Lydia one sunny day in spring, finding her bent over her
+desk, addressing invitations.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s April, child!&#8221; he cried, &#8220;April! The crocuses are out and the
+violets are almost here&mdash;and, what is more important, your day of trial
+gets closer with every tick of the clock. Come outdoors and take a walk
+with me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I can&#8217;t!&#8221; Lydia was aghast at the idea, looking at a mountain of
+envelopes before her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Here! I&#8217;ll help you finish those, and then we&#8217;ll&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, no, <i>no</i>!&#8221; In Lydia&#8217;s negation was a touch of the irritation that
+was often during these days in her attitude toward her godfather. &#8220;I
+can&#8217;t! Please don&#8217;t tease me to! The curtains to the spare room have to
+be put up, and the bed draperies somehow fixed. A stray dog got in there
+when he was wet and muddy and went to sleep on my best lace bedspread.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton had not practiced for years among Endbury ladies without
+having some knowledge of them and a corresponding readiness of mind in
+meeting the difficulties they declared insurmountable. &#8220;I&#8217;ll buy you a
+white marseilles bedspread on our way back from the walk,&#8221; he offered
+gravely.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I&#8217;ve got plenty of plain white ones,&#8221; she admitted incautiously,
+&#8220;but they don&#8217;t go with the scheme of the room&mdash;and the first
+reception&#8217;s only two days off.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_208" id="pg_208">208</a></span>Dr. Melton fixed her with an ironical and melancholy smile: &#8220;Now,
+Lydia, I did think you had it in you to realize that your health and the
+strength of your child are worth more than&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia sprang up and confronted him with an apparent anger of face and
+accent that was contradicted by her trembling chin and suffused eyes.
+&#8220;Oh, go away!&#8221; she commanded him, shaking her head and motioning him
+off. &#8220;Don&#8217;t talk so to me! I can&#8217;t help it&mdash;what I do! Everything&#8217;s a
+part of the whole system, and I&#8217;m in that up to my neck&mdash;you know I am.
+If that&#8217;s right, why, everything&#8217;s all right, just the way everybody
+thinks it is. And if it&#8217;s wrong&mdash;&#8221; She caught her breath, and turned
+back to her desk. &#8220;If it&#8217;s wrong, what good would be done by little
+dribbling compromises of an occasional walk.&#8221; She sat down wearily, and
+leaned her head on her hand. &#8220;I just wish you wouldn&#8217;t keep me so
+stirred up&mdash;when I&#8217;m trying so <i>hard</i> to settle down!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton seemed to divine perfectly the significance of this
+incoherent outbreak. He thrust out his lips in his old grimace that
+denoted emotion, and observed the speaker in a frowning silence. When
+she finished, he nodded: &#8220;You are right, Lydia, I do no good.&#8221; He
+twirled his hat about between his fingers, looking absently into the
+crown, and added, &#8220;But you must forgive me, I love you very dearly.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia ran over to him, conscience-stricken. He took her embrace and
+remorseful kiss quietly. &#8220;Don&#8217;t be sorry, Lydia dear. You have just
+shown me, as in a flash of lightning, how much more powerful a grasp on
+reality you have than I.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia recoiled from him with an outcry of exasperation. &#8220;I! Why, I&#8217;m
+almost an idiot! I haven&#8217;t a grasp on anything! I can&#8217;t see an inch
+before my nose. I&#8217;m in a perfect nightmare of perplexity all the time
+because I can&#8217;t make out what I&#8217;m driving at&mdash;or ought to&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She went on more quietly, with a reasoning air: &#8220;Only look here,
+Godfather, it came over me the other night, when <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_209" id="pg_209">209</a></span>I couldn&#8217;t sleep, that
+perhaps what&#8217;s the trouble with me is that I&#8217;m <i>lazy</i>! I believe that&#8217;s
+it! I don&#8217;t want to work the way Marietta does, and Mother does, and
+even Madeleine does over her dresses and parties and things. It must be
+I&#8217;m a shirk, and expect to have an easier time than most people. That
+<i>must</i> be it. What else can it be?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor made no protest against this theory, taking himself off in a
+silence most unusual with him. Lydia did not notice this; nor did she in
+the next two or three months remark that her godfather took quite
+literally and obeyed scrupulously her exhortation to leave her in peace.</p>
+
+<p>She was in the grasp of this new idea. It seemed to her that in phrasing
+it she had hit upon the explanation of her situation which she had been
+so long seeking, and it was with a resolve to scourge this weakness out
+of her life that she now faced the future.</p>
+
+<p>She found a satisfaction in the sweeping manner in which this new maxim
+could be applied to all the hesitations that had confused her. All her
+meditations heretofore had brought her nothing but uncertainty, but this
+new catchword of incessant activity drove her forward too resistlessly
+to allow any reflections as to whether she were going in the right
+direction. She yielded herself absolutely to that ideal of conduct which
+had been urged upon her all her life, and she found, as so many others
+find, oblivion to the problems of the spirit in this resolute refusal to
+recognize the spirit. It was perhaps during these next months of her
+life that she most nearly approximated the Endbury notion of what she
+should be.</p>
+
+<p>She had yielded to Paul on the subject of the cook not only because of
+her timid distrust of her own inexperienced judgment but because of her
+intense reaction from the usual Endbury motto of &#8220;Husbands, hands off!&#8221;
+She had wanted Paul to be interested in the details of the house as she
+hoped to know and be interested in what concerned him, and when he
+showed his interest in a request she could not refuse it. She hoped that
+she had made a good beginning for the habit of taking counsel with each
+other on all <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_210" id="pg_210">210</a></span>matters. But she thought and hoped and reflected very
+little during these days. She was enormously, incredibly busy, and on
+the whole, she hoped, successfully so. The receptions, at least, went
+off very well, everybody said.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton did not see his goddaughter again until he came with Mrs.
+Sandworth to the last of these events. She was looking singularly
+handsome at that time, her color high, her eyes very large and dark,
+almost black, so dilated were the pupils. With the nicety of observation
+of a man who has lived much among women, the doctor noticed that her
+costume, while effective, was not adjusted with the exquisite feeling
+for finish that always pervaded the toilets of her mother and sister.
+Lydia was trying with all her might to make herself over, but with the
+best will in the world she could not attain the prayerful concentration
+on the process of attiring herself, characteristic of the other women of
+her family.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She forgot to put the barrette in her back hair,&#8221; murmured Mrs.
+Sandworth mournfully, as she and her brother emerged from the hand-shake
+of the last of the ladies assisting in receiving, &#8220;and there are two
+hooks of her cuff unfastened, and her collar&#8217;s crooked. But I don&#8217;t dare
+breathe a word to her about it. Since that time before her marriage when
+she&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, yes, yes,&#8221; her brother cut her short; &#8220;don&#8217;t bring up that tragic
+episode again. I&#8217;d succeeded in forgetting it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You can call it tragic if you like,&#8221; commented Mrs. Sandworth, looking
+about for an escape from the stranded isolation of guests who have just
+been passed along from the receiving line; &#8220;but what it was all about
+was more than I ever could&mdash;&#8221; Her eyes fell again on Lydia, and she lost
+herself in a sweet passion of admiration and pride. &#8220;Oh, isn&#8217;t she the
+loveliest thing that ever drew the breath of life! Was there ever
+anybody else that could look so as though&mdash;as though they still had dew
+on them!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She went on, with her bold inconsequence: &#8220;There is a queer streak in
+her. Sometimes I think she doesn&#8217;t care&mdash;&#8221; <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_211" id="pg_211">211</a></span>She stopped to gaze at a
+striking costume just entering the room.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What doesn&#8217;t she care about?&#8221; asked the doctor.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Sandworth was concentrating on sartorial details as much of her
+mind as was ever under control at one time, and, called upon for a
+development of her theory, was even more vague than usual. &#8220;Oh, I don&#8217;t
+know&mdash;about what everybody cares about.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She&#8217;s likely to learn, if it&#8217;s at all catching,&#8221; conjectured the doctor
+grimly, looking around the large, handsome room. An impalpable effluvium
+was in the air, composed of the scent of flowers, the odor of delicate
+food, the sounds of a discreetly small orchestra behind palms in the
+hallway, the rustling of silks, and the pleasurable excitement of the
+crowd of prosperous-looking women, pleasantly elated by the opportunity
+for exhibiting their best toilets.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To think of its being our little Lydia who&#8217;s the center of all this!&#8221;
+murmured Mrs. Sandworth, her loving eyes glistening with affectionate
+pride. &#8220;It really is a splendid scene, isn&#8217;t it, Marius?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If they were all gagged, it might be. Lord! how they yell!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, at a <i>reception</i>!&#8221; Mrs. Sandworth&#8217;s accent denoted that the word
+was an explanation. &#8220;People have to, to make themselves heard.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And why should they be so eager to accomplish that?&#8221; inquired the
+doctor. &#8220;Listen!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Standing as they were, tightly pressed in between a number of different
+groups, their ears were assaulted by a disjointed mass of stentorian
+conversation that gave a singular illusion as if it all came from one
+inconceivably voluble source, the individuality of the voices being lost
+in the screaming enunciation which, as Mrs. Sandworth had pointed out,
+was a prerequisite of self-expression under the circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>They heard: &#8220;&mdash;<i>For over a month and the sleeves were too see you again
+at Mrs. Elliott&#8217;s I&#8217;m pouring there from four I&#8217;ve got to dismiss one
+with little plum-colored bows <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_212" id="pg_212">212</a></span>all along five dollars a week and the
+washing out, and still impossible! I was there myself all the time and
+they neither of thirty-five cents a pound for the most ordinary ferns
+and red carnations was all they had, and we thought it rather skimpy
+under the brought up in one big braid and caught down with at the
+Peterson&#8217;s they were pink and white with</i>&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Oh, no, Madeleine! that was at the Burlingame&#8217;s</i>.&#8221; Mrs. Sandworth took
+a running jump into the din and sank from her brother&#8217;s sight,
+vociferating: &#8220;<i>The Petersons had them of old-gold, don&#8217;t you remember,
+with little</i>&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor, worming his way desperately through the masses of
+femininity, and resisting all attempts to engage him in the vocal fray,
+emerged at length into the darkened hall where the air was, as he told
+himself in a frenzied flight of the imagination, less like a combination
+of a menagerie and a perfume shop. Here, in a quiet corner, sat Lydia&#8217;s
+father, alone. He held in one hand a large platter piled high with
+wafer-like sandwiches, which he was consuming at a Gargantuan rate, and
+as he ate he smiled to himself.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, Mr. Ogre,&#8221; said the doctor, sitting down beside him with a gasp
+of relief; &#8220;let a wave-worn mariner into your den, will you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Provided with an auditor, Judge Emery&#8217;s smile broke into an open laugh.
+He waved the platter toward the uproar in the next rooms: &#8220;A boiler
+factory ain&#8217;t in it with woman, lovely woman, is it?&#8221; he put it to his
+old friend.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Gracious powers! There&#8217;s nothing to laugh at in that exhibition!&#8221; the
+doctor reproved him, with an acrimonious savagery. &#8220;I don&#8217;t know which
+makes me sicker; to stay in there and listen to them, or come out here
+and find you thinking they&#8217;re <i>funny</i>!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They <i>are</i> funny!&#8221; insisted the Judge tranquilly. &#8220;I stood by the door
+and listened to the scraps of talk I could catch, till I thought I
+should have a fit. I never heard anything funnier on the stage.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Look-y here, Nat,&#8221; the doctor stared up at him angrily, &#8220;they&#8217;re not
+monkeys in a zoo, to be looked at only on holidays <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_213" id="pg_213">213</a></span>and then laughed at!
+They&#8217;re the other half of a whole that we&#8217;re half of, and don&#8217;t you
+forget it! Why in the world should you think it funny for them to do
+this tomfool trick all winter and have nervous prostration all summer to
+pay for it? You&#8217;d lock up a <i>man</i> as a dangerous lunatic if he spent his
+life so. What they&#8217;re like, and what they do with their time and
+strength concerns us enough sight more than what the tariff is, let me
+tell you!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I admit that what your wife is like concerns you a whole lot!&#8221; The
+Judge laughed good-naturedly in the face of the little old bachelor.
+&#8220;Don&#8217;t commence jumping on the American woman now! I won&#8217;t stand it!
+She&#8217;s the noblest of her sex!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do you know why I am bald?&#8221; said Dr. Melton, rubbing his hand over his
+shining dome.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If I did, I wouldn&#8217;t admit it,&#8221; the Judge put up a cautious guard,
+&#8220;because I foresee that whatever I say will be used as evidence against
+me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve torn out all my hair in desperation at hearing such men as you
+claim to admire and respect and wish to advance the American woman. You
+don&#8217;t give enough thought to her&mdash;real thought&mdash;from one year&#8217;s end to
+another to know whether you think she has an immortal soul or not!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, you can&#8217;t get anywhere, trying to reason about those sort of
+things. You have to take souls for granted. Besides, I give her as fair
+a deal in that respect as I give myself,&#8221; protested Lydia&#8217;s father
+reasonably, smiling and eating.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s something in <i>that</i>, now!&#8221; cried his interlocutor, with an odd
+Celtic lilt which sometimes invaded his speech; &#8220;but she <i>has</i> an
+immortal soul, and I&#8217;m by no means sure that yours is still inside you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Judge stood up, brushed the crumbs of his stolen feast from his
+well-fitting broadcloth, and smiled down indulgently at the unquiet
+little doctor. &#8220;She&#8217;s all right, Melton, the American woman, and you&#8217;re
+an unconscionably tiresome old fanatic. That&#8217;s what <i>you</i> are! Come
+along and have a glass of punch with me. Lydia&#8217;s cook has a <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_214" id="pg_214">214</a></span>genius for
+punch&mdash;and for sandwiches!&#8221; he added reflectively, setting down the
+empty platter.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton apparently was off on another tangent of excitability. &#8220;Did
+you ever see her?&#8221; he demanded with a fiercely significant accent.</p>
+
+<p>The Judge made a humorous wry mouth. &#8220;Yes, I have; but what concern is a
+cook&#8217;s moral character to her employer any more than an engineer&#8217;s to
+the railroad&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, it mightn&#8217;t hurt the railroad any if it took more cognizance of
+its engineers&#8217; morals&mdash;&#8221; began the doctor dryly.</p>
+
+<p>The Judge cut him short with a great laugh. &#8220;Oh, Melton! Melton! You
+bilious sophomore! Take a vacation from finding everything so damn
+tragic. Take a drink on me. You&#8217;re all right! Everybody&#8217;s all right!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor nodded. &#8220;And the reception is the success of the season,&#8221; he
+said.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_215" id="pg_215">215</a></span>
+<a name="AN_EVENINGS_ENTERTAINMENT_7768" id="AN_EVENINGS_ENTERTAINMENT_7768"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XX</p>
+<p class="l c">AN EVENING&#8217;S ENTERTAINMENT</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The dinner parties, so Paul told Lydia one evening a few days later,
+would certainly be as successful and with but little more trouble. &#8220;Just
+think of the dinners Ellen&#8217;s been giving us for the last two months! I
+don&#8217;t believe there&#8217;s another such cook in Ohio&mdash;within our purse, of
+course.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia did not visibly respond to this enthusiasm. Indeed, she walked
+away from the last half of it, and leaned out of a window to look up at
+the stars. When she came back to take up the tiny dress on which she was
+sewing, she said: &#8220;I don&#8217;t think I can stand more than this one dinner
+party, Paul. I&#8217;m sorry, but I don&#8217;t feel at all well, and this dreadful
+nausea troubles me a good deal.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, you look lovelier than ever before in your life,&#8221; Paul reassured
+her tenderly, and felt a moment&#8217;s pique that her face did not entirely
+clear at this all-important announcement. &#8220;Come, let&#8217;s go over to the
+Derby&#8217;s for a game of bridge, will you, Lydia?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This conversation took place on a Tuesday late in May. The dinner party
+was set for Thursday. On Wednesday morning, after Paul&#8217;s usual early
+departure, Lydia went to her writing desk to send a note to Madeleine
+Hollister. Paul had intimated that she and Madeleine were seeing less of
+each other than he had expected from their girlhood acquaintance, and
+Lydia, in her anxiety to induce Paul to talk over with her and plan with
+her the growth of their home life, was eager to adopt every casual
+suggestion he threw out. She began, therefore, a cordial invitation to
+Madeleine to spend several days with them. She would try again to be
+more intimate with her husband&#8217;s sister.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_216" id="pg_216">216</a></span>She had not inherited her mother&#8217;s housekeeping eye, and was never
+extremely observant of details. Being more than usually preoccupied this
+morning, she had no suspicion that someone else had been using the
+conveniences for writing on her desk until she turned over the sheet of
+paper on which she had begun her note, and saw with surprise that the
+other side was already covered with a coarse handwriting, unfamiliar to
+her.</p>
+
+<p>As she looked at this in the blankest astonishment, a phrase leaped out
+at her comprehension, like a serpent striking. And then another. And
+another.</p>
+
+<p>She tried to push back her chair to escape, but she was like a person
+paralyzed.</p>
+
+<p>With returning strength to move came an overwhelming wave of nausea. She
+crept up to her own room and lay motionless and soundless for hour after
+hour, until presently it was noon, and the pleasant tinkling of gongs
+announced that lunch was served.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia rose, and made her way down the stairs to the well-ordered table,
+set with the daintiest of perfectly prepared food, and stood, holding on
+to the back of a chair, while she rang the bell. The little second girl
+answered it&mdash;one of the flitting, worthless, temporary occupants of that
+position.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tell Ellen to come here,&#8221; said her mistress.</p>
+
+<p>At the appearance of the cook, Lydia&#8217;s white face went a little whiter.
+&#8220;Did you use my writing desk last evening?&#8221; she asked.</p>
+
+<p>Ellen looked up, her large, square-jawed face like a mask through which
+her eyes probed her mistress&#8217; expression. &#8220;Yes, Mrs. Hollister; I did,&#8221;
+she said in the admirable &#8220;servant&#8217;s manner&#8221; she possessed to
+perfection. &#8220;I ought to ask your pardon for doing it without permission,
+but someone was wanting Mr. Hollister on the telephone, and I thought
+best to sit within hearing of the bell until you and Mr. Hollister
+should return, and as&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You left part of your letter to Patsy O&#8217;Hern,&#8221; said <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_217" id="pg_217">217</a></span>Lydia, and sat
+down suddenly, as though her strength were spent.</p>
+
+<p>The woman opposite her flushed a purplish red. There was a long silence.
+Lydia looked at her servant with a face before which Ellen finally
+lowered her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I am sure, Mrs. Hollister, if you don&#8217;t think I&#8217;m worth the place, and
+if you think you can manage without me to-morrow night, I&#8217;ll go this
+minute,&#8221; she said coolly.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia did not remove her eyes from the other&#8217;s flushed face. &#8220;You must
+go far away from Bellevue,&#8221; she said. &#8220;You must not take a place
+anywhere near here.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Ellen looked up quickly, and down again. The color slowly died out of
+her face. After a sullen silence, &#8220;Yes,&#8221; she said.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That is all,&#8221; said Lydia.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Paul found his wife that evening still very white. She explained Ellen&#8217;s
+disappearance with a dry brevity. &#8220;That we should have continued to give
+that&mdash;that awful&mdash;to give her opportunity to work upon a boy of&mdash;&#8221; she
+ended brokenly. &#8220;Suppose he had been my brother!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul was aghast. &#8220;But, my <i>dear</i>! To-morrow is the night of the dinner!
+Couldn&#8217;t you have put off a few days this sudden fit of&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia broke from her white stillness with a wild outcry. She flung
+herself on her husband, pressing her hands on his mouth and crying out
+fiercely: &#8220;No, no, Paul! Not that! I can&#8217;t bear to have you say that! I
+hoped&mdash;I hoped you wouldn&#8217;t think of&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul was fresh from an interview with Dr. Melton, and in his ears rang
+innumerable cautions against excitement or violent emotions. With his
+usual competent grasp on the essentials of a situation that he could not
+understand at all, he put aside for the time his exasperated
+apprehensions about the next day&#8217;s event, and picking Lydia up bodily he
+carried her to a couch, closing her lips with gentle hands and soothing
+her with caresses, like a frightened child.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_218" id="pg_218">218</a></span>&#8220;Oh, you are good to me!&#8221; she murmured finally, quieted. &#8220;I must try
+not to get so excited. But, Paul&mdash;I <i>can&#8217;t</i> tell you&mdash;about&mdash;about that
+letter&mdash;and later, when I saw Ellen, it was as though we fought hand to
+hand for Patsy, though she never&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There, there, dearest! Don&#8217;t talk about it&mdash;just rest. You&#8217;ve worked
+yourself into a perfect fever.&#8221; If there was latent in the indulgent
+accent of this speech the coda, &#8220;All about nothing,&#8221; it escaped Lydia&#8217;s
+ear. She only knew that the long nightmare of her lonely, horrified day
+was over. She clung to her husband, and thanked heaven for his pure,
+clean manliness.</p>
+
+<p>But in a vastly different way the next day was almost as much of a
+nightmare. Lydia&#8217;s father and mother were temporarily out of town and
+their at least fairly satisfactory cook was enjoying her vacation at an
+undiscoverable address. Lydia was cut off from asking her sister to come
+to her aid by the fact that Paul had prevailed upon her to omit Marietta
+and her husband from her guests. &#8220;If you won&#8217;t give but one, we&#8217;ve just
+<i>got</i> to invite the important ones,&#8221; he had said. &#8220;Your sister can take
+dinner with us any day, and you know her husband <i>isn&#8217;t</i> the most&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia had picked up in the school of necessity a fair knowledge of
+cooking, for which she had discovered in herself quite a liking; but she
+had been too constantly in social demand to have the leisure for
+advancing far into culinary lore, and she now found herself dismayed
+before the elaborate menu that Ellen had planned, for which the
+materials were gathered together. She was still shaken with the emotions
+of the day before, and subject to sudden giddy, sick turns, which,
+although lasting but an instant, left her enormously fatigued.</p>
+
+<p>She went furiously at the task before her, beginning by simplifying the
+dinner as much as she dared and could with the materials at hand, and
+struggling with the dishes she was obliged to retain. For years
+afterward, the sight of chicken salad affected her to acute nausea. The
+inexperienced and careless little second girl lost her head in the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_219" id="pg_219">219</a></span>crisis, and had to be repeatedly calmed and assured that all that would
+be asked of her would be to serve the dinner to the waiters for whom
+Lydia had arranged hastily by telephone with Endbury&#8217;s leading caterer.
+Ellen had planned to serve the meal with the help of a waitress friend
+or two, without other outside help; a feature of the occasion that had
+met with Paul&#8217;s hearty approval. He told Lydia that those palpably
+hired-for-the-occasion nigger waiters were very bad form, and belonged
+to a phase of Endbury&#8217;s social gaucheries as outgrown now as charade
+parties. But now, of course, nothing else was possible.</p>
+
+<p>In the intervals of cooking, Lydia left her makeshift help in the
+kitchen, to see that nothing burned, and in a frenzy of activity flew at
+some of the manifold things to be done to prepare the house for the
+festivity. She swept and wiped up herself the expansive floors of the
+two large parlors, set the rooms in order, dusted the innumerable
+wedding present knickknacks, cleaned the stairs, wiped free from dust
+the carved balustrades, ordered the bedrooms that were to serve as
+dressing rooms in the evening, answered the &#8217;phone a thousand times,
+arranged flowers in the vases, received a reportorial call from Miss
+Burgess, gave cut glass and china its final polish, laid out Paul&#8217;s
+evening clothes and arranged her own toilet ready&mdash;it was five o&#8217;clock!
+There were innumerable other tasks to accomplish, but she dared no
+longer put off setting the table.</p>
+
+<p>It was to be a large dinner&mdash;large, that is, for Endbury&mdash;of twenty
+covers, and Lydia had never prepared a table for so many guests. The
+number of objects necessary for the conventional setting of a dinner
+table appalled her. She was so tired, and her attention was so fixed on
+the complicated processes going on uncertainly in the kitchen, that her
+brain reeled over the vast quantity of knives and forks and plates and
+glasses needed to convey food to twenty mouths on a festal occasion.
+They persistently eluded her attempts to marshal them into order. She
+discovered that she had put forks for the soup&mdash;that in some
+inexplicable way at the plate destined for an important guest there was
+a large <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_220" id="pg_220">220</a></span>kitchen spoon of iron&mdash;a wild sort of whimsical humor rose in
+her from the ferment of utter fatigue and anxiety. When Paul came in,
+looking very grave, she told him with a wavering laugh, &#8220;If I tried as
+hard for ten minutes to go to Heaven as I&#8217;ve tried all day to have this
+dinner right, I&#8217;d certainly have a front seat in the angel choir. If
+anybody here to-night is not satisfied, it&#8217;ll be because he&#8217;s harder to
+please than St. Peter himself.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My Aunt Alexandra will be here,&#8221; said Paul, the humorous side of her
+speech escaping him.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia set down a tray of glasses, and broke into open, shaking,
+hysterical laughter. Paul surveyed her grimly. Her excitement had
+flushed her cheeks and darkened her eyes, and her sudden, apparently
+light-hearted, mirth put the finishing touch to a picture that could
+seem to her husband nothing but a care-free, not to say childish,
+attitude toward a situation of grave concern to him and his prospects
+and ambitions in the world. His inborn and highly cultivated regard for
+competence and success in any enterprise undertaken, drowned out, as was
+by no means infrequent with him, any judicial inquiry into the innate
+importance of the enterprise. He had an instant of bitter impatience
+with Lydia. He felt that he had a right to hold her to account for the
+outcome of events. If she were well enough to have rosy cheeks and to
+laugh at nothing, she was well enough to have satisfactory results
+expected from her efforts.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I hope very much that everything will go well,&#8221; he said curtly, turning
+away. &#8220;Our first dinner party means a good deal.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But everything did not go well. Indeed, it is scarcely too much to say
+that nothing went well. From the over-peppered soup (Lydia had forgotten
+to caution her rattle-brained assistant that she had already seasoned
+the bouillon) to the salad which, although excellent, gave out frankly,
+beyond any possibility of disguise, while five people were still
+unserved, the meal was a long procession of mishaps. <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_221" id="pg_221">221</a></span>Paul took up
+sorrily his wife&#8217;s rather hysterical note of self-mockery, and laughed
+and joked over the varied eccentricities of the pretentious menu. But
+there was no laughter in his heart.</p>
+
+<p>Never before, in all his life, from babyhood up, had he been forced to
+know the acrid taste of failure, and the dose was not sweetened by his
+intense consciousness that he was not in any way responsible. No such
+fiasco had ever resulted from anything he <i>had</i> been responsible for, he
+thought fiercely to himself, leaning forward smilingly to talk to the
+president of the street-railway company, who, having nothing in the
+shape of silverware left before his place but a knife and spoon, was
+eating his salad with the latter implement. &#8220;Lydia has no right to act
+so,&#8221; he thought.</p>
+
+<p>The hostess gave the effect of flushed, bright-eyed animation usual with
+her on exciting occasions.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your wife is a beauty,&#8221; said the street-railway magnate, looking down
+the disorganized table toward her.</p>
+
+<p>Paul received this assurance with the proper enthusiastic assent, but
+something else gleamed hotly in his face as he looked at her. &#8220;I have
+<i>some</i> rights,&#8221; thought the young husband. &#8220;Lydia owes me something!&#8221; He
+never before had been moved to pity for himself.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia seemed to herself to be in an endless bad dream. The exhausting
+efforts of the day had reduced her to a sort of coma of fatigue through
+which she felt but dully the successive stabs of the ill-served,
+unsuccessful dinner. At times, the table, the guests, the room itself,
+wavered before her, and she clutched at her chair to keep her balance.
+She did not know that she was laughing and talking gaily and eating
+nothing. She was only conscious of an intense longing for the end of
+things, and darkness and quiet.</p>
+
+<p>After the meal the company moved into the double parlor. The plan had
+been to serve coffee there, but as people stood about waiting and this
+did not appear, Paul drew Lydia to one side to ask her about it. She
+looked at him <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_222" id="pg_222">222</a></span>with bright, blank eyes, and spoke in an expressionless
+voice: &#8220;The grocery boy forgot to deliver the coffee,&#8221; she said. &#8220;There
+isn&#8217;t any, I remember now.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He turned away silently, and the later part of the entertainment began.</p>
+
+<p>There was to be music, one of the guests being Endbury&#8217;s favorite
+amateur soprano, another a pianist much thought of. The singer took her
+place by the piano, assuming carefully the correct position. Lydia
+watched her balance on the balls of her feet, lean forward a little,
+throw up her chest and draw in her abdomen. As the preliminary chords of
+the accompaniment sounded, she was almost visibly concentrating her
+thoughts on the tension of her vocal chords, on the position of the soft
+palate and the resonance of the nasal cavities. The thoughts of her
+auditors followed her own. It came to Lydia some time after the
+performance was over that the words of the song told of love and life
+and tragic betrayal.</p>
+
+<p>A near-by guest leaned to her and said, during the hand-clapping: &#8220;I
+couldn&#8217;t make out what it was all about&mdash;never can understand a
+song&mdash;but, say! can&#8217;t she put it all over the soprano that sings in the
+First Methodist.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His hostess gave the speaker a rather disconcerting stare, hardly
+explained, he thought, by the enigmatical statement that came after it:
+&#8220;Why, that is how we are living, all of us!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The pianist was an old German, considered eccentric by Endbury. He had a
+social position on account of his son, a prosperous German-American
+manufacturer of buggies, and was invited because of his readiness to
+play on any occasion. The old man looked about him at the company with a
+fatherly smile, and, sitting down to his instrument, waited pointedly
+until all the cheerful hum of conversation had died away. The room was
+profoundly silent as he brought his hands down on the keys in a
+startling, thrilling chord. Lydia&#8217;s heart began to beat fast. She felt a
+chill run among the roots of her hair. She was so moved she could have
+wept aloud, and yet, almost at once, as the musician <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_223" id="pg_223">223</a></span>passed on to the
+rich elaboration of his theme, she lost herself in a groping
+bewilderment. She had heard so little music! Her straining attention
+mocked her with its futility.</p>
+
+<p>She and Paul had been married for eight months, but they had found no
+time for the serious study of music from which she had hoped so much.
+When Paul was at home for an evening he was too tired and worn for
+anything very deep, he said, and preferred to anything else the lighter
+pieces of Nevin. She now gave ear despairingly to the mighty utterance
+of a master, catching only now and then a tantalizing glimpse of what it
+might mean to her. At times, there emerged from the glorious tumult of
+sound some grave, earnest chord, some quick, piercing melody, some
+exquisite sudden cadence, which reached her heart intelligibly; but
+through most of it she felt herself to be listening with heartsick
+yearning to a lovely message in an unknown tongue. Her feeling of
+desolate exile from a realm of beauty she longed to enter, was
+intensified, as was natural in so sensitive a nature, by the strange
+power of music to heighten in its listeners whatever is, for the time,
+their predominant emotion. She felt like crying out, like beating her
+hands against the prison bars suddenly revealed to her. She was almost
+intolerably affected before the end of the selection.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s an awfully long piece for anybody to learn by heart!&#8221; commented
+her neighbor admiringly, as the old pianist finished, and stood up
+wiping his forehead. &#8220;Say, Mr. Burkhardt, what&#8217;s the name of that
+selection?&#8221; he went on, leaning forward.</p>
+
+<p>The old German turned toward him, and answered gravely: &#8220;That is the
+feerst mofement of Beethoven&#8217;s Opus Von Hundred and Elefen.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, it is, is it?&#8221; said Lydia&#8217;s guest, with a facetious intonation.
+&#8220;All of that?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>After that the soprano sang again, someone else sang a humorous negro
+song, there was more piano music, rendered by the prosperous son of the
+old pianist, who played dashingly <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_224" id="pg_224">224</a></span>some bright comic-opera airs. The
+furniture was pushed back and a few dancers whirled over the costly,
+hardwood waxed floors, which Lydia had cleaned that morning. She felt
+vaguely that everyone was being most kind and that her good-natured
+guests were trying to make up for the failure of the dinner by unusual
+efforts to have the evening pass off well. She was very grateful for
+this humane disposition of theirs. It was the bright spot of the
+experience.</p>
+
+<p>But Paul, who also saw the kindly efforts of his guests, felt that this
+was the last intolerable dagger-thrust. Their amused compassion
+suffocated him. He wanted people to envy him, not pity him, he thought
+in mortified chagrin.</p>
+
+<p>After an eternity, the hour of departure arrived. As the door shut out
+the last of the smiling, lying guests, the host and hostess turned to
+face each other.</p>
+
+<p>Paul spoke first, in an even, restrained tone: &#8220;You would better go to
+bed, Lydia; you must be very tired.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>With this, he turned away to shut up the house. He had determined to
+preserve at all costs the appearance of the indulgent, non-critical,
+over-patient husband that he intensely felt himself to be. No force, he
+thought grimly, shutting his jaws hard, should drag from him a word of
+his real sentiments. Fanned by the wind of this virtuous resolution, his
+sentiments grew hotter and hotter as he walked about, locking doors and
+windows, and reviewing bitterly the events of the evening. If he was to
+restrain himself from saying anything, he would at least allow himself
+the privilege of feeling all that was possible to a man so deeply
+injured.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia sat quietly waiting for him to finish, her face in her hands,
+conscious of nothing but fatigue, in her ears a wild echo of the
+inexplicable, haunting Beethoven chords.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly she started and raised her head, her face transfigured. Her
+eyes shone, a smile was on her lips like that of someone who hears from
+afar the sound of a beloved voice. She made a gesture of yearning toward
+her husband. <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_225" id="pg_225">225</a></span>&#8220;Oh, Paul&mdash;Paul!&#8221; she cried to him softly, in a tremulous
+voice of wonder.</p>
+
+<p>He turned, the light for the first time on his black, loveless face.
+&#8220;What is it?&#8221; he enunciated distinctly, looking at her hard.</p>
+
+<p>Before his eyes Lydia shrank back. She put up her hands instinctively to
+hide her face from him. Finally, &#8220;Nothing&mdash;nothing&mdash;&#8221; she murmured.</p>
+
+<p>Without comment, Paul went back to his conscientious round of the house.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia had felt for the first time the quickening to life of her child.
+And during all that day, until then, she had forgotten that she was to
+know motherhood.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_226" id="pg_226">226</a></span>
+<a name="AN_ELEMENT_OF_SOLIDITY_8157" id="AN_ELEMENT_OF_SOLIDITY_8157"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XXI</p>
+<p class="l c">AN ELEMENT OF SOLIDITY</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Lydia dated the estrangement from Marietta, which grew so rapidly during
+the next year, from the conversation on the day after the dinner party.
+She was cruelly wounded by her sister&#8217;s attack on her, but she could
+never remember the scene without one of her involuntary laughs so
+disconcerting to Paul, who only laughed when he felt gay, certainly at
+nothing which affected him seriously. But Lydia&#8217;s sense of humor was so
+tickled at the grotesque contrast between Marietta&#8217;s injured conception
+of the brilliant social event from which she had been excluded and the
+leaden fiasco which it had really been, that even at the time, in the
+midst of denying hotly her sister&#8217;s charges of snobbishness and social
+ambition, she was unable to keep back a shaky laugh or two as she cried
+out: &#8220;Oh, Etta! If you could know how things went, you&#8217;d be too thankful
+to have escaped it. It was awful beyond words!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Marietta answered her by handing her with a grim silence a copy of that
+morning&#8217;s paper, open at <i>Society Notes</i>. Loyal Flora Burgess had
+lavished on &#8220;Miss Lydia&#8217;s&#8221; first dinner party her entire vocabulary of
+deferential, not to say reverential, encomiums. The &#8220;function had
+inaugurated a new era of cosmopolitan amplitude of social life in
+Endbury,&#8221; was the ending of the lengthy paragraph that described the
+table decorations, the menu, the costume of the hostess, the names of
+the music-makers afterward.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia burst into a hysterical laugh. &#8220;Flora Burgess is too killing!&#8221; she
+cried. &#8220;She was here in the afternoon to get details, and I just let her
+wander around and see what she could make out. I was too busy to pay any
+attention <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_227" id="pg_227">227</a></span>to her&mdash;Oh, Etta! I was dead and buried with fatigue before
+the people even began to come. I can&#8217;t even remember much about it
+except that every single thing was wrong. That about &#8216;cosmopolitan
+amplitude&mdash;&#8217; Oh, isn&#8217;t Flora too funny!&mdash;means having music after
+dinner, I suppose. I don&#8217;t know what else.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course,&#8221; said Marietta, rising to go, &#8220;it doesn&#8217;t make any
+difference what it was really like! Only the people that were there know
+that. The report in the paper&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, Marietta, what a thing to say&mdash;that it&#8217;s all pretense, every
+bit&mdash;and not&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Marietta went on steadily and mordantly: &#8220;I don&#8217;t know how you feel
+about it, but <i>I</i> shouldn&#8217;t be very easy in my mind to have my only
+sister&#8217;s name not on the list of guests at my most exclusive social
+function.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton, who made Lydia a professional call that morning, found her
+with reddened eyes, slowly washing and putting away innumerable dirty
+dishes. She told him that the second girl, apparently overcome by the
+events of the day before, had disappeared during the night. Dr. Melton
+thrust out his lips and said nothing, but he took off his coat, put on
+an apron, and, pushing his patient away from the dishpan, attacked a
+huge pile of sticky plates. He worked rapidly and silently, with a
+surgeon&#8217;s deftness. Lydia sat quiet for some time, looking at him.
+Finally, &#8220;I hadn&#8217;t been crying because of dirty dishes,&#8221; she told him;
+&#8220;I&#8217;m not such a child as that. Marietta has been here. She said some
+things pretty hard to bear about her not having been invited to that
+awful dinner party. I didn&#8217;t know what she was talking about a good deal
+of the time&mdash;it was all about what a snob and traitor to my family I was
+growing to be.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You mustn&#8217;t blame Marietta too much,&#8221; said the doctor, rinsing and
+beginning to dry the plates with what seemed to Lydia&#8217;s fatigued languor
+really miraculous speed. &#8220;It&#8217;s true that she watches your social advance
+with the calm disinterestedness of a cat watching somebody pour cream
+out of a jug. She wants her saucerful. But look here. <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_228" id="pg_228">228</a></span>Did I ever tell
+you about the man Montaigne speaks of who spent all his life to acquire
+the skill necessary to throw a grain of millet through the eye of a
+needle? Well, that man was proud of it, but poor Marietta&#8217;s haunted by
+doubts as to whether in her case it&#8217;s been worth while. It makes her
+naturally inclined to be snappy.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He was so used to delighting in Lydia&#8217;s understanding of his perversely
+obscure figures of speech that he turned about, surprised to hear no
+appreciative comment. She was looking away with troubled eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Paul will think I ought not to have let Marietta talk to me like
+that&mdash;that I ought to have resented it. I never can remember to resent
+things.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor began setting out polished water glasses on a tray. &#8220;It is
+the glory of a man to pass by an offense,&#8221; he quoted. &#8220;Ah, don&#8217;t you
+suppose if we knew all about things we&#8217;d feel as relieved at not having
+resented an injury as if we had held our hands from striking a blind man
+who had inadvertently run against us?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There was no response. It was the second time that one of his metaphors,
+far-fetched as he loved them, but usually intelligible to Lydia, had
+missed fire. He turned on her sharply. &#8220;What are you thinking about?&#8221; he
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>She raised her tragic eyes to his. &#8220;About the mashed potatoes last
+night&mdash;they didn&#8217;t have a bit of salt in them&mdash;they were too nasty
+for&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, pshaw! It makes no difference whether your dinner party was a
+success or not! You know that as well as I do. A dinner party is a relic
+of the Dark Ages, anyhow&mdash;if not of the Stone Age! As a physician, I
+shudder to see people sitting down to gorge themselves on the richest
+possible food, all carefully rendered extra palatable in order that they
+may put upon their bodies the burden of throwing off an enormous amount
+of superfluous food. A hundred years from now people will be as ashamed
+of us for our piggishness as we are of our eighteenth-century forbears
+for their wine-swilling to the detriment of their <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_229" id="pg_229">229</a></span>descendants. A dinner
+party of to-day bears no more relation to a rational gathering of
+rational people for the purpose of rational social intercourse than&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He had run on with his usual astonishing loquacity without drawing
+breath, overwhelming Lydia with a fresh flood of words when she tried to
+break in; but she now sprang up and motioned him peremptorily to
+silence.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Please, please, Godfather, don&#8217;t! I asked you not to unsettle
+me&mdash;you&#8217;re not kind to do it! You&#8217;re not kind! I must think it&#8217;s
+important and, and&mdash;the necessary thing to do. I <i>must</i>!&#8221; She put her
+hands over her eyes as she spoke. She was trying to shut out a vision of
+Paul&#8217;s embittered face of wrathful chagrin. &#8220;That&#8217;s the trouble with
+me,&#8221; she went on. &#8220;Something in me makes it hard for me to think it
+important enough to give up everything else for it&mdash;and I&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why &#8216;<i>must</i>&#8217; you?&#8221; asked the doctor bluntly, crumpling his damp
+dishcloth into a ball.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia looked at him and saw Paul so evidently that the doctor saw with
+her. &#8220;I must! I <i>must</i>!&#8221; she only repeated.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton opened his mouth wide, closed it again with a snap, and threw
+the tightly wadded ball in his hand passionately upon the floor with the
+gesture of an angry child. Lydia was standing now, looking down at the
+red-faced little man as he peered up at her after his silent outbreak.
+His attitude of fury so contrasted with the pacific white apron which
+enveloped him, that she broke out into a laugh. Even as she laughed and
+turned away to answer a knock at the door, she was acutely thankful that
+it was not with Paul that she had been set upon by that swiftly mobile
+change of humor, that it was not at Paul that she had launched that
+disrespectful mirth.</p>
+
+<p>The person who knocked proved to be a very large, rosy-cheeked female,
+who might be a big, overgrown child or a preposterously immature woman
+for all Lydia, looking at her in perplexity, could make out. She felt no
+thrill of premonition as this individual advanced <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_230" id="pg_230">230</a></span>into the kitchen, a
+pair of immense red hands folded before her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m Anastasia O&#8217;Hern, ma&#8217;am,&#8221; she announced with a thick accent of
+County Clare and a self-confident, good-humored smile, &#8220;though mostly
+I&#8217;m called &#8217;Stashie&mdash;and I&#8217;m just over from th&#8217; old country to my Aunt
+Bridgie that washed for you till the rheumatism got her, and when she
+told me about what you&#8217;d done for her and Patsy&mdash;how you&#8217;d sent off that
+ould divil where she couldn&#8217;t torment Patsy no more, and him as glad of
+it as Aunt Bridgie herself, just like she knew he would be, and what an
+awful time you do be havin&#8217; with gurrls, and a baby comin&#8217;, I says to
+myself and to Aunt Bridgie, &#8216;There&#8217;s the lady I&#8217;m goin&#8217; to worrk for if
+she&#8217;ll lave me do ut,&#8217; and Aunt Bridgie was readin&#8217; to me in the paper
+about your gran&#8217; dinner party last night and I says to her and to
+myself, &#8216;There&#8217;ll be a main lot of dishes to be washed th&#8217; day and I&#8217;d
+better step over and begin.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She pulled off the shawl that had covered her head of flaming hair, and
+smiled broadly at her two interlocutors, who remained motionless,
+staring at her in an ecstasy of astonishment.</p>
+
+<p>As she looked into Lydia&#8217;s pale face and reddened eyes, the smile died
+away. She clasped her big hands with a pitying gesture, and cried out a
+Gaelic exclamation of compassion with a much-moved accent; then, &#8220;It&#8217;s
+time I was here,&#8221; she told herself. She wiped her eyes, passed the back
+of her hand over her nose with a sniff, picked up the dishcloth from the
+floor, and advanced upon a pile of dirty silver. Her massive bulk shook
+the floor.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t know no more about housework than Casey&#8217;s pig,&#8221; she told them
+cheerfully, &#8220;but Aunt Bridgie says in America they don&#8217;t none of the
+gurrls know nothing. They just hold their jobs because their ladies know
+they couldn&#8217;t do no better to change, and maybe I can learn. I want to
+help.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She emptied the silver into the dishwater with a splash, and set to
+work, turning her broad face to them to say <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_231" id="pg_231">231</a></span>familiarly over her
+shoulder to Lydia, &#8220;Now, just you go and lie down and send the little
+ould gentleman about his business. You need to be quiet&mdash;for the sake of
+the one that&#8217;s coming; and don&#8217;t you forget I&#8217;m here. I&#8217;m&mdash;<i>here</i>!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton drew Lydia away silently, and not until they had put two
+rooms between them and the kitchen did they dare face each other. With
+that first interchange of looks came peals of laughter&mdash;Lydia&#8217;s light,
+ringing laughter&mdash;to hear which the doctor offered up heartfelt
+thanksgivings.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That is your fate, Lydia,&#8221; he said finally, wiping his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t you just love her?&#8221; Lydia cried. &#8220;Isn&#8217;t she the most <i>human</i>
+thing!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do you remember Maeterlinck&#8217;s theory that every soul summons&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia interrupted to say with a wry, humorous mouth, &#8220;You know I don&#8217;t
+know anything. Don&#8217;t ask me if I remember things.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, Maeterlinck has one of his fanciful theories that everybody calls
+to him from the unknown those elements that he most needs, which are
+most in harmony with&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I caught a good solid element that time,&#8221; cried Lydia, laughing again.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She&#8217;s embodied Loyalty,&#8221; said the doctor. &#8220;It breathes from every
+pore.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She&#8217;s going to smash my cut glass and china something awful,&#8221; Lydia
+foretold.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton took his godchild by the shoulders and shook her. &#8220;Now, Lydia
+Emery, you listen to me! I don&#8217;t often issue an absolute command, if I
+am your physician, but I do now. You <i>let</i> her smash your china and cut
+glass, and all the rest of your devastating trash she can lay her hands
+on, rather than lose her&mdash;until after September, anyhow! It&#8217;s a direct
+reward of virtue for your having shipped the &#8216;ould divil&#8217;!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia&#8217;s face clouded. &#8220;I&#8217;m afraid Paul won&#8217;t think <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_232" id="pg_232">232</a></span>her much of a
+substitute for Ellen,&#8221; she murmured, &#8220;and we&#8217;ll have to find a cook
+somehow even if this one learns enough to be second girl.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Second girl!&#8221; ejaculated the doctor. &#8220;She&#8217;s a human being with a
+capacity for loyalty.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She&#8217;s evidently awfully incompetent&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor snorted. &#8220;Competence&mdash;I loathe the word! It&#8217;s used now to
+cover all imaginable sins, as folks used to excuse all manner of
+rascality in a good swordsman. We&#8217;re beyond the frontier period now when
+competence was a matter of life and death. We ought to begin to have
+some glimmering realization that there are other&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Oh</i>, what a hand for talk!&#8221; said Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor rejoiced at her laughing impatience. He thought to himself,
+as he looked at her standing in the doorway and waving good-by to him,
+that she seemed a very different creature from the drooping and
+tearful&mdash;he interrupted his chain of thought as he boarded his car, to
+exclaim, &#8220;May she live long, that heavy-handed, vivifying Celt!&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_233" id="pg_233">233</a></span>
+<a name="THE_VOICES_IN_THE_WOOD_8405" id="THE_VOICES_IN_THE_WOOD_8405"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XXII</p>
+<p class="l c">THE VOICES IN THE WOOD</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Lydia had not been mistaken in her premonition of Paul&#8217;s attitude toward
+the new maid. He found her quite unendurable, but the direful stories
+told by their Bellevue acquaintances about the literal impossibility of
+keeping servants during the hot season induced him to postpone his wrath
+against the awkward, irreverent, too familiar Irishwoman until after
+Lydia should feel more herself. Paul&#8217;s wrath lost nothing by keeping.</p>
+
+<p>To Lydia, on the contrary, Anastasia&#8217;s loyalty and devotion were
+inexpressibly comforting during the trying days of that summer. Her
+servant&#8217;s loving heart radiated warmth and cheer throughout all her
+life. One day, when her mother protested against &#8217;Stashie&#8217;s habit of
+familiar conversation with the family (they had all soon adopted the
+Irish diminutive of her name), Lydia said: &#8220;I can not be too thankful
+for &#8217;Stashie&#8217;s love and kindness.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery was outraged. &#8220;Good gracious, Lydia! What things you do say.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why not? Because she hasn&#8217;t been to college? Neither have I. She&#8217;s as
+well educated as I am, and a great deal better woman.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, what are you talking about? She can&#8217;t read!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t,&#8221; said Lydia. &#8220;That&#8217;s worse.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her mother turned the conversation, thinking she would be glad when this
+period of high-strung nerves and fancies should be over. She told Dr.
+Melton that it seemed to her that &#8220;Lydia took it very hard,&#8221; and she
+supposed they couldn&#8217;t expect her to be herself until after September.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor answered: &#8220;Oh, there&#8217;s a great deal of <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_234" id="pg_234">234</a></span>nonsense about that
+kind of talk. A normal woman&mdash;and, thank Heaven, Lydia&#8217;s that to the
+last degree&mdash;has the whole universe back of her. Lydia&#8217;s always balanced
+on a hair trigger, it&#8217;s true, but she <i>is</i> balanced! And now all nature
+is rallying to her like an army with banners.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ah, you never went through it yourself!&#8221; Mrs. Emery retreated to the
+safe stronghold of matronhood. &#8220;You don&#8217;t know! I had strange fancies,
+like Lydia&#8217;s. Women always do.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Another one of Lydia&#8217;s fancies of that summer drove her to a strange
+disregard of caste rules. It came through a sudden impulse of compassion
+one hot midsummer day when Miss Burgess hobbled up the driveway in the
+hope of gleaning some Bellevue society notes.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s a terrible time of year, Miss Lydia,&#8221; she said, sinking into a
+chair with a long, quavering sigh. &#8220;One drops from thirty and sometimes
+forty dollars a week to twenty or less; and it&#8217;s so hard on one&#8217;s feet,
+being on them in hot weather. I assure you mine ache like the toothache.
+And expenses are as high as in winter, or worse, when you have an
+invalid to look out for. Out here in breezy Bellevue you&#8217;ve no
+conception how hot it is on Main Street. And Mother <i>feels</i> the heat!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>All this she said, not complainingly, but in her usual twittering manner
+of imparting information, as though it were an incident of a
+five-o&#8217;clock tea, but Lydia felt a pang of remorse for her usual
+thoughtless attitude of exasperated hilarity over Miss Burgess&#8217;
+peculiarities. She noticed that the kind, vacuous face was beginning to
+look more than middle-aged, and that the scanty hair above it was
+whitening rapidly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, bring your mother out here for the day, why don&#8217;t you, any time!&#8221;
+she said impulsively. &#8220;I can&#8217;t have any social engagements, you know,
+the way I am, and Paul&#8217;s away a good deal of the time, and &#8217;Stashie and
+I can get you tea and eggs and toast, at least. I&#8217;d love to have her.
+Now, any morning that threatens heat, just you telephone you&#8217;re both
+coming to spend the day.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_235" id="pg_235">235</a></span>She felt quite strange at the thought that she had never seen the
+mother of this devoted, unselfish, affectionate, lifelong acquaintance.</p>
+
+<p>But Miss Burgess, though moved almost to tears at Lydia&#8217;s &#8220;kind
+thoughtfulness,&#8221; clung steadfastly to her standards. She had always
+known that she must not presume on her &#8220;exceptional opportunities for
+acquaintance with Endbury&#8217;s social leaders,&#8221; she told Lydia, nor take
+advantage of any inadvertent kindness of theirs. Her mother would be the
+first one to blame her if she did; her mother knew the world very well.
+She went away, murmuring broken thanks and protestations of devotion.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia looked after her, disappointed. She had been quite stirred by the
+hope of giving some pleasure. There was little to break the long,
+lonely, monotonous expectancy of her life. And yet nothing surprised
+those who knew her better than her equable physical poise during this
+time of trial and discomfort. Everyone had expected so high-strung a
+creature to be &#8220;half-wild with nerves.&#8221; But Lydia, although she
+continued to say occasional disconcerting things, seemed on the whole to
+be gaining maturity and firmness of purpose. Paul was away a great deal
+that summer and she had many long, solitary hours to pass&mdash;a singular
+contrast to the feverish hurry of the winter &#8220;season.&#8221; Her old habit of
+involuntary questioning scrutiny came back and it is possible that her
+motto of &#8220;action at all costs&#8221; was passed under a closer mental review
+than during the winter; but though she went frequently to see her
+godfather and Mrs. Sandworth, she did not break her silence on whatever
+thoughts were occupying her mind, except in one brief, questioning
+explosion. This was on the occasion of her last visit to Endbury before
+her confinement, a few days after her call from Flora Burgess. It had
+occurred to her that they might know something about the reporter&#8217;s
+family and she stopped in after her shopping to inquire.</p>
+
+<p>She found her aunt and her godfather sitting in the deeply shaded, old
+grape arbor in their back yard; Dr. <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_236" id="pg_236">236</a></span>Melton with a book, as always, Mrs.
+Sandworth ungirdled and expansive, tinkling an ice-filled cup and crying
+out upon the weather.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sit down, Lydia, for mercy&#8217;s sake, and cool off. Yes; we know all about
+her; she&#8217;s a patient of Marius&#8217;. Have some lemonade! Isn&#8217;t it fearful!
+And Marius keeps reading improving books! It makes me so much hotter!
+She&#8217;s English, you know.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton looked up from his book to remark, with his usual judicial
+moderation, &#8220;I could strangle that old harridan with joy. She has been
+one of the most pernicious influences the women of this town have ever
+had.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Flora Burgess&#8217; mother? Why, I never heard of her in the world until the
+other day.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You can&#8217;t smell sewer gas,&#8221; said the doctor briefly.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Sandworth laughed. &#8220;Marius almost killed himself last winter to
+pull her through pneumonia. He worked over her night and day. Oh, Marius
+is a great deal better than he talks&mdash;strangle&mdash;!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m a fool, if that&#8217;s what you mean,&#8221; said the doctor.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What is the matter with Flora Burgess&#8217; mother?&#8221; asked Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She&#8217;s been a plague spot in this town for years&mdash;that
+lower-middle-class old Briton, with her beastly ideas of caste&mdash;ever
+since she began sending out her daughter to preach her damnable gospel
+to defenseless Endbury homes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Marius&mdash;my <i>dear</i>!&#8221; chided Mrs. Sandworth&mdash;&#8220;The Gospel&mdash;damnable! You
+forget yourself!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor did not laugh. &#8220;They&#8217;re the ones,&#8221; he went on, &#8220;who first
+started this idiotic idea of there being a social stigma attached to
+living in any but just such parts of town.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You live in just such a part of town yourself,&#8221; said Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My good-for-nothing, pretentious, fashionable patients wouldn&#8217;t come to
+me if I didn&#8217;t.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why do you have to have that kind of patients?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_237" id="pg_237">237</a></span>Occasionally, of late, with her godfather, Lydia had displayed a
+certain uncompromising directness, rather out of character with her
+usual gentleness, which the doctor found very disconcerting. He was
+silent now.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Sandworth&#8217;s greater simplicity saw no difficulties in the way of an
+answer. &#8220;Because, Lydia, he&#8217;s one of the Kentucky Meltons, and because,
+as I said, he talks a great deal worse than he is.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Because I am a fool,&#8221; said the doctor again. This time he flushed as he
+spoke.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He doesn&#8217;t like things common around him,&#8221; went on Mrs. Sandworth, &#8220;any
+more than any gentleman does. And as for strangling old Mrs. Burgess,
+what good would that do? It can&#8217;t be she who&#8217;s influencing Endbury,
+because all it&#8217;s trying to do is to be just like every other town in
+Ohio.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In the Union!&#8221; amended Dr. Melton grimly. He subsided after this into
+one of his fidgety, grimacing, finger-nail-gnawing reveries. He was
+wondering whether he dared tell Lydia of a talk he had had that morning
+with her father. After a look at Lydia&#8217;s flushed, tired face, he decided
+that he would better not; but as the two women fell into a discussion of
+the layette, the conversation, Mr. Emery&#8217;s nervous voice, his sharp,
+impatient gestures, came back to him vividly. He looked graver and
+graver, as he did after each visit to his old friend, and after each
+fruitless exhortation to &#8220;go slow and rest more.&#8221; Mr. Emery was in the
+midst of a very important trial and, as he had very reasonably reminded
+his physician, this was not a good time to relax his grasp on things.
+&#8220;Now I&#8217;m back in practice, in competition with younger men, I <i>can&#8217;t</i>
+sag back! It&#8217;s absurd to ask it of me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You were a fool to go back into practice at your age.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A fool! I&#8217;ve doubled my income.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes; and your arteries&mdash;look here, suppose you were dead. The bar would
+get along without you, wouldn&#8217;t it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But I&#8217;m not dead,&#8221; the other truthfully opposed to this fallacious
+supposition, and turned again to his papers.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_238" id="pg_238">238</a></span>The doctor shut his medicine case with a spiteful snap. &#8220;Don&#8217;t fool
+yourself that it&#8217;s devotion to the common weal that drives you ahead!
+Don&#8217;t make a pretty picture of yourself as working to the last in heroic
+service of your fellow-man! You know, as I know, that if you dropped out
+this minute, American jurisprudence would continue on its triumphant,
+misguided way quite as energetically as now.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Emery looked up, dropping for once the mask of humorous tolerance
+with which he was accustomed to hide any real preoccupation of his own.
+&#8220;Look here, Melton, I&#8217;m too nervous to stand much fooling these days. If
+you want to know the reason why I&#8217;m going on, I&#8217;ll tell you. I&#8217;ve got
+to. I need the money.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Gracious powers! Did you get caught in that B. and R. slump?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Judge smiled a little bitterly. &#8220;No; I haven&#8217;t lost any money&mdash;for a
+very good reason. I never was ahead enough to have any to lose. Haven&#8217;t
+you any idea of what the cost of living the way we do&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton interrupted him, wild-eyed: &#8220;Why, Nat Emery! You have
+yourself and your wife to feed and clothe and shelter&mdash;and you tell me
+that costs so much that you can&#8217;t stop working when there&#8217;s&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, go away, Melton; you make me tired!&#8221; The Judge made a weary gesture
+of dismissal. &#8220;You&#8217;re always talking like a child, or a preacher, about
+how things <i>might</i> be! You know what an establishment like ours costs to
+keep up, as well as I do. I&#8217;m in it&mdash;we&#8217;ve sort of gradually got in
+deeper and deeper, the way folks do&mdash;and it would take a thousand times
+more out of me to break loose than to go on. You&#8217;re an old fuss, anyhow.
+I&#8217;m all right. Only for the Lord&#8217;s sake leave me quiet now.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor shivered and put his hand over his eyes as he remembered how,
+to his physician&#8217;s eye, the increasing ill health of his old friend
+gleamed lividly from his white face.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Sandworth brought him back to the present with <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_239" id="pg_239">239</a></span>an astonished &#8220;Good
+gracious! how anybody can even <i>pretend</i> to shiver on a day like this!&#8221;
+She added: &#8220;Look here, Marius, are you going to sit there and moon all
+the afternoon? Here&#8217;s Lydia going already.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Seasoned to his eccentricities as she was, she was startled by his
+answer. &#8220;Julia,&#8221; he said solemnly, &#8220;did you ever consider how many kinds
+of murder aren&#8217;t mentioned in the statute books?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Marius! What ideas! Remember Lydia!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I remember Lydia!&#8221; he said soberly. He went to lay a hand fondly on
+her shoulder. &#8220;Are you really going, my dear? I&#8217;ll walk along to the
+waiting-room with you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t talk her to death!&#8221; cried Mrs. Sandworth after them.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I won&#8217;t say a word,&#8221; he answered.</p>
+
+<p>It was a promise that he almost literally kept. He was in one of the
+exaggeratedly humble moods which alternated with his florid, talkative,
+cock-sure periods.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia, too, was quite thoughtful and subdued. They descended in a
+complete silence the dusty street, blazing in the late afternoon sun,
+and passed into the inferno of a crowded city square in midsummer. As
+they stood before the waiting-room, Lydia asked suddenly: &#8220;Godfather,
+how can we, any of us, do any better?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;God knows!&#8221; he said, with a gesture of impotence, and went his way.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia entered the waiting-room and went to ask a man in uniform when the
+next car left for Bellevue.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s been an accident in the power-house, lady,&#8221; he told her, &#8220;and
+that line ain&#8217;t runnin&#8217;.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia gave an exclamation of dismay. &#8220;But I must get back to Bellevue
+to-night!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul was out of town, but she knew the agonies of anxiety &#8217;Stashie would
+suffer if she did not appear. &#8220;Oh, but I can telephone,&#8221; she reminded
+herself.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You kin get out there if you don&#8217;t mind takin&#8217; the long way around,&#8221;
+the man explained with a friendly interest. <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_240" id="pg_240">240</a></span>&#8220;If you take the Garfield
+line and change at Ironton to the Onteora branch, it&#8217;ll bring you back
+on the other side of Bellevue, and Bellevue ain&#8217;t so big but what it
+won&#8217;t be a very long walk to where you live.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia thanked him, touched, as she so often was, with the kind and, to
+her, welcome absence of impersonality in working people; and, assuring
+herself that she had time enough to eat something before her car&#8217;s
+departure, betook herself to a dairy lunch-room where she ate a
+conscientiously substantial supper. The heat of the day had left her
+little appetite; but to &#8220;take care of herself&#8221; now seemed at last one of
+the worth-while things to do which she had always had so eager a
+longing.</p>
+
+<p>At seven o&#8217;clock she took the trolley pointed out to her by her friend,
+the starter, who noticed and remembered her when she returned to the
+waiting-room. The evening rush was over, and for some time she was the
+only passenger. Then a very tired-looking, middle-aged man, an
+accountant perhaps, in a shabby alpaca coat, boarded the car and sank at
+once into a restless doze, his heat-paled face nodding about like a
+broken-necked doll&#8217;s. Lydia herself felt heavy on her the death-like
+fatigue which the last weeks had brought to her, but she was not sleepy.
+She looked out intently at the flat, fertile, kindly country, gradually
+darkening in the summer twilight. She was very fond of her home
+landscape. She had not taken so considerable a journey on a trolley for
+a long time&mdash;perhaps not since the trip to the Mallory house-party. That
+was a long time ago.</p>
+
+<p>At the edge of thick woods the car came to a sudden stop. The lights
+went out. The conductor disappeared, twitched at the trolley, and went
+around for a consultation with the motorman, who had at once
+philosophically pulled off his worn glove and sat down on the step.
+&#8220;Power&#8217;s off!&#8221; he called back casually into the car to the accountant,
+who had started up wildly, with the idea, apparently, that he had been
+carried past his station. &#8220;We&#8217;ve got to wait till they turn her on
+again.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_241" id="pg_241">241</a></span>&#8220;How long&#8217;ll that be?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I don&#8217;t know. The whole system is on the bum to-day. Maybe half an
+hour; maybe more. Better take another nap.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The accountant looked around the car, encountered Lydia&#8217;s eyes, and
+smiled sheepishly. After a time of silent waiting, enlivened only by the
+murmur of the conversation between the motorman and the conductor
+outside, the gray-haired man suggested to Lydia that it would be cooler
+out under the trees, and if she would like to go he would be glad to
+help her. When he had her established on a grassy bank he forbore
+further talk, and sat so still that, as the quiet moments slipped by,
+Lydia almost forgot him.</p>
+
+<p>It was singularly pleasant there, with the rustling blackness of the
+wood behind them, and before them the sweep of the open farming country,
+shimmering faintly in the light of the stars now beginning to show in
+the great unbroken arch of the heavens.</p>
+
+<p>Here the talk of the two men on the steps of the car was distinctly
+audible, and Lydia, with much interest, pieced together a character and
+life-history for each out of their desultory, friendly chat; but
+presently they too fell silent, listening to the stir of the night
+breezes in the forest. Lydia leaned her head against a tree and closed
+her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>She never knew if it were from a doze, or but from a reverie that she
+was aroused by a sudden thrilling sound back of her&mdash;the clear, deep
+voice of a distant &#8217;cello. Her heart began to beat faster, as it always
+did at the sound of music, and she sat up amazed, looking back into the
+intense blackness of the wood. And then, like a waking dream, came a
+flood of melody from what seemed to her an angel choir&mdash;fresh young
+voices, throbbing and proclaiming through the summer night some joyous,
+ever-ascending message. Lydia felt her pulses loud at her temples.
+Almost a faintness of pleasure came over her. There was something
+ineffably sweet about the disembodied voices sending their triumphant
+chant up to the stars.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_242" id="pg_242">242</a></span>The sound stopped as suddenly as it began. The motorman stirred and
+drew a long breath. &#8220;They do fine, don&#8217;t they?&#8221; he said. &#8220;My oldest
+girl&#8217;s learning to sing alto with them.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He ain&#8217;t musical himself, is he?&#8221; asked the conductor.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No; <i>he</i> ain&#8217;t. It&#8217;s some Dutch friends that does the playing. But he
+got the whole thing up, and runs the children. It&#8217;s a nawful good thing
+for <i>them</i>, let me tell you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;d he do it for, I wonder,&#8221; queried the conductor idly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Aw, I don&#8217;t know. He&#8217;s kind o&#8217; funny, anyhow. Said he wanted to teach
+young folks how to enjoy &#8217;emselves without spending money. That kind of
+talk hits their <i>folks</i> in the right spot, you bet. He owns a slice of
+this farm, you know, and he&#8217;s given some of the younger kids pieces of
+ground for gardens, and he&#8217;s got up a night class in carpentering for
+young fellows that work in town all day. He&#8217;s a crack-a-jack of a
+carpenter himself.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He&#8217;ll run into the unions if he don&#8217;t look out,&#8221; prophesied the
+conductor.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I guess likely,&#8221; assented the motorman. &#8220;They got after Dielman the
+other day, did you hear, because he&mdash;&#8221; The talk drifted to gossip of the
+world of work-people.</p>
+
+<p>It stopped short as the &#8217;cello again sent out its rich, vibrant
+introduction to the peal of full-throated joy. There seemed to be no
+other sound in all the enchanted, starlit world than this fervid
+harmony.</p>
+
+<p>This time it did not stop, but went on and on, swelling and dying away
+and bursting out again into new ecstasies. In one of the pauses, when
+nothing but the &#8217;cello&#8217;s chant came to her ears, Lydia suddenly heard
+mingling with it the sweet, faint voice of a little stream whispering
+vaguely, near her. It sounded almost like rain on autumn leaves. The
+lights in the car flared up, blinding white, but the two men on the step
+did not stir. The conductor sat with his arms folded on his knees, his
+head on his arms. The motorman leaned against the end of the car. When
+the <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_243" id="pg_243">243</a></span>music finally died, after one long, ringing, exultant shout, no one
+moved for a time.</p>
+
+<p>Then the motorman stood up, drawing on his glove.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Quite a concert!&#8221; said the conductor, starting for the back platform.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They do <i>fine</i>!&#8221; repeated the motorman.</p>
+
+<p>The accountant came forward from the shadow and helped Lydia up the
+steps. There were traces of tears on his tired face.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>In September, when her mother leaned over her to say in a joyful,
+trembling voice, &#8220;Oh, Lydia, it&#8217;s a girl, a darling little girl!&#8221; Lydia
+opened her white lips to say, &#8220;She is Ariadne.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What did you say?&#8221; asked her mother.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We must see that she has the clue,&#8221; said Lydia faintly.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery tiptoed to the doctor. &#8220;Keep her very quiet,&#8221; she whispered;
+&#8220;she is a little out of her head.&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_244" id="pg_244">244</a></span>
+<a name="FOR_ARIADNES_SAKE_8823" id="FOR_ARIADNES_SAKE_8823"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XXIII</p>
+<p class="l c">FOR ARIADNE&#8217;S SAKE</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Little Ariadne was six months old before Lydia could begin to make the
+slightest effort to resume the social routine of her life. This was not
+at all on account of ill health, for she had recovered her strength
+rapidly and completely, and, like a good many normal women, had found
+maternity a solvent of various slight physical disorders of her
+girlhood. She felt now a more assured physical poise than ever before,
+and could not attribute her disappearance from Endbury social life to
+weakness. The fact was that Dr. Melton had upheld her in her wish to
+nurse her baby herself, which limited her to very short absences from
+the house and to a very quiet life within doors. She also discovered
+that the servant problem was by no means simplified by the new member of
+the family. &#8220;Girls&#8221; had always been unwilling to come out to Bellevue
+because of the distance from their friends and followers, and they now
+put forth another universally recognized obstacle in the phrase, &#8220;I
+never work out where there is a baby. They make so much dirt.&#8221; Anastasia
+O&#8217;Hern was there, to be sure&mdash;heavy-handed, warm-hearted &#8217;Stashie, who
+took the new little girl to her loyal spinster heart and wept tears of
+joy over her safe arrival; but &#8217;Stashie had proved, as Paul predicted
+from the first time he saw her, incorrigibly rattle-headed and
+loose-ended. She had learned to prepare a number of simple, homely
+dishes, quite enough to supply the actual needs of the everyday
+household, and what she cooked was unusually palatable. She had the
+Celtic feeling for savoriness. She had also managed, under Lydia&#8217;s
+zealous tuition, to overcome the <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_245" id="pg_245">245</a></span>Celtic tolerance for dirt, and thanks
+to her square, powerful body, as strong as a ditch-digger&#8217;s, she made
+light work of keeping the house in a most gratifying state of
+cleanliness.</p>
+
+<p>But there were gaps in her equipment that were not to be filled by any
+amount of tuition. In the first place, as Paul said of her, she was as
+much like the traditional trim maid as a hippopotamus is like a gazelle.
+Furthermore, as Dr. Melton summed up the matter in answer to one of
+Paul&#8217;s outbreaks against her, she was utterly incapable of comprehending
+that satisfied vanity is the vital element in human life. For anything
+that pertained to the appearance of things, &#8217;Stashie was deaf, dumb and
+blind. She would as soon as not put one of her savory stews on the table
+in an earthen crock, and she never could be trusted to set the table
+properly. There were always some kitchen spoons among the silver, and
+the dishes looked, as Paul said, &#8220;as though she had stood off and thrown
+them at a bull&#8217;s-eye in the middle of the table.&#8221; Moreover, she herself
+could not emancipate herself from the ideas of toilet gleaned in the
+little one-room cabin in County Clare. She was passionately devoted to
+Lydia, and took with the humblest gratitude any hints about the care of
+her person, but it was like trying to make a color-blind person into a
+painter! Anastasia could only love on her knees, and serve, and
+sympathize and cherish; she could not remember to comb her hair, or to
+put on a clean apron when she opened the door, even if it were Madame
+Hollister herself who rang. She had once opened to that important
+personage attired in a calico wrapper, a sweater, and a pair of rubber
+boots, having just come in from emptying the ashes&mdash;one of the heavy
+tasks, outside her regular work, which she took upon her strong, willing
+self. &#8220;But I was clane, and I got her into the house in two minutes from
+the time she rang, the poor old soul!&#8221; she protested to Lydia, who, at
+Paul&#8217;s instance, had taken her to task.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia explained, &#8220;But Mr. Hollister&#8217;s aunt is a person <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_246" id="pg_246">246</a></span>who would rather
+wait half an hour in the cold than see you without an apron.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>To which &#8217;Stashie exclaimed, in awestruck wonder before the mysteries of
+creation, &#8220;Folks do be the beatin&#8217;est, don&#8217;t they now, Mis&#8217; Hollister!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And you must not speak of Mr. Hollister&#8217;s aunt as a &#8216;poor old soul,&#8217;&#8221;
+explained Lydia, apprehensive of Paul&#8217;s wrath if he ever chanced to hear
+such a characterization.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But she is that,&#8221; protested &#8217;Stashie. &#8220;Anybody that&#8217;s her age and
+hobbles around so crippled up with the rheumatism&mdash;my heart bleeds for
+&#8217;em.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She is very rich&mdash;&#8221; began Lydia, but after a moment&#8217;s hesitation she
+had not continued her lesson in social value. She often found that
+&#8217;Stashie&#8217;s questions brought her to a standstill.</p>
+
+<p>There was something lacking in the Irishwoman&#8217;s mental outfit, namely,
+the capacity even to conceive that ideal of impersonal self-effacement,
+which, as Paul said truthfully, is the everywhere accepted standard for
+servants. Her loquacity was a never-ending joke to Madeleine Lowder and
+her husband, who were exulting in a couple of deft, silent, expensive
+Japanese &#8220;boys&#8221; and who, since Madeleine frankly expressed her horror at
+the bother of having children, seemed likely to continue ignorant,
+except at comfortable second-hand, of harassing domestic difficulties.</p>
+
+<p>If Lydia had not been in such dire need of another pair of hands than
+her own slender ones, or if the supply from Endbury intelligence offices
+had been a whit less unreliable and uncertain, she would not have felt
+justified in retaining the burly, uncouth Celt, in spite of her own
+affection, so intensely did Paul dislike her. As it was, she felt guilty
+for her presence and miserably responsible for her homeliness of
+conduct. &#8217;Stashie was a constant point of friction between husband and
+wife, and Lydia was trying with desperate ingenuity to avoid points of
+friction by some other method than the usual Endbury one of divided
+interests. Many times she lay awake at night, convinced <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_247" id="pg_247">247</a></span>that her duty
+was to dismiss Anastasia; only to rise in the morning equally convinced
+that things without her would be in the long run even harder and more
+disagreeable for Paul than they were now. The upshot of the matter was
+that she herself was a very incompetent person, she was remorsefully
+sure of that; although her mother and Marietta and Paul&#8217;s aunt all told
+her that she need expect nothing during the first year of a baby&#8217;s life
+but one wretched round of domestic confusion.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia did not find it so. She was immensely occupied, it is true, for
+though Ariadne was a strong, healthy child, who spent most of her time,
+her grandmother complained, in sleeping, to Lydia&#8217;s more intimate
+contact with the situation there seemed to be more things to be done for
+the baby, in addition to the usual cares of housekeeping, than could
+possibly be crowded into twenty-four hours. And yet she was happier
+during those six months than ever before in her life; happier than she
+had ever dreamed anyone could be. She stepped about incessantly from one
+task to another and was very tired at night, but there was no nervous
+strain on her, and she had no moments of blasting skepticism as to the
+value of her labors.</p>
+
+<p>Everything she did, even the most menial tasks connected with the baby,
+was dignified, to her mind, by its usefulness; and she so systematized
+and organized her busy days that she was always ahead of her work. Paul
+was obliged to alter his judgment of her as impractical and
+incapable&mdash;although of course the dearest and sweetest of little
+wives&mdash;for nothing could have been more competent than the way she
+managed her baby and her simple housekeeping. Indeed, there came to the
+young husband&#8217;s mind not infrequently, and always with a slight aroma of
+bitterness, the conviction that Lydia was perfectly able to do whatever
+she really wished to do and considered important; and that previous
+conditions must have been due to her unwillingness to set herself
+seriously at the problems before her. It was a new theory about his
+wife&#8217;s character, <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_248" id="pg_248">248</a></span>which the intelligent young man laid by on a mental
+shelf for future use after this period of intense domesticity should be
+past.</p>
+
+<p>At present, he accepted thankfully his clean house and his savory food,
+was not too much put out by &#8217;Stashie&#8217;s eccentricities, since there was
+no one but the immediate families to see them, and rejoiced with a
+whimsical tenderness in Lydia&#8217;s passion of satisfaction with her baby.
+He saw so little of the droll, sleeping, eating little mite that he
+could not as yet take it very seriously as his baby. But it was, on the
+whole, a happy half-year for him too. He was much moved and pleased by
+Lydia&#8217;s joy. He had meant to make his wife happy.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia herself was transported by the mere physical intoxication of new
+motherhood, a potion more exciting, so her much experienced physician
+said, than any wine ever fermented. She hung over her sleeping baby,
+poring upon the exquisite fineness of the skin, upon the rosy little
+mouth, still sucking comically at an imaginary meal, upon the dimpled,
+fragile hands, upon the peaceful relaxation of the body, till the very
+trusting, appealing essence of babyhood flooded her senses like a strong
+drug; and when the child was awake, and she could bathe the much creased
+little body, and handle the soft arms, and drop passionate kisses on the
+satin-smooth skin, and rub her cheek on the downy head, she found
+herself sometimes trembling and dizzy with emotion. She felt constantly
+buoyed up by a deep trust and belief in life which she had not known
+before. The huge and steadying continuity of existence was revealed to
+her in those days. It was a revelation that was never to leave her. She
+outgrew definitely the sense of the fragmentary futility of living which
+had always been, inarticulate, unvoiced, but intensely felt, the torment
+of her earlier life.</p>
+
+<p>It grieved her generous heart and her aspiration to share all with her
+husband that the exigences of his busy life deprived him of any
+knowledge of this newly-opened well <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_249" id="pg_249">249</a></span>of sweet waters, that he had
+nothing from his parenthood but an amused, half shame-faced pride in
+points about the baby which, he was informed, were creditable.</p>
+
+<p>At a faint hint of this feeling on Lydia&#8217;s part, her sister-in-law broke
+into her good-natured laughter at Lydia&#8217;s notions. &#8220;What can a man know
+about a baby?&#8221; she cried conclusively.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, I didn&#8217;t know about one till Ariadne came. I learned on her.
+What&#8217;s to hinder a man&#8217;s doing the same thing?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Madeleine was so much amused by this fantastic idea that she repeated it
+to Dr. Melton, who came in just then.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t it take <i>Lydia</i>!&#8221; she appealed to him.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor considered the lovely, fair-haired creature in silence for a
+moment before answering. Then, &#8220;Yes; of course you&#8217;re right,&#8221; he
+assented. &#8220;It&#8217;s a strictly feminine monopoly. It&#8217;s as true that all men
+are incapable of understanding the significance of a baby in the
+universe and in their own lives, as it is true that all women love
+babies and desire them.&#8221; His tone was full of a heavy significance. He
+could never keep his temper with Paul&#8217;s sister.</p>
+
+<p>Madeleine received this without a quiver. She neither blushed nor looked
+in the least abashed, but there was an unnecessary firmness in her voice
+as she answered, looking him steadily in the eye: &#8220;Exactly! That&#8217;s just
+what I&#8217;ve been telling Lydia.&#8221; She often said that she was the only
+woman in Endbury who wasn&#8217;t afraid of that impertinent little doctor.</p>
+
+<p>After Madeleine had gone away, Lydia looked at her godfather with
+shining eyes. &#8220;I am living! I am living!&#8221; she told him, holding up the
+baby to him with a gesture infinitely significant; &#8220;and I like it as
+well as I thought I should!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Most people do,&#8221; he informed her, &#8220;when they get a peck at it. It
+generally takes something cataclysmic, too, to tear them loose from
+their squirrel-cages&mdash;like babies, or getting converted.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_250" id="pg_250">250</a></span>If he thought that early married life could also be classed among these
+beneficently uprooting agencies, he kept his thoughts to himself.
+Lydia&#8217;s marriage had been eminently free from disagreeable shocks or
+surprises, and amply deserved to be called successful in the usual
+reasonable and moderate application of that adjective to matrimony; but
+there had been nothing in it, certainly, to destroy even temporarily
+anyone&#8217;s grasp on what are known as the realities of life.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor considered, and added to his last speech: &#8220;Getting converted
+is surer. Babies grow up!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia felt that her godfather was right, and that babies gave one only a
+short respite, when, toward spring, she observed in all the inhabitants
+of her world repeated signs of uneasy dissatisfaction with her
+&#8220;submergence in domesticity,&#8221; as Mrs. Emery put it in a family council.
+Her father inquired mildly, one day in March, with the touchingly vague
+interest he took in his children&#8217;s affairs, if it weren&#8217;t about time she
+returned a few calls and accepted some invitations, and began &#8220;to live
+<i>like</i> folks again.&#8221; &#8220;Ariadne isn&#8217;t the first baby in the world,&#8221; he
+concluded.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She&#8217;s the first one <i>I</i> ever had,&#8221; Lydia reminded him, with the
+humorous smile that was so like his own.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, you mustn&#8217;t forget, as so many young mothers do, that you&#8217;re a
+member of society and a wife, as well as a wet-nurse,&#8221; he said.</p>
+
+<p>Marietta had never resumed an easy or genial intercourse with the
+Hollisters since the affair of the dinner party, but she came to call at
+not infrequent intervals, and Paul&#8217;s sister dropped in often, to &#8220;keep
+an eye on Lydia,&#8221; as she told her husband. She had an affection for her
+sister-in-law, in spite of an exasperated amusement over her liability
+to break out with new ideas at unexpected moments. Both these ladies
+were loud in their exhortations to Lydia not to let maternity be in her
+life the encumbering, unbeautifying, too lengthy episode it was to women
+with less force of character than their own. &#8220;You do get so <i>out</i> of
+things,&#8221; <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_251" id="pg_251">251</a></span>Madeleine told her with her usual breathless italicizing, &#8220;if
+you stay away too long. You just never can catch up! There&#8217;s a
+behind-the-timesy <i>smell</i> about your clothes&mdash;honest, there is&mdash;if you
+let them go too long.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Marietta added her quota of experienced wisdom to the discussion. &#8220;If
+you just hang over a baby all the time, you get morbid, and queer, and
+different.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Madeleine had laughed, and summed up the matter with a terse, &#8220;Worse
+than that! You get left!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia&#8217;s elder brother, George, the rich one, who lived in Cleveland and
+manufactured rakes and hoes, wrote her one of his rare letters to the
+same effect. Lydia thought it likely that he had been moved to this
+unusual show of interest in her affairs by proddings from her mother and
+Marietta. If this surmise was correct, and if a similar request had been
+sent to Henry, the other member of the Emery family, the one who had
+married the grocer&#8217;s daughter, the appeal had a strikingly different
+effect. From Oregon came an impetuous, slangily-worded exhortation to
+Lydia not to make a fool of herself and miss the best of life to live up
+to the tommyrot standard of old dry-as-dust Endbury. The Emerys heard
+but seldom from this erring son, and Lydia, who had been but a child
+when he left home, had never before received a letter from him. He wrote
+from a fruit farm in Oregon, the description of which, on the
+grandiloquent letter-head, gave an impression of ampleness and
+prosperity which was not contradicted by the full-blooded satisfaction
+in life which breathed from every line of the breezy, good-natured
+letter.</p>
+
+<p>The incident stirred Lydia&#8217;s imagination. It spoke of a wider
+horizon&mdash;of a fresher air than that about her. She tried to remember the
+loud-talking, much-laughing, easy-going young man as she had seen him
+last. They were too far apart in years to have had much companionship,
+but there had been between them an unspoken affection which had never
+died. People always said that George and Marietta were alike and Lydia
+and Harry. To this Mrs. Emery always protested that Lydia wasn&#8217;t in the
+<i>least</i> like <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_252" id="pg_252">252</a></span>Henry, and she didn&#8217;t know what people were talking about;
+but the remark gave a secret pleasure to Lydia. She, too, was very fond
+of laughing, and her brother&#8217;s vein of light-hearted nonsense had been a
+great delight to her. It was not present in any of the rest of the
+family, and certainly did not show itself in her at this period of her
+life.</p>
+
+<p>During this time Paul&#8217;s attention was concentrated on bringing about a
+reallotment of American Electric territory in the Middle West, an
+arrangement that would add several busy cities to his district and make
+a decided difference in his salary and commissions. He worked early and
+late in the Endbury office, and made many trips into all parts of the
+field, to gather data conclusive of the value of his scheme. Lydia had
+tried hard to get from him information enough to understand what it was
+all about, but he put her off with vague, fatigued assurances that it
+was too complicated for her to grasp, or for him to go over without his
+papers; that it would take him too long to explain, and that, anyhow,
+she could be sure of one thing&mdash;it was all straight, clean business,
+designed entirely to give the public better service and more work from
+everybody all &#8217;round. Lydia did not doubt this. It was always a great
+source of satisfaction to her to feel secure and unshaken trust in her
+father&#8217;s and her husband&#8217;s business integrity, and she was sorry for
+Marietta, who could not, she feared, count among her spiritual
+possessions any such faith in Ralph. It was, on the other hand, one of
+her most unresigned regrets, that she was not allowed to share in these
+ideals for public service of her husband and father&mdash;these ideals so
+distantly glimpsed by her, and perhaps not very consciously felt by
+them. It was not that they refused to answer any one of her questions,
+but they were so little in the habit of articulating this phase of their
+activities that their tongues balked stubbornly before her ignorant and
+fumbling attempts to enter this inner chamber.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, it&#8217;s all right, Lydia! Just you trust me!&#8221; Paul would cry, with a
+hint of vexation in his voice, as if he felt that questions could mean
+only suspicion.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_253" id="pg_253">253</a></span>Lydia&#8217;s tentative efforts to construct a bridge between her world and
+his met constantly with this ill success. She had had so little training
+in bridge-building, she thought sadly.</p>
+
+<p>One evening that spring, such a futile attempt of hers was interrupted
+by the son of one of their neighbors, a lad of eighteen, who had just
+been given a subordinate position in his father&#8217;s business. As he
+strolled up to their veranda steps, Lydia looked up from the dress she
+was enlarging for the rapidly growing baby and reflected that
+astonishingly rapid growth is the law of all healthy youth. The tall boy
+looked almost ludicrous to her in his ultra-correct man&#8217;s outfit, so
+vividly did she recall him, three or four years before, in short
+trousers and round-collared shirt-waist. His smooth, rosy face had still
+the downy bloom of adolescence.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Howd&#8217; do, Walter!&#8221; said Paul, glancing up from a pile of blue-prints
+over which he had been straining his eyes in the fading evening light.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Evening,&#8221; answered the boy, nodding and sitting down on the top step
+with one knee up. &#8220;D&#8217;you mind if I smoke, Mrs. Hollister?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Not at all,&#8221; she answered gravely, tickled by the elaborate
+carelessness with which he handled his new pipe.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What you working on, Hollister?&#8221; he went on with the manner of one old
+business man to another.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia hid a smile. She found him delicious. She began to think how she
+could make Dr. Melton laugh with her account of Walter the Man.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The lay-out of the new power-house&mdash;Elliott-Gridley works in Urbana,&#8221;
+answered Paul, in a straightforward, reasonable tone, a little absent.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia stopped smiling. It was a tone he had never used to answer any
+business question she had ever put to him. &#8220;I&#8217;m figuring on their
+generators,&#8221; he went on in explanation.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Big contract?&#8221; asked Walter.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Two thousand kilowatt turbo generator,&#8221; answered Paul.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_254" id="pg_254">254</a></span>The other whistled. &#8220;Whew! I didn&#8217;t know they had the cash!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They haven&#8217;t,&#8221; said Paul briefly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, chattel-mortgage?&#8221; surmised the other.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Lease-contract,&#8221; Paul corrected. &#8220;That doesn&#8217;t have to be recorded.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s the matter with recording it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Afraid of their credit. They don&#8217;t want Dunn&#8217;s sending all over
+creation that they&#8217;ve put chattel-mortgages on their equipment, do
+they?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No; sure! I see.&#8221; The boy grasped instantly, with a quick nod, the
+other&#8217;s meaning. &#8220;Well, that&#8217;s <i>one</i> way of gettin&#8217; &#8217;round it!&#8221; he added
+admiringly after an instant&#8217;s pause.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia had laid down her work and was looking intently at her two
+companions. At this she gave a stifled exclamation which made the boy
+turn his head. &#8220;Say, Mrs. Hollister, aren&#8217;t you looking kind of pale
+this evening?&#8221; he asked. &#8220;These first hot nights do take it out of a
+person, don&#8217;t they? Mr. Hollister ought to take you to Put-in-Bay for a
+holiday. Momma&#8217;d take care of the baby for you and welcome. She&#8217;s crazy
+about babies.&#8221; He was again the overgrown school-boy that Lydia knew.
+The conversation drifted to indifferent topics. Lydia did not take her
+usual share in it, and when their caller had gone Paul inquired if she
+really were exhausted by the heat.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, no,&#8221; she said; &#8220;you know I don&#8217;t mind the heat.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You didn&#8217;t say much when Walter was here, and I&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I was thinking,&#8221; Lydia broke in. &#8220;I was thinking that I couldn&#8217;t
+understand a word you and Walter were saying any more than if you were
+talking Hebrew. I was thinking that that little boy knows more about
+your business than I do.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul did not attempt to deny this, but he laughed at her dramatic
+accent. &#8220;Sure, he does! And about how to tie a four-in-hand, and what&#8217;s
+the best stud to wear at the back of a collar, and where to buy socks.
+What&#8217;s that to you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_255" id="pg_255">255</a></span>Lydia looked at him with quivering, silent lips.</p>
+
+<p>He answered, with a little heat: &#8220;Why, look-y here, Lydia, suppose I
+were a doctor. You wouldn&#8217;t expect to know how many grains of morphine
+or what d&#8217;you call &#8217;em I was going to use in&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But Dr. Melton <i>is</i> a doctor, and I know lots about what he thinks of
+as he lives day after day&mdash;there are other things besides technical
+details and grains of morphine&mdash;other problems&mdash;human things&mdash;Why, for
+instance, there&#8217;s one question that torments him all the time&mdash;how much
+it&#8217;s right to humor people who aren&#8217;t sick but think they are. He talks
+to me a great deal about such&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul laughed, rising and gathering up his blue-prints. &#8220;Well, I can&#8217;t
+think of any problem that torments me but the everlasting one of how to
+sell more generators and motors than my competitors. Come on indoors,
+Honey; I&#8217;ve got to have some light if I finish going over these
+to-night.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His accent was evidently intended to end the discussion, and Lydia
+allowed it to do so, although the incident was one she could not put out
+of her mind. She watched Walter going back and forth to Endbury with a
+jealousy the absurdity of which she herself realized, and she listened
+with a painful intentness to the boy&#8217;s talk during his occasional idle
+sojourns on their veranda steps. Yet she had been used to hearing Paul
+talk unintelligibly to the business associates whom, from time to time,
+he brought out to the house to dine and to talk business afterward.
+Somehow, she said to herself, it&#8217;s being just <i>Walter</i> seemed to bring
+it home to her. To have that boy&mdash;and yet she liked him, too, she
+thought. She looked sometimes into his fresh, innocently keen face with
+a yearning apprehension. Paul was amused at his precocious airs, and yet
+was not without respect for his rapidly developing business capacity. He
+said once, &#8220;Walter&#8217;s a real nice boy. I shouldn&#8217;t mind having a son like
+that myself!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The remark startled Lydia. If she were to have a son he <i>would</i> be like
+that, she realized. And he would grow up <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_256" id="pg_256">256</a></span>and marry some&mdash;she sprang up
+and caught Ariadne to her in a sudden fierce embrace.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;ll break your back lifting that heavy baby &#8217;round so,&#8221; Paul
+remonstrated with justice.</p>
+
+<p>For all her aversion to the set forms of &#8220;society&#8221; as understood by
+Endbury, Lydia was fond of having people about her, &#8220;to try to get
+really acquainted with them&#8221; she said, and during that summer the
+Hollister veranda in the evening became a rendezvous for their Bellevue
+neighbors. Paul rather deplored the time wasted in this unprofitable
+variety of informal social life which, in his phrase, &#8220;counted for
+nothing&#8221; but he was always glad to see Walter. &#8220;At the rate he&#8217;s going
+and the way he&#8217;s taking hold, he&#8217;ll be a valuable business friend in a
+few years,&#8221; he said prophetically to Lydia, and he assumed more and more
+the airs of a comrade with the lad.</p>
+
+<p>One evening when Walter came lounging over to the veranda, Lydia was
+busy indoors, but later she stepped to the door in time to hear Paul
+say, laughing: &#8220;Well, for all that, he&#8217;s not so good as Wellman Phelps&#8217;
+stenographer.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How so?&#8221; asked the boy, alert for a pleasantry from his elder.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, Phelps carries this fellow &#8217;round with him everywhere he goes, has
+had him for years, and twice a week all he has to do is to say: &#8216;Say,
+Fred; write my wife, will you?&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His listener broke out into a peal of boyish laughter. &#8220;Pretty good!&#8221; he
+applauded the joke.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s a fact,&#8221; Paul went on. &#8220;Fred writes it and signs it and sends it
+off, and Phelps never has to trouble his head about it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia stepped back into the darkness of the hall.</p>
+
+<p>When she came out later, a misty figure in white, Paul rose, saying,
+&#8220;Well, Walter, I&#8217;ll leave you to Mrs. Hollister now. I&#8217;ve got some work
+to do before I get to bed.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia sat silent, looking at the boy&#8217;s face, clear and untarnished in
+the moonlight. He was looking dreamily away at the lawn, dappled with
+the shadow of the slender young <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_257" id="pg_257">257</a></span>trees. They seemed creatures scarcely
+more sylvan than he, sprawled, like a loitering faun with his hands
+clasped behind his head. His mouth had the pure, full outlines of a
+child&#8217;s.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What are you thinking about, Walter?&#8221; Lydia asked him suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>He started, and brought his limpid gaze to hers. &#8220;About how to
+cross-index our follow-up letter catalogue better,&#8221; he answered
+promptly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Really? Really?&#8221; She leaned toward him, urging him to frankness.</p>
+
+<p>He was surprised at her tone. &#8220;Why, sure!&#8221; he told her. &#8220;Why not? What
+else?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia said no more.</p>
+
+<p>She had never felt more helplessly her remoteness from her husband&#8217;s
+world than during that spring. It was a sentiment that Paul, apparently,
+did not reciprocate. In spite of his frequent absences from home and his
+detached manner about most domestic questions, he had as definite ideas
+about his wife&#8217;s resumption of her social duties as had everyone else.
+&#8220;It made him uneasy,&#8221; as he put it, &#8220;to be losing so many points in the
+game.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Look here, my dear,&#8221; he said one evening in spring when the question
+came up; &#8220;summer&#8217;s almost here, and this winter&#8217;s been as good as
+dropped right out. Can&#8217;t you just pick up a few threads and make a
+beginning? It&#8217;ll make it easier in the fall.&#8221; He added, uneasily, &#8220;We
+don&#8217;t want old Lowder and Madeleine to get ahead of us entirely, you
+know. You can leave the kid with &#8217;Stashie, can&#8217;t you, once in a while?
+She ought to be able to do <i>that</i> much, I should think.&#8221; He spoke as
+though he had assigned to her the simplest possible of all domestic
+undertakings. As Lydia made no response, he said finally, before
+attacking a pile of papers, &#8220;If I&#8217;m going to earn a lot more money, what
+good&#8217;ll it do us if you don&#8217;t do your share? Besides, we owe it to the
+kid. You want to do your best by your little girl, don&#8217;t you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As always, Lydia responded with a helpless alacrity to <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_258" id="pg_258">258</a></span>that appeal.
+&#8220;Oh, yes! Oh, yes! We must do our best for her.&#8221; This phrase summed up
+the religion she had at last found after so much fervent, undirected
+search. The church, as she knew it, was chiefly the social center of
+various fashionable activities which differed from ordinary fashionable
+enterprises only in being used to bring in money, which money, handed
+over to the rector, disappeared into the maw of some unknown, voracious,
+charitable institution. And beyond the church there had been no element
+in the life she knew, that was not frankly materialistic. But now, as
+the miracle of awakening consciousness took place daily in her very
+sight, and as the first dawnings of a personality began to look out of
+her child&#8217;s eyes, all Lydia&#8217;s vague spiritual cravings, all the groping
+tendrils of her aspirations, clung about the conviction more and more
+summing up her inner life, that she must do her best for Ariadne, must
+make the world, into which that little new soul had come, a better place
+than she herself had found it. She felt as na&iuml;vely and passionately that
+her child must be saved the mistakes that she had made, as though she
+were the first mother who ever sent up over her baby&#8217;s head that
+pitiful, universal prayer.</p>
+
+<p>The matter of the social duty of the young Hollisters was finally
+compromised by Lydia&#8217;s accepting a number of invitations for the latter
+part of the season, and giving a series of big receptions in May. They
+were not by a hair nor a jot nor a tittle to be distinguished from their
+predecessors of the year before. As they seemed hardly adequate, Lydia
+suggested half-heartedly that they give a dinner party, but Paul
+replied, &#8220;With &#8217;Stashie to pour soup down people&#8217;s backs and ask them
+how their baby&#8217;s whooping cough is, as she passes the potatoes?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The hot weather came with the rush that was always so unexpected and so
+invariable, and another season was over. It was a busy, silent,
+thoughtful summer for Lydia. Of course (much to Lydia&#8217;s distress),
+Ariadne had been weaned when her mother had been forced to leave her to
+&#8220;go out&#8221; again, and this necessitated such anxious attention <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_259" id="pg_259">259</a></span>to her
+diet and general regimen during the hot weather that Lydia was very
+grateful to have little to interfere with her.</p>
+
+<p>The General Office had accepted provisionally Paul&#8217;s redistributing
+plan, and in his anxiety to prove its value he was away from home more
+even than usual. The heat was terrible, but Lydia and he both knew no
+other climate, and Lydia loved the summer as the time of year when the
+fierceness of Nature forced on all her world a reluctant adjournment of
+their usual methods of spending their lives. She was absorbed in
+Ariadne, and the slow, blazing summer days were none too long for her.</p>
+
+<p>The child began to develop an individuality. She was a sensitive,
+quickly-responsive little thing; exactly, so Mrs. Emery said, like Lydia
+at her age, except that she seemed to have none of Lydia&#8217;s native mirth,
+but, rather, a little pensive air that made her singularly appealing to
+all who saw her, and that pierced her mother&#8217;s heart with an anguish of
+protecting love.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia said to her godfather one day, suddenly, &#8220;I wonder if people can
+be taught how to fight?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He had one of his flashes of intuition. &#8220;The baby, you mean?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia evaded the directness of this. &#8220;Oh, in general, aren&#8217;t folks
+better off if they like to fight for themselves? Don&#8217;t they <i>have</i> to?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He considered the question in one of his frowning silences, so long that
+Lydia started when he spoke again. &#8220;They don&#8217;t need to fight with claws
+for their food, as they used to do. Things are arranged now so that the
+physically strong, who like such a life, are the ones who choose it.
+They get food for the others. Why shouldn&#8217;t the morally strong fight for
+the weaker ones and make it possible for everyone to have a chance at
+developing the best of himself without having to battle with others to
+do it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s pretty vague,&#8221; said Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, look here,&#8221; said the doctor. &#8220;You don&#8217;t plow the field to plant
+the wheat that makes your bread. That&#8217;s <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_260" id="pg_260">260</a></span>a man of a coarser physical
+fiber than yours, who is strengthened by the effort, and not exhausted
+as you would be. Why shouldn&#8217;t the world be so organized that somebody
+of coarser moral texture than yours should do battle with the forces of
+materialism and tragic triviality that&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But Ariadne&#8217;s growing up! She will need all that so <i>soon</i>&mdash; and the
+world won&#8217;t be organized then, you know it won&#8217;t&mdash;and she&#8217;s no fighter
+by instinct, any more than&mdash;&#8221; She was silent. The doctor filled in her
+incomplete sentence mentally, and found no answer to make.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_261" id="pg_261">261</a></span>
+<a name="THROUGH_PITY_AND_TERROR_EFFECTING_A_PURIFICATION_OF_THE_HEART_9423" id="THROUGH_PITY_AND_TERROR_EFFECTING_A_PURIFICATION_OF_THE_HEART_9423"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XXIV</p>
+<p class="l c">&#8220;THROUGH PITY AND TERROR EFFECTING A PURIFICATION OF THE HEART&#8221;</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>One hot day in August, Ariadne slept later than usual and when she woke
+was quite unlike her usual romping, active self. Her round face was
+deeply flushed, and she lay listlessly in her little bed, repulsing with
+a feeble fretfulness every attempt to give her food. Lydia&#8217;s heart
+swelled so that she was choked with its palpitations. Paul was out of
+town. She was alone in the house except for her servant. To that
+ignorant warm heart she turned with an inexpressible thankfulness. &#8220;Oh,
+&#8217;Stashie! Stashie!&#8221; she called in a voice that brought the other
+clattering breathlessly up the stairs. &#8220;The baby! Look at the baby! And
+she won&#8217;t touch her bottle.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The tragic change in the Irishwoman&#8217;s face as she looked at their
+darling, their anguished community of feeling&mdash;there was instantly a
+bond for the two women which wonderfully ignored all the dividing
+differences between them. Lydia felt herself&mdash;as she rarely did&mdash;not
+alone. It brought a wild comfort into her tumult. &#8220;&#8217;Stashie, you
+don&#8217;t&mdash;you don&#8217;t think she&#8217;s&mdash;<i>sick?</i>&#8221; She brought the word out with
+horrified difficulty.</p>
+
+<p>&#8217;Stashie was running down the back stairs. &#8220;I&#8217;m &#8217;phonin&#8217; to th&#8217; little
+ould doctor,&#8221; she called over her shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia ran to catch up Ariadne. The child turned from her mother with a
+moan and closed her eyes heavily. A moment later, to Lydia&#8217;s terror, she
+had sunk into a stupor.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor found mistress and maid hanging over the baby&#8217;s bed with
+white faces and trembling lips, hand in <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_262" id="pg_262">262</a></span>hand, like sisters. He examined
+the child silently, swiftly, looking with a face of inscrutable
+blankness at the clinical thermometer with which he had taken her
+temperature. &#8220;Just turn her so she&#8217;ll lie comfortably,&#8221; he told
+&#8217;Stashie, &#8220;and then you stay with her a moment. I want a talk with your
+mistress.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In the hall, he cast at Lydia a glance of almost angry exhortation to
+summon her strength. &#8220;Are you fit to be a mother?&#8221; he asked harshly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Wait a minute,&#8221; said Lydia; she drew a long breath and took hold of the
+balustrade. &#8220;Yes,&#8221; she answered.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ariadne&#8217;s very sick. I oughtn&#8217;t to have allowed you to wean her with
+hot weather coming on. You&#8217;d better wire Paul.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; she said, not blenching. &#8220;What else can I do?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8217;Phone to the hospital for a trained nurse, start some water boiling to
+sterilize things, and get somebody here in a hurry to go to the nearest
+drug store for me. I&#8217;ll go back to her now.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Is she&mdash;is she&mdash;dangerously&mdash;?&#8221; asked Lydia in a low, steady voice.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes; she is,&#8221; he said unsparingly.</p>
+
+<p>The telegram Lydia sent her husband read: &#8220;Ariadne suddenly taken very
+sick. Dr. Melton says dangerously. He thinks she does not suffer much,
+though she seems to. When shall I expect you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The answer she received in a few hours read: &#8220;Have two nurses. Get
+Jones, Cleveland, consultation. Impossible to leave.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was handed her as she was running up the stairs with a pitcher of hot
+water. She read it, as she did everything that day, in a dreamlike
+rapidity and quietness, and showed it to Dr. Melton without comment. He
+handed it back without a word. Later, he turned for an instant from the
+little bed to say, irrelevantly, &#8220;Peterson, of Toledo, would be better
+than Jones, if I have to have anybody. But so far, it&#8217;s simple
+enough&mdash;damnably simple.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He was obliged to leave for a time after this, called by <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_263" id="pg_263">263</a></span>a patient at
+the point of death. That seemed quite natural to Lydia. Death was thick
+in the air. He left the baby to a clear-eyed, deft-handed, impersonal
+trained nurse, on whom Lydia waited slavishly, sitting motionless in a
+corner of the room until she was sent for something, then flying
+noiselessly upon her errand.</p>
+
+<p>Her mother and father were out of town, and Marietta limited herself to
+telephoning frequent inquiries. She told &#8217;Stashie to tell her sister she
+knew she would be only in the way, with two nurses in the house. Lydia
+made &#8217;Stashie answer all the telephone calls. She felt that if she broke
+her silence, if she tried to speak&mdash;and then she could not bear to be
+out of the sight of the little figure with the flushed cheeks, moving
+her head back and forth on the pillow and gazing about with bright,
+unseeing eyes. As night came on, she began to give, in a voice not her
+own, little piteous cries of suffering, or strange delirious mockeries
+of her pretty laughter and quaint, unintelligible, prattling talk. Once,
+as the long, hot night stood still, the baby called out, quite clearly:
+&#8220;Mamma! Mamma!&#8221; It was the first time she had ever said it.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia sprang up and rushed toward the bed like an insane person, her
+arms outstretched, her eyes glittering. Dr. Melton did not forbid her to
+take up her child, but he said in a neutral tone, &#8220;It would be better
+for her to lie perfectly quiet.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia stopped short, shuddering. The doctor did not take his eyes from
+his little patient. After a moment the mother went slowly back to her
+seat. &#8220;Hand me the thermometer,&#8221; said the doctor to the nurse.</p>
+
+<p>In the early morning came a telegram from Paul. &#8220;Wire me frequently
+baby&#8217;s condition. Spare no expense in treatment.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia answered: &#8220;Ariadne slightly worse. Doctor says crisis in three
+days.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This time she put in no extra information as to the baby&#8217;s suffering,
+and her message was under ten words, like his own. She despatched him
+thereafter a bulletin every four <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_264" id="pg_264">264</a></span>or five hours. They ran mostly to the
+effect that Ariadne was about the same.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor came and went, the nurses relieved each other, the telephone
+rang for Marietta&#8217;s inquiries, Flora Burgess called once a day to get
+the news from &#8217;Stashie. Lydia was slave to the nurses, alert for the
+slightest service she could render them, divining, with a desperate
+intuition, their needs before they were formulated. &#8217;Stashie was the
+only person who paid the least attention to her, &#8217;Stashie the only
+phenomena to break in on the solitude that surrounded her like an
+illimitable plain. &#8217;Stashie made her eat. &#8217;Stashie saw to it that once
+or twice she lay down. &#8217;Stashie combed her hair, and bathed her white
+face&mdash;most of all, &#8217;Stashie went about with eyes that reflected
+faithfully the suffering in Lydia&#8217;s own. She said very little, but as
+they passed, the two women sometimes exchanged brief words: &#8220;Niver you
+think it possible, Mis&#8217; Hollister!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No,&#8221; Lydia would answer resolutely; &#8220;it&#8217;s not possible.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But as the hours slowly filed past the doctor assured her bluntly that
+it would be quite possible. &#8220;There&#8217;s a fighting chance,&#8221; he said, &#8220;and
+nothing more.&#8221; He added relentlessly, &#8220;If I hadn&#8217;t been such a fool as
+to let you wean her&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There was in his manner none of his usual tenderness to his godchild.
+One would have thought he scarcely saw her. He was the physician wholly.
+Lydia was grateful to him for this. She could not have borne his
+tenderness then, but his professional concentration left her horribly
+alone.</p>
+
+<p>No, not alone! There was always &#8217;Stashie&mdash;silent &#8217;Stashie, with red
+eyes, her heart bleeding. But even &#8217;Stashie&#8217;s loyal heart could not know
+all the bitterness of Lydia&#8217;s. &#8217;Stashie&#8217;s breasts did not swell and
+throb, as if in mockery. &#8217;Stashie did not hear, over and over, &#8220;If she
+had not been weaned&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>On the night and near the hour when the crisis was expected, Lydia was
+at the end of the hall, where she had installed an oil-stove. She was
+heating water needed for <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_265" id="pg_265">265</a></span>some of the processes of the sick room. It had
+begun to steam up in the thick, hot night air, was singing loudly, and
+would boil in an instant. She sat looking at it in her tense, trembling
+quiet. There was no light but the blue flame of the stove.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly there rang loudly in her ears the question to which she had
+deafened herself with such crucifying effort&mdash;&#8220;What if Ariadne should
+die?&#8221; It was as though someone had called to her. She looked down into
+the black abyss from which she had willfully turned away her eyes, and
+saw that it was fathomless. A throe of revolt and hatred shook her. She
+bowed her head to her knees, racked by an anguish compared with which
+the torture of childbirth was nothing; and out of this deadly pain came
+forth, as in childbirth, something alive&mdash;a vision as swift, as passing
+as a glimpse into the gates of Paradise; a blinding certainty of
+immensity, of the hugeness of the whole of which she and Ariadne were a
+part; of the sacredness of life, which was to be lived sacredly, even
+if&mdash; She raised her head, living a more exalted instant than she had
+ever dreamed she would know.</p>
+
+<p>The water broke into quick, dancing bubbles. In a period of time
+incalculably short, transfiguration had come to her.</p>
+
+<p>The door at the other end of the hall opened and Dr. Melton&#8217;s light,
+uneven footstep echoed back of her. She did not turn. He laid a hand on
+her shoulder. It was trembling, and with a wonderful consciousness of
+endless courage she turned to comfort him. His lips were twitching so
+that for an instant he could not speak. Then, &#8220;She&#8217;ll pull through. I&#8217;m
+pretty sure now, she&#8217;ll&mdash;&#8221; he got out and leaned against the wall.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia took him into a protecting embrace as though it were his baby who
+had turned back from the gates of death. She had come into a larger
+heritage. She was mother to all that suffered. Looking down on the head
+which, for an instant, lay on her bosom, she noticed how white the hair
+was. He was an old man, her godfather, he had been on <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_266" id="pg_266">266</a></span>a long strain&mdash;.
+He looked up at her. And then in an instant it was over. He had mastered
+himself and had grasped the handle of the basin.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How long has this been boiling?&#8221; he asked.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia pointed to her watch, hanging on the wall. &#8220;Three minutes by
+that,&#8221; she said. &#8220;May I leave to tell &#8217;Stashie?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor nodded absently.</p>
+
+<p>Neither spoke of Paul.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia hurried across the dark, silent house with swift sureness. The
+happiness she was about to confer cast a radiance upon her. She touched
+the door to the servant&#8217;s room, and ran her fingers lightly over it to
+find the knob. Faint as the noise was, it was answered instantly by a
+stir inside. There was a thud of bare feet and a quick rush. Lydia felt
+the door swing open before her in the darkness and spoke quickly to the
+trembling, breathing form she divined there, &#8220;The doctor says she&#8217;s
+safe.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Strong arms were about her, hot tears not her own rained down on her
+face. Before she knew it, she was swept to her knees, where, locked in
+the other&#8217;s close embrace, she felt the big heart thump loud against her
+own and heard go up above her head a wild &#8220;Oh, God! Oh, Mary Mother! Oh,
+Christ! Oh, Mary Mother! Glory be to God! Hail, Mary, Mother of God!
+Thanks be to God! Thanks be&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Kneeling there in the blackness, with her servant&#8217;s arms around her,
+Lydia thought it the first prayer she had ever heard.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Ariadne grew well with the miraculous rapidity of children, and when
+Paul came back was almost herself again, if a little thinner.</p>
+
+<p>It was upon Lydia that Paul&#8217;s eyes fastened, Lydia very white, her face
+almost translucent, her starry eyes contradicting the tremor of her
+lips. He drew her to him, crying out: &#8220;Why, Lydia darling, you look as
+though you&#8217;d been drawn through a knot-hole! This has been enough sight
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_267" id="pg_267">267</a></span>harder on you than on the baby! What in the world wore <i>you</i> out so? I
+thought you had two nurses!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He looked closely into her face, seeing more changes: &#8220;Why, you poor,
+poor, poor thing!&#8221; he said compassionately. &#8220;You look positively years
+older.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I am that,&#8221; she told him, seeming to speak, oddly enough, he
+thought, exultantly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You just shouldn&#8217;t allow yourself to get so wrought up over Ariadne,&#8221;
+he expostulated affectionately. &#8220;You&#8217;ll wear yourself out! What earthly
+good did it do the baby? Sickness is a matter for professionals, I tell
+you what! You had the two nurses and your precious old Dr. Melton that
+you swear by! What more could be done? That&#8217;s the reason I didn&#8217;t come
+back. I knew well enough that there wasn&#8217;t an earthly thing I could do
+to help.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia looked at him so strangely that he noticed it. &#8220;Oh, of course I
+could have been company for you. But that was the <i>only</i> thing! Getting
+the baby well was the business of the hour, <i>wasn&#8217;t</i> it now? And the
+doctor and nurses were looking out for that. Besides, you had &#8217;Stashie
+to wait on you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes; I had &#8217;Stashie,&#8221; admitted Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>Paul perceived uneasily some enigmatic quality in her quiet answer, and
+went on reasonably: &#8220;Now, Lydia, don&#8217;t go making yourself out a martyr
+because I didn&#8217;t come back. You know I&#8217;d have come if there was anything
+to be done! I&#8217;d have come from the ends of the earth to help you nurse
+her if we&#8217;d had to do that! But, thank the Lord, I make enough money so
+we could do better by the little tad than that!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Suppose I had gone to the theater that night,&#8221; asked Lydia slowly.
+&#8220;There was nothing I could do here.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul was justifiably aggrieved. &#8220;Good Lord, Lydia! I wasn&#8217;t off amusing
+myself! I was doing <i>business!</i>&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His special accent for the word was never more pronounced.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Making money to pay for the trained nurses that saved <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_268" id="pg_268">268</a></span>her life,&#8221; he
+ended. His conviction of the unanswerable force of this statement put
+him again in good humor. &#8220;Now, little madame, you listen to me. You&#8217;re
+going to take a junketing honeymoon off with me, or I&#8217;ll know the reason
+why! I&#8217;m going to take you up to Put-in-Bay for a vacation! Pretty near
+all our card-club gang are there now, and we&#8217;ll have a gay old time and
+cheer you up! I bet you just let yourself go, and worried yourself into
+a fever, didn&#8217;t you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>During this speech Lydia stood leaning against him, feeling the cloth of
+his sleeve rough on her bare forearm, feeling the stir and life of his
+body, the warmth of his breath on her face. She had an impulse to scream
+wildly to him, as though to make him hear and stop and turn, before he
+finally disappeared from her sight; and she faced him dumbly. There were
+no words to tell him&mdash;she tried to speak, but before his absent, kind,
+wandering eyes, a foreknowledge of her own inarticulateness closed her
+lips. He had not been there, and so he would never know. She stirred,
+moved away, and rearranged the flowers in a vase. &#8220;Oh, yes; I worried,
+of course,&#8221; she said. &#8220;The baby was awfully sick for three days.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She felt desperately that she was failing in the most obvious duty not
+to try to make him understand what had happened in his absence. She
+bethought herself of one fact, the mere statement of which should tell
+him a thousand times more eloquently than words, something of what she
+had suffered. &#8220;The doctor told me twice that she wouldn&#8217;t have been sick
+if she hadn&#8217;t been weaned.&#8221; She said this with an accent of immense
+significance, clasping her hands together hard.</p>
+
+<p>Paul was unpacking his suit-case. &#8220;Great Scott! You nursed her six
+months!&#8221; he said conclusively, over his shoulder. &#8220;Besides, you <i>had</i> to
+wean her&mdash;don&#8217;t you remember?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, yes; I remember,&#8221; said Lydia. Her hands dropped to her sides.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t they get over things quickly?&#8221; commented Paul, <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_269" id="pg_269">269</a></span>looking around at
+the baby. &#8220;To see her creeping around like a little hop-toad and
+squeaking that rubber bunny&mdash;why, I declare, I don&#8217;t believe that
+anything&#8217;s been the matter with her at all. You and the doctor lost your
+nerve, I guess.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Three or four days later he was called away again. Their regular routine
+began. The long, slow days, slid past the house in Bellevue in endless,
+dreamy procession. Ariadne grew fast, developing constantly new
+faculties, new powers. By the end of the summer she was no longer a
+baby, but a person. The young mother felt the same mysterious forces of
+change and growth working irresistibly in herself. The long summer,
+thoughtful and solitary, marked the end of one period in her life.</p>
+
+<p>She looked forward shrinkingly to the winter. What would happen to this
+new self whose growth in her was keeping pace with her child&#8217;s? What
+would happen next?</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_270" id="pg_270">270</a></span>
+<a name="A_BLACK_MILESTONE_9744" id="A_BLACK_MILESTONE_9744"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XXV</p>
+<p class="l c">A BLACK MILESTONE</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>What happened was, in the first week of October, the sudden death of her
+father. It was sudden only to his wife and daughter, whom, as always,
+the Judge had tried to spare, at all costs, the knowledge of anything
+unpleasant. Dr. Melton thought that perhaps the strong man&#8217;s incredulity
+of anything for him to fear had a good deal to do with his repeated
+refusals to allow his wife or daughter to be warned of the danger of
+apoplexy. Without that hypothesis, it seemed incredible, he told Mrs.
+Sandworth, that so kind a man could be so cruel.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Everything&#8217;s incredible,&#8221; murmured Mrs. Sandworth, her handkerchief at
+her eyes, her loving heart aching for the newly-made widow, her lifelong
+friend.</p>
+
+<p>Her brother did not answer. He sat, gnawing savagely on his finger
+nails, his thoughts centered, as always, on his darling
+Lydia&mdash;fatherless.</p>
+
+<p>He had prided himself on his acute insight into human nature in general,
+and upon his specialized, intensified knowledge of those two women whom
+he had known so long and studied so minutely; but &#8220;I&#8217;ve been a conceited
+blockhead, and vanity&#8217;s treacherous as well as damnable,&#8221; he cried out
+to his sister some days later, amazed beyond expression at the way in
+which their loss affected Lydia and her mother.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery&#8217;s attitude was a revelation to him, a revelation that left
+him almost as angrily full of grief as she herself. He had thought best
+on the whole not to disclose to her the substance of the several
+conversations he had had with his dead friend on the subject of
+finances. With <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_271" id="pg_271">271</a></span>two prosperous sons, the widow would be well taken care
+of, he thought, perhaps adding with a little acridity, &#8220;just as she
+always has been, without a thought on her part.&#8221; But when Mrs. Emery,
+divining the truth with an awful intuition, came flying to him after the
+settlement, he was not proof against the fury of her interrogations. If
+she wanted to know, he would tell her, he thought grimly to himself.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There is nothing left,&#8221; she began, bursting into his office, &#8220;but the
+house, which has a mortgage, and the insurance&mdash;nothing! Nothing!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was rather soon for her to be resentful, the doctor thought bitterly,
+misreading the misery on her face. &#8220;No,&#8221; he said.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Had the Judge lost any money&mdash;do you know?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No; I think not.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But where&mdash;what&mdash;we had at one time five thousand dollars at least in
+the savings bank. I happened to know of that small account. I supposed
+of course there was more. There is no trace of even that, the
+administrator says.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That went into the extra expenses of the year Lydia made her d&eacute;but. And
+her wedding cost a great deal, he told me one day&mdash;and her
+trousseau&mdash;and other expenses at that time.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Used as the doctor was to the universal custom of divided interests
+among his well-to-do patients, it did not seem too strange to him to be
+giving information about her own affairs to this gray-haired matron. She
+was not the first widow to whom he had been forced to break bad news of
+her husband&#8217;s business.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Emery stared at him, her dry lips apart, a glaze over her eyes. He
+thought her expression strange. As she said nothing, he added, with a
+little sour pleasure in defending his dead friend, even if it should
+give a prick to a survivor, &#8220;The Judge was so scrupulously honest, you
+know.&#8221; The widow sat down and laid her arms across the table, still
+staring hard at the doctor. It came to him that she was not looking at
+him at all, but at some devastating inner <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_272" id="pg_272">272</a></span>sight, which seared her
+heart, but from which she could not turn away her eyes. He himself
+turned away, beginning to be aware of some passion within her beyond his
+divination. There was a long silence.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, &#8220;That was the reason he would not stop working,&#8221; said the woman
+in a voice which made the physician whirl about. He looked sharply into
+her face, and what he saw there took him in one stride to her side. She
+kept her stony eyes still on the place where he had been&mdash;eyes that saw
+only, as though for the first time, some long procession of past events.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I see everything now,&#8221; she went on with the same flat intonation. &#8220;He
+<i>could</i> not stop. That was the reason why he would never rest.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She got slowly to her feet, smoothing over and over one side of her
+skirt with a strange automatic gesture. She was looking full into the
+doctor&#8217;s face now. &#8220;I have killed him,&#8221; she said quietly, and fell as
+though struck down by a blow from behind.</p>
+
+<p>Her long, long illness was spent in the Melton&#8217;s home, with the doctor
+in attendance and Julia Sandworth, utterly devoted, constantly at hand.
+The old Emery house, the outward symbol of her married life, was sold,
+and the big &#8220;yard&#8221; cut up into building lots long before she was able to
+sit up. Lydia came frequently, but, acting on the doctor&#8217;s express
+command, never brought Ariadne. The outbreaks of self-reproach and
+embittered grief that were likely to burst upon the widow, even in the
+midst of one of her quiet, listless days, were not, he said, for a child
+to see or hear, especially such a sensitive little thing as Ariadne.
+Those wild bursts of remorse were delirious, he told Lydia, but to his
+sister he said he wished they were. &#8220;I imagine they are the only times
+when she comes really to herself,&#8221; he added sadly.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width:370px">
+<a name="illus-003" id="illus-003"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-273.jpg" alt="&#34;I SEE EVERYTHING NOW,&#34; SHE WENT ON. &#34;HE COULD NOT STOP&#34;" title="" width="370" /><br />
+<span class="caption">&#8220;I SEE EVERYTHING NOW,&#8221; SHE WENT ON. &#8220;HE COULD NOT STOP&#8221;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_273" id="pg_273">273</a></span>The especial agony for the sick woman was that nothing of what had
+happened seemed to her now in the least necessary. &#8220;Why, if I had only
+known&mdash;if I had only dreamed how things were&mdash;&#8221; she cried incessantly to
+those about her. &#8220;What did I care about anything compared with Nat! I
+loved my husband! What did I care&mdash;if I had only dreamed that&mdash;if I had
+only known what I was doing!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton labored in heartsick pity to remove her fixed idea, which
+soon became a monomania, that she alone was to blame for the Judge&#8217;s
+death. It now seemed to him, in his sympathy with her grief, that she
+had been like a child entrusted with some frail, priceless object and
+not warned of its fragility. She herself cried out constantly with
+astonished hatred upon a world that had left her so.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If anyone had warned me&mdash;had given me the least idea that it was so
+serious&mdash;I could have lived in three rooms&mdash;we had been poor&mdash;what did I
+care for anything but Nathaniel! I only did all those things
+because&mdash;because there was nothing else to do!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia tried to break the current with a reminder of the sweet memories
+of the past. &#8220;Father loved you so! He loved to give you what you wanted,
+Mother dear.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What I wanted! I wanted my husband. I want my husband!&#8221; the widow
+screamed like a person on the rack.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor sent Lydia away with a hasty gesture. &#8220;You must not see her
+when she is violent,&#8221; he said. &#8220;You would never forget it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was something he himself never forgot, used as he was to pitiful
+scenes in the life of suffering humanity. He was almost like a sick
+person himself, going about his practice with sunken eyes and gray face.
+His need for sympathy was so great that he abandoned the tacit silence
+about the Emerys which had existed between him and Rankin ever since
+Lydia&#8217;s marriage, and, going out to the house in the Black Rock woods,
+unburdened to the younger man the horror of his heart.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She&#8217;s suffering,&#8221; he cried. &#8220;She&#8217;s literally heartbroken! She is! It&#8217;s
+real! And what has she had to make up for it? Oh, it&#8217;s monstrous! One
+thing she says keeps ringing in my ears. That gray-haired woman, a human
+being my own age&mdash;the silly, tragic, childish thing she <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_274" id="pg_274">274</a></span>keeps
+saying&mdash;&#8216;I only did all those things&mdash;I only wanted all those
+things&mdash;because there was nothing else!&#8217; <i>Nothing else!</i>&#8221; He turned on
+his host with a fierce &#8220;Good God! She&#8217;s right. What else was there ever
+for&mdash;for any woman of her class&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin pushed his shivering, fidgeting visitor into a chair and, laying
+a big hand on his shoulder, said with a faint smile: &#8220;Maybe I can divert
+your mind for an instant with a story&mdash;another one of my great-aunt&#8217;s,
+only it&#8217;s an old one this time; you&#8217;ve probably heard it&mdash;about the old
+man who said to his wife on his death-bed, &#8216;I&#8217;ve tried to be a good
+husband to you, dear. It&#8217;s been hard on my teeth sometimes, but I&#8217;ve
+always eaten the crusts and let you have the soft bread.&#8217; You remember
+what the wife&#8217;s answer was?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No,&#8221; said the doctor frowning.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s the epitome of tragedy. She said, &#8216;Oh, my dear, and I like crusts
+so!&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor stared into the fire. &#8220;Do you mean&mdash;there&#8217;s work for them?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I mean work for them,&#8221; repeated the younger man.</p>
+
+<p>The word echoed in a long silence.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s the most precious possession we have,&#8221; said Rankin finally. &#8220;We
+ought to share more evenly.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor rose to go. &#8220;Generally I forget that we&#8217;re of different
+generations,&#8221; he said with apparent irrelevance, &#8220;but there are times
+when I feel it keenly.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why now especially?&#8221; Rankin wondered. &#8220;I&#8217;ve stated a doctrine that is
+yours, too.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No; you wouldn&#8217;t see, of course. Yes; it&#8217;s my doctrine&mdash;in theory. I
+believe it, as people believe in Christianity. I should be equally loath
+to see anybody doubt it, or practice it. Ah, I&#8217;m a fool! Besides, I was
+born in Kentucky. And I&#8217;m sixty-seven years old.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He shut the door behind him with emphasis.</p>
+
+<p>He was on his way to Bellevue to see Lydia. Knowing her tender heart, he
+had expected to see her drowned in grief over her father&#8217;s death. Her
+dry-eyed quiet made <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_275" id="pg_275">275</a></span>him uneasy. That morning, he found her holding
+Ariadne on her knees and telling her in a self-possessed, low tone,
+which did not tremble, some stories of &#8220;when grandfather was a little
+boy.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t want her to grow up without knowing something of my father,&#8221;
+she explained to the doctor.</p>
+
+<p>Her godfather laid a hand on her arm. &#8220;Don&#8217;t keep the tears back so,
+Lydia,&#8221; he implored.</p>
+
+<p>She gave him as great a shock of surprise as her mother had done.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If I could cry,&#8221; she said quietly, &#8220;it would be because I feel so
+little sorrow. I do not miss my father at all&mdash;or hardly at all.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor caught at his chair and stared.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How should I?&#8221; she went on drearily. &#8220;I almost never saw him. I never
+spoke to him about anything that really mattered. I never let him know
+me&mdash;or anything I really felt.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What are you talking about?&#8221; cried the doctor. &#8220;You always lived at
+home.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I never lived with my father. He was always away in the morning before
+I was up. I was away, or busy, in the evening when he was there. On
+Sundays he never went to church as Mother and I did&mdash;I suppose now
+because he had some other religion of his own. But if he had I never
+knew what it was&mdash;or anything else that was in his mind or heart. It
+never occurred to me that I could. He tried to love me&mdash;I remember so
+many times now&mdash;and <i>that</i> makes me cry!&mdash;how he tried to love me! He
+was so glad to see me when I got home from Europe&mdash;but he never knew
+anything that happened to me. I told you once before that when I had
+pneumonia and nearly died Mother kept it from him because he was on a
+big case. It was all like that&mdash;always. He never knew.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton broke in, his voice uncertain, his face horrified: &#8220;Lydia, I
+cannot let you go on! you are unfair&mdash;you shock me. You are morbid! I
+knew your father intimately. He loved you beyond expression. He would
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_276" id="pg_276">276</a></span>have done anything for you. But his profession is an exacting one. Put
+yourself in his place a little. It is all or nothing in the law&mdash;as in
+business.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;When you bring children into the world, you expect to have them cost
+you some money, don&#8217;t you? You know you mustn&#8217;t let them die of
+starvation. Why oughtn&#8217;t you to expect to have them cost you thought,
+and some sharing of your life with them, and some time&mdash;real time, not
+just scraps that you can&#8217;t use for business?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As the doctor faced her, open-mouthed and silent, she went on, still
+dry-eyed, but with a quaver in her voice that was like a sob: &#8220;But, oh,
+the worst of my blame is for myself! I was a blind, selfish,
+self-centered egotist. I could have changed things if I had only tried
+harder. I am paying for it now. I am paying for it!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She took her child up in her arms and bent over the dark silky hair. She
+whispered, &#8220;It&#8217;s not that I have lost my father. I never had a
+father&mdash;but you!&#8221; She put out her hand and pressed the doctor&#8217;s hard.
+&#8220;And my poor father had no daughter.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She set the child on the floor with a gesture almost violent, and cried
+out loudly, breaking for the first time her cheerless calm, &#8220;And now it
+is too late!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Ariadne turned her rosy round face to her mother&#8217;s, startled, almost
+frightened. Lydia knelt down and put her arms about the child. She
+looked solemnly into her godfather&#8217;s eyes, and, as though she were
+taking a great and resolute oath, she said, &#8220;But it is not too late for
+Ariadne.&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_277" id="pg_277">277</a></span>
+<a name="A_HINT_FROM_CHILDHOOD_10013" id="A_HINT_FROM_CHILDHOOD_10013"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XXVI</p>
+<p class="l c">A HINT FROM CHILDHOOD</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>As the spring advanced and Judge Emery&#8217;s widow recovered a little
+strength, it became apparent that life in Endbury, with its
+heartbreaking associations, would be intolerable to her. In anxious
+family councils many futile plans were suggested, but they were all
+brushed decisively away by the unexpected arrival from Oregon of the
+younger son of the family.</p>
+
+<p>One day in May, a throbbingly sunshiny day, full of a fierce hot vigor
+of vitality, Lydia was with her mother in the Melton&#8217;s darkened parlor.
+As so often, the two women had been crying and now sat in a weary
+lethargy, hand in hand. There came a step on the porch, in the hall, and
+in the doorway stood a tall stranger. Lydia looked at him blankly, but
+her mother gave a cry and flung herself into his arms.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve come to take you home with me, Momma dear,&#8221; he said quietly, using
+the old name for her, which had been banished from the Emery household
+since Lydia&#8217;s early childhood. The sound of it went to her heart.</p>
+
+<p>The newcomer smiled at her over his mother&#8217;s head. It was her father&#8217;s
+smile, the quaint, half-wistful, humorous smile, which had seemed so
+incongruous on the Judge&#8217;s powerful face. &#8220;I&#8217;m your brother Harry,
+little Lyddie,&#8221; he said, &#8220;and I&#8217;ve come to take care of poor Momma.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>During all that summer it was a bitter regret to Lydia that she had seen
+her brother so short a time. He had decreed that the sooner his mother
+was taken away from Endbury, the better for her, and Mrs. Emery had
+clung to him, assenting passively to all he said, and peering
+constantly, with <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_278" id="pg_278">278</a></span>tear-blurred eyes, into his face to see again his
+astonishing resemblance to his father. They had left the day after his
+arrival.</p>
+
+<p>He had found time, however, to go out to Bellevue for a brief visit, to
+see Lydia&#8217;s home and her little daughter&mdash;Paul was away on a business
+trip&mdash;and the half-hour he spent there was one that Lydia never forgot.
+The tall, sunburned Westerner, with his kind, humorous eyes, his
+affectionate smile, his quaint, homely phrases, haunted the house for
+the rest of the summer. The time of his stay had been too breathlessly
+short for any serious talk. He had looked about at the big, handsome
+house with a half-mocking awe, inspected the &#8220;grounds&#8221; with a lively
+interest in the small horticultural beginnings Lydia had been able to
+achieve, told her she ought to see his two hundred acres of apple-trees;
+and for the time that was left before his trolley-car was due he played
+with his little niece and talked over her head to his sister.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She&#8217;s a dandy, Lyddie! She&#8217;s a jim-dandy of a little girl! She ought to
+come out and learn to ride straddle with her cousins. I got a boy about
+her age&mdash;say, they&#8217;d look fine together! He&#8217;s a towhead, like all the
+rest of &#8217;em&mdash;like their mother.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>For months afterward Lydia could close her eyes and see again the
+transfigured expression that had come over his face at the mention of
+his wife. &#8220;Talk about luck!&#8221; he said, after a moment&#8217;s pause, &#8220;there
+never was such luck as my getting Annie. Say, I wish you could know her,
+Lyddie. I tell you what&mdash;shoulder to shoulder, every minute, she&#8217;s stood
+up to things right there beside me for twelve years&mdash;Lord! It don&#8217;t seem
+more than six months when I stop to think about it. We had some hard
+sledding along at the first, but with the two of us pulling together&mdash;.
+She&#8217;s laughed at sickness and drought and bugs and floods. We&#8217;re all
+through that now, we&#8217;re doing fine; but, honest, it was worth it, to
+know Annie through and through as I do. There isn&#8217;t a thing about the
+business she doesn&#8217;t know as well as I do, and good reason why, too.
+We&#8217;ve worked it <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_279" id="pg_279">279</a></span>all out together. We&#8217;ve stuck close, we have. I&#8217;ve
+helped in the house and with the kids, and she&#8217;s come right out into the
+orchards with me. Share and share alike&mdash;that&#8217;s our motto.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He was silent a moment, caressing Ariadne&#8217;s dark hair gently, and
+reviewing the past with shining eyes. &#8220;Lord! Lord! It&#8217;s been a good
+life!&#8221; He turned to his sister with a smile. &#8220;Well, Lyddie, I expect you
+know something about it, too. You certainly are fixed fine, and
+everybody says you&#8217;ve married a splendid fellow.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia leaned forward eagerly, the impulse to unburden herself
+overwhelming. &#8220;Oh, Paul is the best man&mdash;&#8221; she began, &#8220;so true and kind
+and&mdash;and&mdash;pure&mdash;but Harry, we don&#8217;t&mdash;we can&#8217;t&mdash;his business&mdash;&#8221; She
+turned away from her brother&#8217;s too keen eyes and stared blindly at the
+wall, conscious of an ache in her heart like a physical hurt.</p>
+
+<p>Later, as they were talking of old memories, of Lydia&#8217;s childhood, Harry
+asked suddenly: &#8220;How&#8217;d you happen to give your little girl such a funny
+name?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was a question that had not been put to Lydia before. Her family had
+taken for granted that it was a feverish fancy of her sick-bed. She
+gazed at her brother earnestly, and was about to speak when he looked at
+his watch and stood up, glancing uneasily down toward the trolley track.
+It was too late&mdash;he would be gone so soon&mdash;like something she had
+dreamed. &#8220;Oh, I liked the name,&#8221; she said vaguely; adding, &#8220;Harry! I
+wish you could stay longer! There&#8217;s so much I should like to talk over
+with you. Oh, how I wish you&#8217;d never gone away.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You come out and see us,&#8221; he urged. &#8220;It&#8217;d do you good to get away from
+this old hole-in-the-ground! We live six miles from a neighbor, so you&#8217;d
+have to get along without tea-parties, but I bet Annie and the kids
+would give you a good time all right.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He kissed Lydia good-by, tossed Ariadne high in the air, and as he
+hurried down the driveway he called back over his shoulder: &#8220;Take good
+care of my little niece for me! I tell you it&#8217;s the kids that count the
+most!&#8221; It was a saying <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_280" id="pg_280">280</a></span>that filled ringingly for Lydia the long, hot
+days of the quiet summer that ensued. As for Ariadne, she did not for
+months stop talking of &#8220;nice, laughy, Unkie Hawy.&#8221; Her fluency of speech
+was increasing out of all proportion to her age.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever slow changes might be taking place in Lydia, went on silently
+and obscurely during that summer; but in the fall a new moral horizon
+burst upon her with the realization that she was again to become a
+mother. Another life was to be entrusted to her hands, to hers and
+Paul&#8217;s, and with the knowledge came the certainty that she must now
+begin to take some action to place her outer life more in accord with
+her new inner self. It would be the worst moral cowardice longer to
+evade the issue.</p>
+
+<p>Thus bravely did she exhort herself, and, though shrinking with
+apprehension at the very thought of entering upon a combat, attempted to
+shame herself into a little courage.</p>
+
+<p>When Paul heard of his wife&#8217;s hopes, he was enchanted. He cried out
+jubilantly: &#8220;I bet you it&#8217;ll be a boy this time!&#8221; and caught her to him
+in an embrace of affection so ardent that for a moment she glowed like a
+bride. She clung to him, happy in the warmth of feeling that,
+responsive, as always, to his touch, sprang up in her; and when in his
+good-natured, half-laughing, dictatorial way he made her lie down at
+once and promise to rest and be quiet, the boyish absurdity of his
+solicitude was sweet to her.</p>
+
+<p>He disappeared in answer to a telephone call, and she closed her eyes,
+savoring the pleasure of the little scene. How she needed Paul to
+reconcile her to life! How kind he really was! How good! His was the
+clean, honorable affection he had promised her on their wedding day. If
+she were to have any faith in the novels she read (like most American
+women of the leisure class, her education after her marriage consisted
+principally in reading the novels people talked about), if there was any
+truth in what she read in these stories, she felt she was blest far
+above most women in that there had come to her since her marriage no
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_281" id="pg_281">281</a></span>revelation of a hidden, unclean side to her husband&#8217;s nature.</p>
+
+<p>But Lydia had never felt herself closely touched by reading; it all
+seemed remote from her own life and problems. The sexual questions on
+which the plots invariably turned, which formed the very core and center
+of the lives of the various female characters, had, as a matter of fact,
+according to her honest observation of her acquaintances, a very
+subordinate place in the average American life about her. The marital
+unhappiness, estrangement, and fragmentary incompleteness in the circle
+she knew, over which she had grieved and puzzled, had nothing to do with
+what novels mean by &#8220;unfaithfulness.&#8221; The women of Endbury, unlike the
+heroines of fiction, did not fear that their husbands would fall in love
+with other women. The men of Endbury spent as little time in
+sentimentalizing over other men&#8217;s wives as they did over their own.</p>
+
+<p>She often wondered why writers did not treat of the other problems that
+beset her class&mdash;for instance, why it was only women in frontier
+conditions, like Harry&#8217;s wife, who could share in their husband&#8217;s lives;
+why nobody tried to change things so that they could do more of their
+part in the work of the world; why they could not have a share in the
+activities that gave other men, even little boys like Walter, so much
+closer knowledge of their husbands&#8217; characters than they, their wives,
+had. She had a dim notion, caught from stray indications in the
+magazines, that writers were considering such questions in books other
+than novels, but she had no idea how to search them out. The woman&#8217;s
+club to which she belonged was occupied with the art of Masaccio, who
+was, so a visitor from Chicago&#8217;s &aelig;sthetic circles informed them, the
+&#8220;latest thing&#8221; in art interests.</p>
+
+<p>She decided to ask Paul if he had heard of such books. She would ask him
+so many such questions in the new life that was to begin. They had been
+married more than three years and, so far as their relations to each
+other went, they were by no means inharmonious; but of the close-knit,
+deep-rooted intimacy of soul and mind that had been her dream <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_282" id="pg_282">282</a></span>of
+married life, there had not been even a beginning. Well, she told
+herself bravely, four years were but a short period in a lifetime. They
+were both so young yet. They could begin now.</p>
+
+<p>Paul came back from the telephone, note-book in hand, jotting down some
+figures. He smiled at her over the top of the book, and before he sat
+down to his desk he covered her carefully with a shawl, stroked her
+hair, and closed her eyes, saying with an absent tenderness: &#8220;There!
+take a nap, dear, while I finish these notes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He looked supremely satisfied with himself in the instant before he
+plunged into his calculations, and Lydia guessed that he was
+congratulating himself on having remembered her in the midst of
+absorbing business cares. She lay looking at him as he worked, her mind
+full of busy thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>Chiefly, as she went over their situation, she felt guilty to think how
+entirely apart from him all her real life was passed. The doubts, the
+racking spiritual changes, that had come to her, she had kept all to
+herself; and yet she could say honestly that her silence had been
+involuntary, instinctive, she fancied whimsically, like the reticence as
+to emotions that one keeps in the hurly-burly of a railway station. With
+tickets to be bought and trunks to be checked and time-tables to be
+consulted, it is absurd to try to communicate to a busy and preoccupied
+companion inexplicable qualms of soul-sickness. Any sensible woman&mdash;and
+Lydia, like most American women, had been trained by precept and example
+to desire above all things to be sensible and not emotionally
+troublesome to the men of her family&mdash;any sensible woman kept her
+thoughts to herself till the time came when she could talk them over
+without interfering with the business on hand.</p>
+
+<p>As she lay on the sofa and watched Paul&#8217;s face sharpen in his
+concentration, it occurred to her that the point of the whole matter was
+that for her and Paul the suitable and leisurely time for mutual
+discussion had never come. That was all! That was the whole trouble! It
+was not any inherent lack of common feeling between them. Simply, <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_283" id="pg_283">283</a></span>there
+was always business on hand with which she must not interfere.</p>
+
+<p>Paul lifted his head, his eyes half closed in a narrowed, speculative
+gaze upon some knotty point in his calculation. This long, sideways look
+happened to fall upon Lydia, and she turned cold before the profound
+unconsciousness of her existence in those eyes apparently fixed so
+piercingly upon her. She had a quick fancy that the blank wall of
+abstraction at which that vacant stare was directed really and palpably
+separated her husband from her.</p>
+
+<p>For a moment she wondered if she were growing like the women she had
+heard her father so unsparingly condemn&mdash;silly, childish, egotistic
+women who could not bear to have their husbands think of anything but
+themselves, who were jealous of the very business which earned them and
+their children a living. She acquitted herself of this charge proudly.
+She did not want all of Paul&#8217;s time; she wanted only some of it. And
+then, it was not to have him thinking of her, but with her about the
+common problems of their life; it was to think with him about the
+problems of his life; it was to have him help her by his sound,
+well-balanced, well-trained mind, which, so everyone said, worked such
+miracles in business; to have him help her through the thicket of
+confusion into which she was plunged by her inability to accept the
+plainly-marked road over which all of her world was pressing forward.
+Perhaps it was all right, she thought, the way Endbury people &#8220;did.&#8221; She
+asked nothing better than to be convinced that it was; she longed for a
+satisfying answer. But Paul did not even know she had doubts! How could
+he, she asked herself, exonerating him from blame. He was away so many
+hours of the day and days of the year; and when he came home he was so
+tired!</p>
+
+<p>It was characteristic of her temper that she had learned quickly and
+without bitterness the lesson every wife must learn, that neither
+tenderness nor delicate perceptions of shades of feeling can be extorted
+from a very tired or very preoccupied man. Masculine fatigue brings with
+it a <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_284" id="pg_284">284</a></span>healthy bluntness as to what is being expected in the way of
+emotional responsiveness, and men will not allow their sense of duty to
+spur their jaded affection to the point of exhaustion. Lydia noted this,
+felt that she could not with any show of reason resent it, since it
+showed a state of things as hard for Paul as for her; but she could not
+blind herself to the fact that the inevitable result was Paul&#8217;s complete
+ignorance of her real life. She felt herself to be so different from the
+girl he had married as scarcely to be recognizable, and yet there was no
+way by which he could have caught even a glimpse of the changes that had
+made her so. The short periods they spent with each other were
+necessarily more than filled by consultations about matters of household
+administration and plans for their social life, and about the way to
+spend the money that Paul earned. Paul was a very good-natured and
+consciously indulgent husband, but Lydia seldom emerged from an hour&#8217;s
+conversation with him without an uneasy feeling that she was not by any
+means getting out of the money he furnished her the largest amount
+possible of what he wanted; and this sensation was scarcely conducive to
+an expression of what was, after all, on her part nothing but a vague
+aspiration toward an ideal&mdash;an aspiration that came to her clearly only
+at times of great tranquillity and peace, when her mind was quite at
+rest.</p>
+
+<p>She was going around and around the treadmill of her familiar
+perplexities when a trifling incident, so small, so dependent on its
+framing of situation, accent, expression and gesture as scarcely to be
+recordable, gave her a sudden glimpse of quite another side to the
+matter. She was shocked into realizing that just as their way of life
+hid from Paul what was going on in her mind, so he also, in all
+probability, was rapidly changing without her knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>Paul finished his figuring, pushed the papers to one side with a sigh of
+fatigue, and turned his eyes thoughtfully on his wife. &#8220;That&#8217;s very good
+news of yours, Lydia dear, about the expected son and heir. But it&#8217;s
+rather a pity it didn&#8217;t come last winter, isn&#8217;t it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How so?&#8221; she asked.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_285" id="pg_285">285</a></span>&#8220;Why, you had to be out of things on account of being in mourning,
+anyhow. If this had happened the year your father died, you could have
+killed two birds with one stone, don&#8217;t you see?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia&#8217;s perception of a thousand reasonable explanations and excuses for
+this speech was so quick that it was upon her almost before she was
+aware of her resentment. She hurried to shut the door on a blighting new
+vision of her husband, by telling herself loudly that it was to be
+expected Paul should feel so; but, rapid as her loyal, wifely movement
+had been, she had felt a gust of hot revulsion against something in her
+husband which her affection for him forbade her to name.</p>
+
+<p>She could not put out of her mind, his look, his accent, his air of
+taking for granted that the speech was a natural one. The knowledge that
+Marietta would be too bewildered by her dwelling on the incident even to
+laugh at her, did not avail to free her of the heavy doubts that filled
+her. Was she mistaken in feeling that it indicated an alarming increase
+of materialism in Paul? She was really too fanciful, she told herself
+many times a day, surprised to find herself going over it again. Was it
+a mere chance remark&mdash;a little stone in the garden path&mdash;or was it the
+first visible outcropping of a stratum of unconquerable granite which
+grimly underlay all the flower beds of his good nature?</p>
+
+<p>The final impression on her mind was of a new motive for coming to a
+better, closer understanding with Paul about the fundamentals of their
+life. It had not occurred to her before, in spite of all her struggles
+&#8220;to be good,&#8221; as she put it to herself with her childlike na&iuml;vet&eacute;, that
+Paul might be needing her as much as she needed him! Spurred on by this
+new reason for breaking through the impalpable wall that separated their
+inner lives, she resolved that she would no longer let herself be
+dominated by the inconsequent multiplicity of the trifling incidents
+that filled their days.</p>
+
+<p>If she could only get close to Paul she was sure that all would be well.
+She made herself hope, with a brave belittling of the tangle that
+baffled her, that perhaps just one <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_286" id="pg_286">286</a></span>long, serious talk with Paul would
+be all that was needed. If she could just make Paul see what she saw, he
+could tell her how to set to work to remedy things. Paul was so clever.
+Paul was always so kind&mdash;when he saw!</p>
+
+<p>She began watching for a favorable opportunity for this long, serious
+talk, and as day after day fled past with only a glimpse of Paul
+desperately in a hurry in the morning and desperately tired at night,
+she was aware that her idea of the shape their life was taking had not
+exaggerated the extent of the broad flood of trivialities that separated
+them. Although the light laugh of her girlhood was rarer than before her
+marriage, life had not proved it to be the result of mere animal
+spirits. She still saw a great deal to laugh at, though sometimes it was
+tremulous laughter, carrying her to the edge of tears. And she often
+laughed to herself during these days at the absurd incongruity of what
+her heart was swelling to utter and the occasions on which she would
+have to speak.</p>
+
+<p>&#8217;Stashie was away, tending her aunt who was ill, away for an indefinite
+period, for Patsy&#8217;s steady wages quite sufficed to keep his cousin at
+home to care for his grandmother. Lydia sometimes feared the
+satisfaction she took in Patsy&#8217;s exemplary career was tinctured with
+vainglory for her own share in it, but, if so, she was punished for it
+now, since it was his very prosperity that took away from her the only
+steady domestic help she had ever been able to keep. She had now only a
+cook, a slatternly negress, with a gift for frying chicken and making
+beaten biscuit, and a total incapacity to conceive of any other activity
+as possible for her. Lydia had telephoned to the two employment agencies
+in Endbury and had been informed, by no means for the first time, that
+the supply of girls willing to work in the suburbs had entirely given
+out. For the time being there was simply not one to be had, so for the
+next few days Lydia, as well as Paul, was more than usually occupied;
+but her fixed intention to &#8220;talk things over with him&#8221; was not shaken.
+And yet&mdash;day after day went by with the routine unvaried&mdash;there was no
+time in the <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_287" id="pg_287">287</a></span>morning; in the evening Paul was too tired, and on Sundays
+there was always &#8220;Company,&#8221; it being practically their only time for
+daylight entertainment. Often Paul brought a business associate home for
+dinner; his family or hers came in; there were always callers in the
+afternoon; and they were usually invited out to supper or had guests
+themselves. It was the busiest day of the week.</p>
+
+<p>Ever since her father&#8217;s death she had been reviving in her mind, shocked
+to find them so few, her positive, personal recollections of him, and
+one of them now came back to her with a symbolic meaning. It had been a
+not uncommon occurrence in her childhood&mdash;a school picnic in the Black
+Rock woods; but this one stood out from all the others because, by what
+freak of chance she never knew, her father had gone with her instead of
+her mother. How proud she had been to have him there! How eagerly she
+had done the honors of the &#8220;entertainment&#8221;! How anxiously she had hoped
+that he would be pleased with the recitations, the songs, the May-day
+dance!</p>
+
+<p>One of the events of the day was to be the recitation of a fairy poem by
+a boy in one of the upper grades. He was to step out of the bushes in
+the character of a Brownie. The child had but just thrust his head
+through the leaves and begun, &#8220;I come to tell ye of a world ye mortals
+wot not of,&#8221; when a terrific clap of thunder overhead, followed by
+lightning, and rain in torrents, broke up the picnic and sent everyone
+flying for shelter to a near-by barn. Lydia had been very much afraid of
+thunderstorms, and she could still remember how, through all her
+confusion and terror, she had admired the fixity of purpose of the
+little Brownie, piteous in his drenched fairy costume, gasping out, as
+they ran along: &#8220;I come to tell ye&mdash;I come to tell ye, mortals&mdash;&#8221; to his
+scurrying audience.</p>
+
+<p>When they reached the barn and were huddled in the hay, wet and forlorn,
+and deafened by the peals of thunder, the determined little boy had
+stood up on a farm wagon on the barn floor, and the instant the storm
+abated began again with his insistent tidings of a world they wot not
+of. With <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_288" id="pg_288">288</a></span>her father&#8217;s death fresh in her mind, Lydia could not without
+a throb of pain recall his rare outburst of hearty laughter at the
+child&#8217;s perseverance. &#8220;I bet on that kid!&#8221; he had cried out, applauding
+vigorously at the end. &#8220;Who <i>is</i> he?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Paul Hollister,&#8221; she had told him, proud to know the bigger children.
+&#8220;He&#8217;s a very especial friend of mine.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, you can bet he&#8217;ll get on,&#8221; her father had assured her.</p>
+
+<p>The opening of the Brownie&#8217;s speech had come to be one of the humorous
+catchwords of the Emery household, to express firmness of purpose, and
+it was now with a mixture of laughter and tears that Lydia recalled the
+scene&mdash;the dusky interior of the barn, the sweet, strong scent of the
+hay, the absurd little figure grimacing and squeaking on the farm wagon,
+and her big, little-known, all-powerful father, one strong arm around
+her, protecting her from all she feared, as nothing in the world could
+protect her now.</p>
+
+<p>She was grown up now, and must learn how to protect her own children
+against dangers less obvious than thunderstorms. It was her turn now to
+insist on making herself heard above uproar and confusion. Her little
+Brownie playmate shamed her into action. She would not wait for a pause
+in the clatter of small events about Paul and herself; she would raise
+her voice and shout to him, if necessary, overcoming the shy reluctance
+of the spirit to speak aloud of its life.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_289" id="pg_289">289</a></span>
+<a name="LYDIA_REACHES_HER_GOAL_AND_HAS_HER_TALK_WITH_HER_HUSBAND_10430" id="LYDIA_REACHES_HER_GOAL_AND_HAS_HER_TALK_WITH_HER_HUSBAND_10430"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XXVII</p>
+<p class="l c">LYDIA REACHES HER GOAL AND HAS HER TALK WITH HER HUSBAND</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Paul was still asleep when Lydia opened her eyes one morning and said to
+herself with a little laugh, but quite resolutely: &#8220;I come to tell ye of
+a world ye mortals wot not of.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As she dressed noiselessly, she fortified herself with the thought that
+she had, in her nervousness, greatly overestimated the seriousness of
+her undertaking. There was nothing so formidable in what she meant to
+do, after all. She only wished to talk reasonably with her husband about
+how to avoid having their life degenerate into a mere campaign for
+material advancement. She did not use this phrase in her thoughts about
+the matter. She thought more deeply, and perhaps more clearly, than
+during her confused girlhood, but she had no learned or dignified
+expressions for the new ideas dawning in her. As she coiled her dark
+hair above her face, rather pale these days, like a white flower instead
+of the glowing rose it had been, she said to herself, like a child:
+&#8220;Now, I mustn&#8217;t get excited. I must remember that all I want is a chance
+for all of us, Paul and the children and me, to grow up as good as we
+can, and loving one another the most for the nicest things in us and not
+because we&#8217;re handy stepping-stones to help one another get on. And we
+can&#8217;t do that if we don&#8217;t really put our minds to it and make that the
+thing we&#8217;re trying hardest to do. The other things&mdash;the parties and
+making money and dressing better than we can really afford to&mdash;they&#8217;re
+only all right if they don&#8217;t get to seeming the things to look out for
+first. We must find out how to keep them second.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_290" id="pg_290">290</a></span>A golden shaft of winter sunshine fell on Paul&#8217;s face. He opened his
+eyes and yawned, smiling good-naturedly at his wife. Lydia summoned her
+courage and fairly ran to the bed, sitting down by him and taking his
+strong hand in hers.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, you india-rubber ball!&#8221; he cried in humorous despair at her. &#8220;Don&#8217;t
+you know a woman with your expectations oughtn&#8217;t to go hurling herself
+around that way?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I know&mdash;I&#8217;m too eager always,&#8221; she apologized. &#8220;But, Paul, I&#8217;ve been
+waiting for a nice quiet time to have a long talk with you about
+something that&#8217;s troubling me, and I just decided I wouldn&#8217;t wait
+another minute.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul patted her cheek. He was feeling very much refreshed by his night&#8217;s
+sleep. He smiled at his young wife again. &#8220;Why, fire away, Lydia dear.
+I&#8217;m no ogre. You don&#8217;t have to wait till I&#8217;m in a good temper, do you?
+What is it? More money?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, no, <i>no</i>!&#8221; She repudiated the idea so hotly that he laughed, &#8220;Well,
+you can&#8217;t scare me with anything else. What&#8217;s up?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia hesitated, distracted, now that her chance had come, with the
+desire to speak clearly. &#8220;Paul dear, it&#8217;s very serious, and I want you
+to take it seriously. It may take a great effort to change things, too.
+I&#8217;m very unhappy about the way we are&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A wail from Ariadne&#8217;s room gave warning that the child had wakened, as
+she not infrequently did, terrified by a bad dream. Lydia fled in to
+comfort her, and later, when she came back, leading the droll little
+figure in its pink sleeping-drawers, Paul was dressing with his usual
+careful haste. He stopped an instant to laugh at Ariadne&#8217;s face of
+determined woe and tossed her up until an unwilling smile broke through
+her pouting gloom. Then he turned to Lydia, as to another child, and
+rubbed his cheek on hers with a boyish gesture. &#8220;Now, you other little
+forlornity, what&#8217;s the matter with you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia warmed, as always, at the tenderness of his tone, <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_291" id="pg_291">291</a></span>though she
+noticed with an inward laugh that he continued buttoning his vest as he
+caressed her and that his eyes wandered to the clock with a wary
+alertness. &#8220;Perhaps you&#8217;d better wait and tell me at the table,&#8221; he went
+on briskly. &#8220;I&#8217;m all ready to go down.&#8221; He pulled his coat on with his
+astonishing quickness, and ran downstairs.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia put Ariadne into her own bed, telling the docile little thing to
+stay there till Mother came back for her, and followed Paul, huddling
+together the remnants of her resolution which looked very wan in the
+morning light. Breakfast was not ready; the table was not even set, and
+when she went out into the kitchen she was met by a heavy-eyed cook,
+moving futilely about among dirty pots and pans and murmuring something
+about a headache. Lydia could not stop then to investigate further, but,
+hurrying about, managed to get a breakfast ready for Paul before his
+first interest in the morning paper had evaporated enough to make him
+impatient of the delay.</p>
+
+<p>He fell to with a hearty appetite as soon as the food was set before
+him, not noticing for several moments that Lydia&#8217;s breakfast was not yet
+ready. When he did so, he spoke with a solicitous sharpness: &#8220;Lydia, you
+need a guardian! You ought to eat as a matter of duty! I bet half your
+queer notions come from your just pecking around at any old thing when
+I&#8217;m not here to keep track of you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He poured out another cup of coffee for himself as he spoke.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, dear; I know, I do. I will,&#8221; Lydia assured him, with her quick
+acquiescence to his wishes. &#8220;But this morning Mary is sick, or
+something, and I got yours first.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul spoke briefly, with his mouth full of toast: &#8220;If you were more
+regular in the way you run the house, and insisted on never varying
+the&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But I was afraid you would be late,&#8221; said Lydia. It was the daily
+terror of her life.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I <i>am</i> late now,&#8221; he told her, with his good-humored insistence on
+facts. &#8220;I&#8217;ve missed the 7:40, and I&#8217;ve just time to catch the next one
+if I hurry. Do you happen <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_292" id="pg_292">292</a></span>to know, dear, where I put that catalogue
+from Elberstrom and Company? The big red book with the picture of a
+dynamo on the cover. I was looking over it last night, and Heaven knows
+where I may have dropped it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The opinion as to the proper answer to a speech like this was one of the
+sharply marked lines of divergence between Madeleine Lowder and her
+brother&#8217;s wife. &#8220;Soak him one when you get a chance, Lydia,&#8221; she was
+wont to urge facetiously, and her advice in the present case would
+unhesitatingly have been to answer as acrimoniously as possible that if
+he were more regular in the way he handled such things his wife would
+have to spend less time ransacking the house looking for them. But in
+spite of such practical and experienced counsel, Lydia was scarcely
+conscious of refraining from the entirely justifiable and entirely
+futile customary recriminations, and she was as unaware as Paul of the
+vast amount of embittering domestic friction which was spared them by
+her silence. She had some great natural advantages for the task of
+creating a better domestic life at which she was now so eagerly setting
+herself, and one of them was this incapacity to resent petty injustices
+done to herself. She was handicapped in any effort by her utter lack of
+intellectual training and by a natural tendency to mental confusion, but
+her lack of small vanities not only spared her untold suffering, but
+added much to her singleness of aim.</p>
+
+<p>She now went about searching for the catalogue, finally finding it in
+the library under the couch. When she came back to the dining-room she
+saw Paul standing up by the table, wiping his mouth. Evidently he was
+ready to start. How absurd she had been to think of talking seriously to
+him in the morning!</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mary brought your breakfast in,&#8221; he said nodding toward an untidy tray.
+&#8220;I hate to seem to be finding fault all the time, but really her breath
+was enough to set the house on fire! Can&#8217;t you keep her down to moderate
+drinking?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ll try,&#8221; said Lydia.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_293" id="pg_293">293</a></span>Paul took the catalogue from her hand and reached for his hat. They
+were in the hall now. &#8220;Good-by, Honey,&#8221; he said, kissing her hastily and
+darting out of the house.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia had but just turned back to the dining-room when he opened the
+door and came in again, bringing a gust of fresh winter air with him.
+&#8220;Say, dear, you forgot about something you wanted to tell me about. I&#8217;ve
+got eight minutes before the trolley, so now&#8217;s your chance. What is it?
+Something about the plumbing?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In the dusky hall Lydia faced him for a moment in silence, with so
+singular an expression on her face that he looked apprehensive of some
+sort of scene. Then she broke out into breathless, quavering laughter,
+whose uncertainty did not prevent Paul from great relief at her apparent
+change of mood. &#8220;Never mind,&#8221; she said, leaning against the newel-post,
+&#8220;I&#8217;ll tell you&mdash;I&#8217;ll tell you some other time.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He kissed her again, and she felt that it was with a greater tenderness
+now that he no longer feared a possibly disagreeable communication from
+her.</p>
+
+<p>After he had gone, she thought loyally, putting things in the order of
+importance she had been taught all her life, &#8220;Well, it <i>is</i> hard for him
+to have perplexities at home and not to be able to give the freshest and
+best of himself to business.&#8221; It was not until later, as she was
+dressing Ariadne, that she swung slowly back to her new doubt of that
+view of the problem.</p>
+
+<p>Ariadne was in one of her most talkative moods, and was describing at
+great length the dream that had frightened her so. There was a hen with
+six little chickens, she told her mother, and one of them was as big&mdash;as
+big&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, dear; and what did the big little chicken do?&#8221; Lydia laced up the
+little shoes, on her knees before the small figure, her mind whirling.
+&#8220;That was just the trouble, she couldn&#8217;t make it seem right any more,
+that Paul&#8217;s best and freshest should <i>all</i> go to making money and none
+to a consideration of why he wished to make it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, Ariadne, and it flew over the house, and then?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_294" id="pg_294">294</a></span>She began buttoning the child&#8217;s dress, and lost herself in ecstasy over
+the wisps of soft curls at the back of the rosy neck. She dropped a
+sudden kiss on the spot, in the midst of Ariadne&#8217;s narrative, and the
+child squealed in delighted surprise. Lydia was carried away by one of
+her own childlike impulses of gayety, and burrowed bear-like, growling
+savagely, in the soft flesh. Ariadne doubled up, shrieking with
+laughter, the irresistible laughter of childhood. Lydia laughed in
+response, and the two were off for one of their rollicking frolics. They
+were like a couple of kittens together. Finally, &#8220;Come, dear; we must
+get our breakfasts,&#8221; said Lydia, leading along the little girl, still
+flushed and smiling from her play.</p>
+
+<p>Her passion for the child grew with Ariadne&#8217;s growth, and there were
+times when she was tempted to agree in the unspoken axiom of those about
+her, that all she needed was enough children to fill her heart and hands
+too full for thought; but sometimes at night, when Paul was away and she
+had the little crib moved close to her bed, very different ideas came to
+her in the silent hours when she lay listening to the child&#8217;s quick,
+regular breathing. At such times, when her mind grew very clear in the
+long pause between the hurry of one day and the next, she had rather a
+sort of horror in bringing any more lives into a world which she could
+do so little to make ready for them. Ariadne was here, and, oh! She must
+do something to make it better for her! Her desire that Ariadne should
+find it easier than she to know how to live well, rose to a fervor that
+was a prayer emanating from all her being. Perhaps she was not clever or
+strong enough to know how to make her own life and Paul&#8217;s anything but a
+dreary struggle to get ahead of other people, but somehow&mdash;somehow,
+Ariadne must have a better chance.</p>
+
+<p>Something of all this came to her mind in the reaction from her frolic,
+as she established the child in her high-chair and sat down to her own
+cold breakfast; but she soon fell, instead, to pondering the question of
+Mary in the kitchen. She had not now that terror of a violent scene
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_295" id="pg_295">295</a></span>which had embittered the first year of her housekeeping, but she felt a
+qualm of revulsion from the dirty negress who, as she entered the
+kitchen, turned to face her with insolent eyes. It seemed a plague-spot
+in her life that in the center of her home, otherwise so carefully
+guarded, there should be this presence, come from she shuddered to think
+what evil haunts of that part of Endbury known as the &#8220;Black Hole.&#8221; She
+thought, as so many women have thought, that there must be something
+wrong in a system that made her husband spend all his strength laboring
+to make money so much of which was paid, in one form or another, to this
+black incubus. She thought, as so many other women have thought, that
+there must be something wrong with a system of life that meant that,
+with rare exceptions, such help was all that could be coaxed into doing
+housework; but Lydia, unlike the other women she knew, did not&mdash;could
+not&mdash;stop at the realization that something was wrong. Some irresistible
+impulse moved her to try at least to set it right.</p>
+
+<p>On this occasion, however, as she faced the concrete result of the
+system, she was too languid, and felt too acutely the need for sparing
+her strength, to do more than tell her cook briefly that if she did not
+stop drinking she would be dismissed. Mary made no reply, looking down
+at her torn apron, her face heavy and sullen. She prepared some sort of
+luncheon, however, and by night had recovered enough so that with
+Lydia&#8217;s help the dinner was eatable.</p>
+
+<p>Paul was late to dinner, and when he sat down heavily at the table
+Lydia&#8217;s heart failed her at the sight of his face, fairly haggard with
+fatigue. She kept Ariadne quiet, the child having already learned that
+when Daddy came home from the city there must be no more noisy play; and
+she served Paul with a quickness that outstripped words. She longed
+unspeakably to put on one side forever all her vexing questions and
+simply to cherish and care for her husband physically. He had so much to
+burden him already&mdash;all he could carry. But she had been so long
+bringing herself to the point of resolution in the matter, she had so
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_296" id="pg_296">296</a></span>firmly convinced herself that her duty lay along that dark and obscure
+path, that she clung to her purpose.</p>
+
+<p>After dinner, when she came downstairs from putting Ariadne to bed, she
+found him already bent over the writing-table, covering a sheet of paper
+with figures. &#8220;You remember, Paul, I have something to talk over with
+you,&#8221; she began, her mouth twitching in a nervous smile.</p>
+
+<p>He pushed the papers aside, and looked up at her with a weary
+tenderness. &#8220;Oh, yes; I do remember. We might as well have it over now,
+I suppose. Wait a minute, though.&#8221; He went to the couch, piled the
+pillows at one end, and lay down, his hands clasped under his head. &#8220;I
+might as well rest myself while we talk, mightn&#8217;t I?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, yes, yes, poor dear!&#8221; cried Lydia remorsefully. &#8220;I wish I didn&#8217;t
+<i>have</i> to bother you!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I wish so, too,&#8221; he said whimsically. &#8220;Sure it&#8217;s nothing you can&#8217;t
+settle yourself?&#8221; He closed his eyes and yawned.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t <i>want</i> to settle it myself!&#8221; cried Lydia with a rush, seeing an
+opening ready-made. &#8220;That&#8217;s the point. I want you to be in it! I want
+you to help me! Paul, I&#8217;m sure there&#8217;s something the matter with the way
+we live&mdash;I don&#8217;t like it! I don&#8217;t see that it helps us a bit&mdash;or anyone
+else&mdash;you&#8217;re just killing yourself to make money that goes to get us
+things we don&#8217;t need nearly as much as we need more of each other! We&#8217;re
+not getting a bit nearer to each other&mdash;actually further away, for we&#8217;re
+both getting different from what we were without the other&#8217;s knowing
+how! And we&#8217;re not getting nicer&mdash;and what&#8217;s the use of living if we
+don&#8217;t do that? We&#8217;re just getting more and more set on scrambling along
+ahead of other people. And we&#8217;re not even having a good time out of it!
+And here is Ariadne&mdash;and another one coming&mdash;and we&#8217;ve nothing to give
+them but just this&mdash;this&mdash;this&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She had poured out her accumulated, pent-up convictions with passion,
+feeling an immense relief that she had at last expressed herself&mdash;that
+at last she had made a breach in <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_297" id="pg_297">297</a></span>the wall that separated her from Paul.
+At the end, as she hesitated for a phrase to sum up her indictment of
+their life, her eyes fell on Paul&#8217;s face. Its expression turned her
+cold. She stopped short. He did not open his eyes, and the ensuing
+silence was filled with his regular, heavy breathing. He had fallen
+asleep.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia folded her hands in her lap and sat looking at him intently. In
+the tumult of her emotions there was neither bitterness nor resentment.
+But a cloud had passed between her and the sun. She sat there a long
+time, her face very pale and grave. After a time she laid her hand on
+her husband&#8217;s shoulder. She felt an intolerable need to feel him at
+least physically near.</p>
+
+<p>The telephone bell rang distinctly in the hall. Paul bounded to his
+feet, wide awake.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I bet that&#8217;s the Washburn superintendent!&#8221; he cried. &#8220;He said they
+might call me up here if they came to a decision.&#8221; He had apparently
+forgotten Lydia&#8217;s presence, or else the fact that she knew nothing of
+his affairs. He disappeared into the hall, his long, springy, active
+step resounding quickly as he hurried to the instrument. Lydia heard his
+voice, decisive, masterful, quiet, evidently dictating terms of some
+bargain that had been hanging in the balance. When he came back, his
+head was up, like a conqueror&#8217;s. &#8220;I&#8217;ve got their contract!&#8221; he told her,
+and then, snatching her up, he whirled her about, shouting out a &#8220;yip!
+yip! yip!&#8221; of triumph.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of herself Lydia&#8217;s chin began to tremble. She felt a stinging
+in her eyes. Paul saw these signs of emotion and was
+conscience-stricken. &#8220;Oh, I&#8217;m a black-hearted monster!&#8221; he cried, in
+burlesque contrition. &#8220;I must have dropped off just as you began your
+spiel. But, Lydia, if <i>you&#8217;d</i> taken that West Virginia trip, you&#8217;d go to
+sleep if the Angel Gabriel were blowing his horn! I was gone three days,
+you know, and, honest, I didn&#8217;t have three hours&#8217; consecutive sleep!
+Don&#8217;t be too mad at me. Start over again. I&#8217;ll listen to every word,
+honest to gracious I will. I feel as waked up as a fighting cock,
+anyhow, by <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_298" id="pg_298">298</a></span>this Washburn business! To think I&#8217;ve pulled that off at
+last!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m not mad at <i>you</i>, Paul,&#8221; said Lydia, trying to speak steadily, and
+holding with desperate resolution to her purpose of communicating with
+her husband. &#8220;I&#8217;m mad at the conditions that made you so sleepy you
+couldn&#8217;t keep awake! All I had to say is that I don&#8217;t like our way of
+life&mdash;I don&#8217;t see that it&#8217;s making us any better, and I want Ariadne&mdash;I
+want our children to have a better one. I want you to help me make it
+so.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul stared at her, stupefied by this attack on axioms. &#8220;Good gracious,
+my dear! What are you talking about? &#8216;Our way of life!&#8217; What do you
+mean? There&#8217;s nothing peculiar about the way we live. Our life is just
+like everybody else&#8217;s.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia burned with impatience at the appearance of this argument, beyond
+which she had never been able to induce her mother or Marietta to
+advance a step. She cried out passionately: &#8220;What if it is! If it&#8217;s not
+the right kind of life, what difference does it make if everybody&#8217;s life
+<i>is</i> like it!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The idea which her excitement instantly suggested to Paul was
+reassuring. Before Ariadne came, he remembered, Lydia had had queer
+spells of nervous tension. He patted her on the shoulder and spoke in
+the tone used to soothe a nervous horse. &#8220;There, Lydia! There, dear!
+Don&#8217;t get so wrought up! Remember you&#8217;re not yourself. You do too much
+thinking. Come, now, just curl up here and put your head on my&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia feared greatly the relaxing influence of his caressing touch. If
+once he put forth his personal magnetism, it would be so hard to go on.
+She drew away gently. &#8220;<i>Can</i> anybody do too much thinking, Paul? The
+trouble must be that I&#8217;m not thinking right. And, oh, I want to, so!
+<i>Please</i> help me! Everybody says you have such a wonderful head for
+organization and for science&mdash;if I were a dynamo that wasn&#8217;t working,
+you could set me right!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_299" id="pg_299">299</a></span>Paul laughed, and made another attempt to divert her. &#8220;I couldn&#8217;t if
+the dynamo looked as pretty and kissable as you do!&#8221; He was paying very
+little attention to what she said. He was only uncomfortable and uneasy
+to see her so white and trembling. He wished he had proposed taking her
+out for the evening. She had been having too dull a time. He ought to
+see that she got more amusement. They said that comic opera now running
+in town was very funny.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Paul, listen to me!&#8221; she was crying desperately as these thoughts went
+through his head. &#8220;Listen to me, and look honestly at the way we&#8217;ve been
+living since we were married, and you <i>must</i> see that something&#8217;s all
+wrong. I never see you&mdash;never, never, do you realize that? except when
+you&#8217;re in a raging hurry in the morning or tired to death at night, and
+when I&#8217;m just as tired as you are, so all we can do is to go to bed so
+we can get up in the morning and begin it all over again. Or else we
+tire ourselves out one degree more by entertaining people we don&#8217;t
+really like&mdash;or rather people about whose real selves we don&#8217;t know
+enough to know whether we like them or not&mdash;we have them because they&#8217;re
+influential, or because everybody else entertains them, or because they
+can help us to get on&mdash;or can be smoothed over so they won&#8217;t hinder our
+getting on. And there&#8217;s no prospect of doing anything different from
+this all the days of our life&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But, look-y here, Lydia, that&#8217;s the way things <i>are</i> in this world! The
+men have to go away the first thing in the morning&mdash;and all the rest of
+what you say! <i>I</i> can&#8217;t help it! What do you come to me about it for?
+You might as well break out crying because I can&#8217;t give you eyes in the
+back of your head. That&#8217;s the way things are!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia made a violent gesture of unbelief. &#8220;That&#8217;s what everybody&#8217;s been
+telling me all my life&mdash;but now I&#8217;m a grown woman, with eyes to see, and
+something inside me that won&#8217;t let me say I see what I don&#8217;t&mdash;<i>and I
+don&#8217;t see that</i>! I don&#8217;t <i>believe</i> it has to be so. I can&#8217;t believe it!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_300" id="pg_300">300</a></span>Paul laughed a little impatiently, irritated and uneasy, as he always
+was, at any attempt to examine too closely the foundations of existing
+ideas. &#8220;Why, Lydia, what&#8217;s the matter with you? You sound as though
+you&#8217;d been reading some fool socialist literature or something.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You know I don&#8217;t read anything, Paul. I never hear about anything but
+novels. I never have time for anything else, and very likely I couldn&#8217;t
+understand it if I read it, not having any education. That&#8217;s one thing I
+want you to help me with. All I want is a chance for us to live together
+a little more, to have a few more thoughts in common, and, oh! to be
+trying to be making something better out of ourselves for our children&#8217;s
+sake. I can&#8217;t see that we&#8217;re learning to be anything but&mdash;you, to be an
+efficient machine for making money, I to think of how to entertain as
+though we had more money than we really have. I don&#8217;t seem really to
+know you or live with you any more than if we were two guests stopping
+at the same hotel. If socialists are trying to fix things better, why
+shouldn&#8217;t we have time&mdash;both of us&mdash;to read their books; and you could
+help me know what they mean?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul laughed again, a scornful, hateful laugh, which brought the color
+up to Lydia&#8217;s pale face like a blow. &#8220;I gather, then, Lydia, that what
+you&#8217;re asking me to do is to neglect my business in order to read
+socialist literature with you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His wife&#8217;s rare resentment rose. She spoke with dignity: &#8220;I begged you
+to be serious, Paul, and to try to understand what I mean, although I&#8217;m
+so fumbling, and say it so badly. As for its being impossible to change
+things, I&#8217;ve heard you say a great many times that there are no
+conditions that can&#8217;t be changed if people would really try&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Good heavens! I said that of <i>business</i> conditions!&#8221; shouted Paul,
+outraged at being so misquoted.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, if it&#8217;s true of them&mdash;No; I feel that things are the way they are
+because we don&#8217;t really care enough to have them some other way. If you
+really cared as much <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_301" id="pg_301">301</a></span>about sharing a part of your life with me&mdash;really
+sharing&mdash;as you do about getting the Washburn contract&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her indignant and angry tone, so entirely unusual, moved Paul, more than
+her words, to shocked protest. He looked deeply wounded, and his accent
+was that of a man righteously aggrieved. &#8220;Lydia, I lay most of this
+absurd outbreak to your nervous condition, and so I can&#8217;t blame you for
+it. But I can&#8217;t help pointing out to you that it is entirely uncalled
+for. There are few women who have a husband as absolutely devoted as
+yours. You grumble about my not sharing my life with you&mdash;why, I <i>give</i>
+it to you entire!&#8221; His astonished bitterness grew as he voiced it. &#8220;What
+am I working so hard for if not to provide for you and our child&mdash;our
+children! Good Heavens! What more <i>can</i> I do for you than to keep my
+nose on the grindstone every minute. There are limits to even a
+husband&#8217;s time and endurance and capacity for work.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia heard a frightened roaring in her ears at this unexpected turn to
+the conversation. Paul had never spoken so to her before. This was a
+very different tone from his irritation over defective housekeeping. She
+was as horrified as he over the picture that he held up with such
+apparently justified indignation, the picture of her as a querulous and
+ungrateful wife. Why, Paul was looking at her as though he hated her!
+For the first time in her married life, she conceived the possibility
+that she and Paul might quarrel, really seriously quarrel, about
+fundamental things. The idea terrified her beyond words. Her mind,
+undisciplined and never very clear, became quite confused, and only her
+long preparation and expectation of this talk enabled her to keep on at
+all, although now she could but falter ahead blindly. &#8220;Why, Paul
+dear&mdash;don&#8217;t look at me so! I never dreamed of <i>blaming</i> you for it! It&#8217;s
+just because I want things better for you that I&#8217;m so anxious to&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You haven&#8217;t noticed me complaining any, have you?&#8221; put in Paul grimly,
+still looking at her coldly.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_302" id="pg_302">302</a></span>&#8220;&mdash;It&#8217;s because I can&#8217;t bear to see you work so hard to get me things
+I&#8217;d ever so much rather go without than have you grow so you can&#8217;t see
+anything but business&mdash;it seems all twisted! I&#8217;d rather you&#8217;d pay an
+assistant to go off on these out-of-town trips, and we&#8217;d get along on
+less money&mdash;live in a smaller house, and not entertain.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, Lydia, you talk like a child! How can I talk business with you when
+you have such crazy, impractical ideas? It&#8217;s not just the money an
+assistant would cost! Either he&#8217;d not be so good as I, and then I&#8217;d lose
+my reputation for efficiency and my chance for promotion, or else he
+<i>would</i> be as good and he&#8217;d get the job permanently and divide the field
+with me. A man has to look a long way ahead in business!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But, Paul, what if he <i>did</i> divide the field with you? What if you
+don&#8217;t get ahead of everybody else, if you&#8217;d have time and strength to
+think of other things more&mdash;you said the other day that you weren&#8217;t
+sleeping well any more, and you&#8217;re losing your taste for books and music
+and outdoors&mdash;why, I&#8217;d rather live in four rooms right over your office,
+so that you wouldn&#8217;t have that hour lost going and coming&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul broke in with a curt scorn: &#8220;Oh, Lydia! What nonsense! Why don&#8217;t
+you propose living in a tent, to save rent?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why I would&mdash;I would in a minute if I thought it would make things any
+better!&#8221; Lydia cried with a desperate simplicity.</p>
+
+<p>At this crowning absurdity, Paul began to laugh, his ill-humor actually
+swept away by his amusement at Lydia&#8217;s preposterous fancies. It was too
+foolish to try to reason seriously with her. He put his hand on her
+shining dark hair, ruffling it up like a teasing boy. &#8220;I guess you&#8217;d
+better leave the economic status of society alone, Lydia. You might
+break something if you go charging around it so fierce.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A call came from the darkness of the hall: &#8220;Mis&#8217; Hollister!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_303" id="pg_303">303</a></span>&#8220;It&#8217;s Mary,&#8221; said Paul; &#8220;probably you forgot to give her any
+instructions about breakfast, in your anxiety about the future of the
+world. If you can calm down enough for such prosaic details, do tell her
+for the Lord&#8217;s sake not to put so much salt in the oatmeal as there was
+this morning.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia found the negress with her wraps on, glooming darkly, &#8220;Mis&#8217;
+Hollister, I&#8217;m gwine to leave,&#8221; she announced briefly.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia felt for a chair. Mary had promised faithfully to stay through the
+winter, until after her confinement. &#8220;What&#8217;s the matter, Mary?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I cyant stay in no house wheah de lady says I drinks.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You will stay until&mdash;until I am able to be about, won&#8217;t you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My things is gone aready,&#8221; said Mary, moving heavily toward the door,
+&#8220;and I&#8217;m gwine now.&#8221; As she disappeared, she remarked casually, &#8220;I
+didn&#8217;t have no time to wash the supper dishes. Good-by.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s the matter with Mary?&#8221; called Paul.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia went back to him, trying to smile. &#8220;She&#8217;s gone&mdash;left,&#8221; she
+announced.</p>
+
+<p>Paul opened his eyes with a look of keen annoyance. &#8220;You can&#8217;t break in
+a new cook <i>now</i>!&#8221; he said. &#8220;She can&#8217;t go now!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She&#8217;s gone,&#8221; repeated Lydia wearily. &#8220;I don&#8217;t know how anybody could
+make her stay.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul got up from the couch with his lips closed tightly together, and,
+sitting down in a straight chair, took Lydia on his knee as though she
+were a child. &#8220;Now, see here, my wife, you mustn&#8217;t get your feelings
+hurt if I do some plain talking for a minute. You&#8217;ve been telling me
+what you think about things, and now it&#8217;s my turn. And what <i>I</i> think is
+that if my dear young wife would spend more time looking after her own
+business she&#8217;d have fewer complaints to make about my doing the same.
+The thing for you to do is to accept conditions as they are and do your
+best in them&mdash;and, really, Lydia, make your best a little better.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_304" id="pg_304">304</a></span>Lydia was on the point of nervous tears from sheer fatigue, but she
+clung to her point with a tenacity which in so yielding a nature was
+profoundly eloquent. &#8220;But, Paul, if everybody had always settled down
+and accepted conditions, and never tried to make them better&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s a difference between conditions that have to be accepted and
+those that can be changed,&#8221; said Paul sententiously.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia tore herself away from him and stood up, trembling with
+excitement. She felt that they had stumbled upon the very root of the
+matter. &#8220;But who&#8217;s to decide which our conditions are?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul caught at her, laughing. &#8220;I am, of course, you firebrand! Didn&#8217;t
+you promise to honor and obey?&#8221; He went on with more seriousness, a
+tender, impatient, condescending seriousness: &#8220;Now, Lydia, just stop and
+think! Do you, can you, consider this a good time for you to try to
+settle the affairs of the universe&mdash;still all upset about your father&#8217;s
+death, and goodness knows what crazy ideas it started in your head&mdash;and
+with an addition to the family expected! <i>And</i> the cook just left!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But that&#8217;s the way things always are!&#8221; she protested. &#8220;That&#8217;s life.
+There&#8217;s never a time when something important hasn&#8217;t just happened or
+isn&#8217;t just going to happen, you have to go right ahead, or you
+never&mdash;why, Paul, I&#8217;ve waited for two years for a really good chance for
+this talk with you&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Thank the Lord!&#8221; he ejaculated. &#8220;I hope it&#8217;ll be another two before you
+treat me to another evening like this. Oh, pshaw, Lydia! You&#8217;re morbid,
+moping around the house too much&mdash;and your condition and all. Wait till
+you&#8217;ve got another baby to play with&mdash;I don&#8217;t remember you had any
+doubts of anything the first six months of Ariadne&#8217;s life. You ought to
+have a baby a year to keep you out of mischief! Just you wait till you
+can entertain and live like folks again. In the meantime you hustle
+around and keep busy and you won&#8217;t be so bothered with thinking and
+worrying.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_305" id="pg_305">305</a></span>Unknowingly, they had drawn again near to the heart of their
+discussion. Unknowingly Lydia stood before the answer from her husband,
+the final statement that she wished to hear.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But to hustle and keep busy&mdash;that&#8217;s good only so long as you keep at
+it. The minute you stop&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul&#8217;s answer was an epoch in her thought.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>Don&#8217;t stop!</i>&#8221; he cried, surprised at her overlooking so obvious a
+solution.</p>
+
+<p>At this bullet-like retort, Lydia shivered as though she had been
+struck. She turned away with a blind impulse for flight. Her gesture
+brought her husband flying to her. He took her forcibly in his arms.
+&#8220;What the devil&mdash;what is the matter <i>now</i>?&#8221; he asked, praying for
+patience. She hung unresponsive in his grasp. &#8220;What&#8217;s the matter?&#8221; he
+repeated.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;ve just told me a horrible thing,&#8221; she whispered; &#8220;that life is so
+dreadful that the only way we can get through it at all is by never
+looking at&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul actually shook her in his exasperation. &#8220;Gee whiz, Lydia! you&#8217;re
+enough to drive a man to drink! I never told you any such melodramatic
+nonsense. I told you straight horse sense, which is that if you took
+more interest in your work, in the work that every woman of your class
+and position has to do, you&#8217;d have less time to think foolishness&mdash;and
+your husband would have an easier life.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Her trembling lips opened to speak again, but he closed them with a firm
+hand. &#8220;And now, as your natural guardian, I&#8217;m not going to let you say
+another word about it. You dear little silly! However did you get us so
+wound up! Blessed if I have any idea what it&#8217;s all been about!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He was determined to end the discussion. He was relieved beyond
+expression that he had been able to get through it without saying
+anything unkind to his wife. He never meant to do that. He now went on,
+shaking a finger at her:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You listen to me, Lydia-Emery-that-was! Do you know what we are going
+to do? We&#8217;re going out into that <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_306" id="pg_306">306</a></span>howling desolation that Mary has
+probably left in the kitchen, and we&#8217;re going to see if we can find a
+couple of clean glasses, and we&#8217;re going to have a glass of beer apiece
+and a ham sandwich and a piece of the pie that&#8217;s left over from dinner.
+You don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s the matter with you, but I do! You&#8217;re starved!
+You&#8217;re as hungry as you can be, aren&#8217;t you now?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia had sunk into a chair during this speech and was now regarding him
+fixedly, her hands clasped between her knees. At his final appeal to
+her, she closed her eyes. &#8220;Yes,&#8221; she said with a long breath; &#8220;yes, I
+am.&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_307" id="pg_307">307</a></span>
+<a name="THE_AMERICAN_MAN_11065" id="THE_AMERICAN_MAN_11065"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XXVIII</p>
+<p class="l c">&#8220;THE AMERICAN MAN&#8221;</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A ripple from the surging wave of culture which, for some years, had
+been sweeping over the women&#8217;s clubs of the Middle West, began to
+agitate the extremely stationary waters of Endbury social life. The
+Women&#8217;s Literary Club felt that, as the long-established intellectual
+authority of the town, it should somehow join in the new movement. The
+organization of this club dated back to a period now comparatively
+remote. Mrs. Emery, who had been a charter member, had never been more
+genuinely puzzled by Dr. Melton&#8217;s eccentricities than when he had
+received with a yell of laughter her announcement that she had just
+helped to form a &#8220;literary club,&#8221; which would be the &#8220;most exclusive
+social organization&#8221; in Endbury. It had lived up to this expectation. To
+belong to it meant much, and both Paul and Flora Burgess had been
+gratified when, on her mother&#8217;s resignation, Lydia had been elected to
+the vacant place.</p>
+
+<p>This close corporation, composed of ladies in the very inner circle,
+felt keenly the stimulating consciousness of its importance in the
+higher life of the town, and had too much civic pride to allow Endbury
+to lag behind the other towns in Ohio. Columbus women, owing to the
+large German population of the city, were getting a reputation for being
+musical; Cincinnati had always been artistic; Toledo had literary
+aspirations; Cleveland went in for civic improvement. The leading
+spirits of the Woman&#8217;s Literary Club of Endbury cast about for some
+other sphere of interest to annex as their very own property.</p>
+
+<p>They were hesitating whether to undertake a campaign of <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_308" id="pg_308">308</a></span>municipal
+house-cleaning, or to devote themselves to the study of the sonnet form
+in English verse, when an unusual opportunity for distinction opened
+before them. The daughter of the club&#8217;s president was married to a
+professor in the State University of Michigan, and on one of her visits
+home she suggested that her mother&#8217;s club invite to address it the
+Alliance Fran&ccedil;aise lecturer of that year. He had to come out to Ann
+Arbor, anyhow&mdash;Ann Arbor was not very far from Endbury&mdash;not far, that
+is, as compared with the journey the lecturer would have made from
+Columbia and Harvard to &#8220;Michigan State.&#8221; One of the club husbands was a
+railroad man and, maybe, could give them transportation. Frenchmen were
+always anxious to make all the money they could&mdash;she was sure that M.
+Buisine could be induced to come for a not extravagant honorarium. Why
+should not Endbury go in for cosmopolitanism? That certainly would be
+something new in Ohio.</p>
+
+<p>And so it was arranged for an afternoon for the first week in December,
+a very grand &#8220;house-darkened-and-candle-lighted performance,&#8221; as
+Madeleine Lowder labeled this last degree of Endbury ceremonious
+elaboration. It was held at the house of Paul&#8217;s aunt, so that,
+naturally, Lydia could by no means absent herself. Madeleine came for
+her, and together they took Ariadne to Marietta&#8217;s house and left her
+there for safe-keeping. Lydia was intensely conscious, under her
+sister&#8217;s forbearing silence, that Marietta had never been asked to join
+the Woman&#8217;s Literary Club. Even the jaunty Madeleine was aware of a
+tension in the brief conversation over the child&#8217;s head, and remarked as
+she and Lydia walked away from the house: &#8220;Well, really now, <i>was</i> that
+the most tactful thing in the world?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What else could I do?&#8221; asked Lydia, at her wit&#8217;s end. &#8220;I don&#8217;t dare
+leave Ariadne with those awful things from the employment agencies, and
+&#8217;Stashie&#8217;s not coming back till next week.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_309" id="pg_309">309</a></span>&#8220;Oh, <i>she&#8217;s</i> coming again, is she?&#8221; commented her companion. &#8220;Well,
+that&#8217;ll mean lots of fun watching Paul squirm. But don&#8217;t mind him,
+Lydia.&#8221; Madeleine was one of the women who prided herself on her loyal
+sense of solidarity among her sex. &#8220;If he says a word, you poke him one
+in the eye. Keep her till after your confinement, anyhow. A woman ought
+to be allowed to run her house without any man butting in. We let them
+alone; they ought to let us.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There never was a person in the world, Lydia thought, in whom marriage
+had made less difference than in Paul&#8217;s sister. She was exactly the same
+as in her girlhood. Lydia wondered at her with an ever-growing
+amazement. The enormous significance of the marriage service, the
+mysteries of the dual existence, her new responsibilities,&mdash;they all
+seemed non-existent. Paul said approvingly that Madeleine knew how to
+get along with less fuss than any woman he ever saw. Her breezy high
+spirits were much admired in Endbury, and her good humor and prodigious
+satisfaction with life were considered very cheerfully infectious.</p>
+
+<p>The two women had reached Madame Hollister&#8217;s house while Madeleine was
+expounding her theory of matrimony, and now took their places in the
+throng of extremely well-dressed women sitting on camp chairs, the rows
+of which filled the two parlors. The lecturer with the president of the
+club, occupied a dais at the other end of the room. He was a tall, ugly
+man, with prominent blue eyes, gray hair upstanding in close-cropped
+military stiffness, and a two-pronged grizzled beard. He was looking
+over his audience with a leisurely smiling scrutiny that roused in Lydia
+a secret resentment.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He&#8217;s very distinguished looking, isn&#8217;t he?&#8221; whispered Madeleine. &#8220;So
+different! And <i>cool</i>! I&#8217;d like to see Pete Lowder sit up there to be
+stared at by all this gang of women.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, he&#8217;s probably used to it,&#8221; said her neighbor on the <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_310" id="pg_310">310</a></span>other side.
+&#8220;They say he&#8217;s spoken before any number of women&#8217;s clubs. He does two a
+day sometimes. He&#8217;s seen lots of American society women before now.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Madeleine stared at him curiously. &#8220;I wonder what he thinks of us! I
+wonder! I&#8217;d give anything to know!&#8221; she said. She repeated this
+sentiment in varying forms several times.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia wondered why Madeleine should care so acutely about the opinion of
+a stranger and a foreigner, and finally, in her na&iuml;ve, straightforward
+way, she put this question to her. Madeleine was not one of the many who
+evaded Lydia&#8217;s questions, or answered them only with a laugh at their
+oddity. She was very straightforward herself and generally had a very
+clear idea of what underlay any action or feeling on her part. But this
+time her usual rough-and-ready methods of analysis seemed at fault.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, because,&#8221; she said indefinitely. &#8220;Don&#8217;t you always want to know
+what men are thinking of you?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Men that know something about me, maybe,&#8221; Lydia amended.</p>
+
+<p>Madeleine laughed. &#8220;<i>They&#8217;re</i> the ones that don&#8217;t think at all, one way
+or the other,&#8221; she reminded her sister-in-law.</p>
+
+<p>The president of the club rose. Her introduction of the speaker was
+greeted with cordial, muted applause from gloved hands. There was a
+scraping of chairs, a stir of draperies, and little gusts of delicate
+perfumes floated out, as the hundred or more women settled themselves at
+the right angle, all their keen, handsome, nervous faces lifted to the
+speaker in a pleasant expectancy. Not only were they agreeably aware
+that they were forming part of one of the most recherch&eacute; events of
+Endbury&#8217;s social life, but they were remembering piquant rumors of M.
+Buisine&#8217;s sensational attacks on American materialism. The afternoon
+promised something more interesting than their usual programme of
+home-made essays and papers.</p>
+
+<p>Their expectation was not disappointed. In fluent English, apparently
+smooth with long practice on the same <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_311" id="pg_311">311</a></span>theme, he wove felicitous and
+forceful elaborations on the proverb relating to people who are absent
+and the estimation in which they are held by those present. He had seen
+in America, he said, everything but the American man. He had seen
+hundreds and thousands of women as well-dressed as Parisiennes (and, as
+a rule, much more expensively), as self-possessed as English great
+ladies, as cultivated as Russian princesses, as universally and
+variously handsome as visions in a painter&#8217;s dream&mdash;(&#8220;He&#8217;s not afraid of
+laying it on thick, is he?&#8221; whispered Madeleine with an appreciative
+laugh)&mdash;but, except for a few professors in college, he had seen no men.
+He had inquired for them everywhere and was told that he did not see
+them because he was a man of letters. If he had been the inventor of a
+new variety of railroad brake he would have seen millions. He was told
+that the men, unlike their wives, had no intellectual interests, had no
+clubs with any serious purposes, had no artistic aims, had no home life,
+no knowledge of their children, no interest in education&mdash;that, in
+short, they left the whole business of worthy living to their wives, and
+devoted themselves exclusively to the wild-beast joys of tearing and
+rending their business competitors.</p>
+
+<p>He gave many picturesque instances of his contention, he sketched
+several lively and amusing portraits of the one or two business men he
+had succeeded in running down; their tongue-tied stupefaction before the
+ordinary topics of civilization, their scorn of all &aelig;sthetic
+considerations; their incapacity to conceive of an intellectual life as
+worthy a grown man; the Stone-age simplicity with which they referred
+everything to savage cunning; their oblivion to any other standard than
+&#8220;success,&#8221; by which they meant possessing something that they had taken
+away by force from somebody else.</p>
+
+<p>It was indeed a very entertaining lecture, a most stimulating,
+interesting experience to the crowd of well-dressed women; although
+perhaps some of them found it a little long after the dining-room across
+the hall began to be filled <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_312" id="pg_312">312</a></span>with waiters preparing the refreshments and
+an appetizing smell of freshly-made coffee filled the air. Still, it was
+a lecture they had paid for, and it was gratifying to have it so full
+and conscientiously elaborated.</p>
+
+<p>The ideas promulgated were not startlingly new to them, since they had
+read magazine articles on &#8220;Why American Women Marry Foreigners&#8221; and
+similar analyses of the society in which they lived; but to have it said
+to one&#8217;s face, by a living man, a tall, ugly, distinguished foreigner,
+with the ribbon of the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole,&mdash;that brought
+it home to one! They nodded their beautifully-hatted heads at the truth
+of his well-chosen, significant anecdotes, they laughed at his sallies,
+they applauded heartily at the end when the lecturer sat down, the
+little smile, that Lydia found so teasing, still on his bearded lips.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, he hit things off pretty close, for a foreigner, didn&#8217;t he?&#8221;
+commented Madeleine cheerfully, gathering her white furs up to the
+whiter skin of her long, fair throat and preparing for a rush on the
+refreshment room. &#8220;He must have kept his eyes open pretty wide since he
+landed.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia did not answer, nor did she join in the stampede to the
+dining-room. She sat still, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, her
+eyes very bright and dark in her pale face. She was left quite alone in
+the deserted room. Across the hall was the loud, incessant uproar of
+feminine conversation released from the imprisonment of an hour&#8217;s
+silence. From the scraps of talk that were intelligible, it might have
+been one of her own receptions. Lydia heard not a mention of the
+opinions to which they had been listening. Apparently, they were
+regarded as an entertaining episode in a social afternoon. She listened
+intently. She looked across at the crowd of her acquaintances as though
+she were seeing them for the first time. In their midst was the tall
+foreigner, smiling, talking, bowing, drinking tea. He was being
+introduced in succession to all of his admiring auditors.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia rose to go and made her way to the dressing-room <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_313" id="pg_313">313</a></span>on the second
+floor for her wraps. As she returned toward the head of the stairs she
+saw a man&#8217;s figure ascending, and stood aside to let him pass. He bowed
+with an unconscious assurance unlike that of any man Lydia had ever
+seen, and looked at her pale face and burning eyes with some curiosity.
+A faint aroma of delicate food and fading flowers and woman&#8217;s
+sachet-powder hung about him. It was the lecturer, fresh from his throng
+of admirers. Lydia&#8217;s heart leaped to a sudden valiant impulse,
+astonishing to her usual shyness, and she spoke out boldly, hastily:
+&#8220;Why did you tell us all that about our men? Didn&#8217;t you think any of us
+would realize that they are good&mdash;our men are&mdash;good and pure and kind!
+Didn&#8217;t you think we&#8217;d know that anything that&#8217;s the matter with them
+must be the matter with us, too? They had mothers as well as fathers!
+It&#8217;s not fair to blame everything on the men! It&#8217;s not fair, and it
+can&#8217;t be true! We&#8217;re all in together, men and women. One can&#8217;t be
+anything the other isn&#8217;t!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She spoke with a swift, grave directness, looking squarely into the
+man&#8217;s eyes, for she was as tall as he. They were quite alone in the
+upper hall. From below came the clatter of the talking, eating women.
+The Frenchman did not speak for a moment. For the first time the faint
+smile on his lips died away. He paid to Lydia the tribute of a look as
+grave as her own. Finally, &#8220;Madame, you should be French,&#8221; he told her.</p>
+
+<p>The remark was so unexpected an answer to her attack that Lydia&#8217;s eyes
+wavered. &#8220;I mean,&#8221; he went on in explanation, &#8220;that you are acting as my
+wife would act if she heard the men of her nation abused in their
+absence. I mean also that I have delivered practically this same lecture
+over thirty times in America before audiences of women, and you are the
+first to&mdash;Madame, I should like to know your husband!&#8221; he exclaimed with
+another bow.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My husband is like all other American men,&#8221; cried Lydia sharply,
+touched to the quick by this reference. &#8220;It is because he is that I&mdash;&#8221;
+She broke off with her gesture <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_314" id="pg_314">314</a></span>of passionate unresignation to her lack
+of fluency. Already the heat of the impulse that had carried her into
+speech was dying away. She began to hesitate for words.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I can&#8217;t say what I mean&mdash;you must know it, anyhow! You blame the
+fathers for leaving all the bringing-up of the children to their wives,
+and yet you point out that the sons keep growing up all the time to
+be&mdash;to be&mdash;to be all you blame their fathers for being! If we women were
+half so&mdash;fine&mdash;as you tell us, why haven&#8217;t we changed things?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The foreigner made a vivid, surprised, affirmatory gesture. &#8220;Exactly!
+exactly! exactly, Madame!&#8221; he cried. &#8220;It is the question I have asked
+myself a thousand times: Why is it&mdash;why is it that women so
+strong-willed, so unyielding in the seeking what they desire, why is it
+that apparently they have no influence on the general fabric of the
+society in&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Perhaps it is,&#8221; said Lydia unsparingly, her latent anger coming to the
+surface again and furnishing her fluency, &#8220;perhaps it is because people
+who see our faults don&#8217;t help us to correct them, but flatter us by
+telling us we haven&#8217;t any, and all the time think ill of us behind our
+backs.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The lecturer began to answer with aplomb and an attempt at graceful
+cynicism: &#8220;Ah, Madame, put yourself in my place! I am addressing
+audiences of women. Would it be tactful to&mdash;&#8221; but under Lydia&#8217;s honest
+eyes he faltered, stopped, flushed darkly under his heavy beard, up over
+his high, narrow forehead to the roots of his gray hair. He swallowed
+hard. &#8220;Madame,&#8221; he said, &#8220;you have rebuked me&mdash;deservedly. I&mdash;I demand
+your pardon.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, you needn&#8217;t mind me,&#8221; said Lydia humbly; &#8220;my opinion doesn&#8217;t amount
+to anything. I oughtn&#8217;t to talk, either. I don&#8217;t <i>do</i> anything different
+from the rest&mdash;the women downstairs, I mean. I can only see there&#8217;s
+something wrong&mdash;&#8221; She found the other&#8217;s gaze into her troubled eyes so
+friendly that she was moved to cry out to <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_315" id="pg_315">315</a></span>him, all her hostility gone:
+&#8220;What <i>is</i> the trouble, anyhow?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The lecturer flushed again, this time touched by her appeal. &#8220;I proudly
+put at your service any reflections I have made&mdash;as though you were my
+daughter. I have a daughter about your age, who is also married&mdash;who
+faces your problems. Madame, you look fatigued&mdash;will you not sit down?&#8221;
+He led her to a sofa on one side of the hall and took a seat beside her.
+&#8220;Is not the trouble,&#8221; he began, &#8220;that the women have too much leisure
+and the men too little&mdash;the women too little work, the men too much?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, yes, yes, yes!&#8221; Lydia&#8217;s meditations had long ago carried her past
+that point; she was impatient at his taking time to state it. &#8220;But how
+can we change it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You cannot change it in a day. It has taken many years to grow. It has
+seemed to me that one way to change it is by using your leisure
+differently. Even those women who use their leisure for the best
+self-improvement have not used it well. Many of my countrymen say that
+the culture of American women is like a child&#8217;s idea of
+ornamentation&mdash;the hanging on the outside of all odd bits of broken
+finery. I have not found it always so. I have met many learned women
+here, many women more cultivated than my own wife. But listen, Madame,
+to the words of an old man. Culture is dust and ashes if the spiritual
+foundations of life are not well laid; and, believe me, it takes two, a
+man and a woman, to lay those foundations. It can not be done alone.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But how, how&mdash;&#8221; began Lydia impatiently.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In the only way that anything can be accomplished in this world, by
+working! Your women have not worked patiently, resolutely, against the
+desertion of their men. Worse&mdash;they have encouraged it! Have you never
+heard an American, woman say: &#8216;Oh, I can&#8217;t bear a man around the house!
+They are so in the way!&#8217; Or, &#8216;I let my husband&#8217;s business alone. I want
+him to let&mdash;&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He imitated an accent so familiar to Lydia that she winced. &#8220;Oh, don&#8217;t!&#8221;
+she said. &#8220;I see all that.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_316" id="pg_316">316</a></span>&#8220;You must find few to see with you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But how to change it?&#8221; She leaned toward him as though he could impart
+some magic formula to her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;With the men, work to have them share your problems&mdash;work to share
+theirs. Do not be discouraged by repeated failure. Defeat should not
+exist for the spirit. And, oh, the true way&mdash;you pointed it out in your
+first words. You have the training of the children. Their ideals are
+yours to make. A generation is a short&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>His face answered more and more the eager intentness of her own. He
+raised his hand with a gesture that underlined his next words: &#8220;But
+remember always, always, what Amiel says, that a child will divine what
+we really worship, and that no teaching will avail with him if we
+<i>teach</i> in contradiction to what we <i>are</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They were interrupted by a loud hail from the stairs. Madeleine Lowder&#8217;s
+handsome head showed through the balustrade, and back of her were other
+amused faces.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I started to look you up, Lydia,&#8221; she said, advancing upon them
+hilariously, &#8220;I thought maybe you weren&#8217;t feeling well, and then I saw
+you monopolizing the lion so that everybody was wondering where in the
+world he was, and you were so wrapped up that you never even noticed me,
+so I motioned the others to see what a demure little cat of a sister I
+have.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She stood before them at the end of this facetious explanation,
+laughing, frank, sure of herself, and as beautiful as a great rosy
+flower.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Your <i>sister</i>,&#8221; said the lecturer incredulously to Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;My husband&#8217;s sister,&#8221; Lydia corrected him, and presented the newcomer
+in one phrase.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Isn&#8217;t she a sly, designing creature, Mr. Buisine?&#8221; cried Madeleine, in
+her usual state of hearty enjoyment of her situation. &#8220;You haven&#8217;t met
+many as up-and-coming, have you now?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I do not know the meaning of your adjective, Mademoiselle; but it is
+true that I have met few like your brother&#8217;s wife.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_317" id="pg_317">317</a></span>&#8220;I&#8217;m not Mademoiselle!&#8221; Madeleine was greatly amused at the idea.</p>
+
+<p>The lecturer looked at her with a return to his enigmatic smile of the
+earlier afternoon. &#8220;I never saw a person who looked more unmarried than
+yourself, Mademoiselle,&#8221; he persisted.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, we American women know the secret of not looking married,&#8221; said
+Madeleine proudly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You do indeed,&#8221; said the Frenchman with the manner of gallantry. &#8220;All
+of you look unmarried.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia rose to go. The lecturer looked at her, his eyes softening, and
+made a silent gesture of farewell.</p>
+
+<p>He turned back to Madeleine. &#8220;But I <i>am</i>,&#8221; she assured him, pleased and
+flattered with the centering of their persiflage on herself. She made a
+gesture toward Lydia, disappearing down the stairs. &#8220;I&#8217;m as much married
+as <i>she</i> is!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>M. Buisine continued smiling. &#8220;That is quite, quite incredible,&#8221; he told
+her.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_318" id="pg_318">318</a></span>
+<a name="i_in_tragic_life_God_wot_No_villain_need_be_Passions_spin_the_ploti_11446" id="i_in_tragic_life_God_wot_No_villain_need_be_Passions_spin_the_ploti_11446"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XXIX</p>
+<table summary=""><tr><td align="left">&#8220;<i>... in tragic life, God wot,<br />No villain need be. Passions spin the plot.</i>&#8221;</td></tr></table>
+</div>
+
+<p>&#8220;Say, Lydia,&#8221; said Madeleine with her bluff good humor, coming into the
+house a few days after the French lecture, &#8220;say, I&#8217;m awfully sorry I
+told Paul! I never supposed he&#8217;d go and get mad. It was just my fool
+notion of being funny.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia was dusting the balustrade, her back to her visitor. She tingled
+all through at this speech, and for an instant went on with her work,
+trying to decide if she should betray the fact that she knew nothing of
+the incident to which Madeleine&#8217;s remark seemed to refer, or if she
+should, as she had done so many times already, conceal under a silence
+her ignorance of what her husband told other people. She never learned
+of matters pertaining to Paul&#8217;s profession except from chance remarks of
+his business associates. He had not even told her, until questioned,
+about his great inspiration for rearranging the territory covered in
+that region by his company; a plan that must have engrossed his thoughts
+and fired his enthusiasm during months of apparently common life with
+his wife. And Paul had been genuinely surprised, and a little put out at
+her desire to know of it.</p>
+
+<p>She decided that she dared not in this instance keep silent. She was too
+entirely in the dark as to what Madeleine had done. &#8220;I don&#8217;t know what
+you&#8217;re talking about, Madeleine,&#8221; she said, turning around, dust-cloth
+in hand, trying to speak casually.</p>
+
+<p>Her sister-in-law stared. &#8220;Didn&#8217;t Paul come home and give it to you? He
+looked as though he were going to.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_319" id="pg_319">319</a></span>Lydia&#8217;s heart sank in a vague premonition of evil. &#8220;Paul hasn&#8217;t said
+anything to me. Why in the world should he? Is it about &#8217;Stashie? She&#8217;s
+been back several days now, but I thought he hadn&#8217;t noticed her much.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, he <i>hasn&#8217;t</i> said anything, that&#8217;s a fact!&#8221; exclaimed Madeleine,
+with the frank implication in her voice that she had not before believed
+Lydia&#8217;s statement. &#8220;My, no! It&#8217;s not about &#8217;Stashie. It&#8217;s about the
+French lecturer.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia&#8217;s astonishment at this unexpected answer quite took away her
+breath. &#8220;<i>About the</i>&mdash;&#8221; she began.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, look-y here, it was this way,&#8221; explained Madeleine rapidly. &#8220;I
+told you I was only joking. I thought it would be fun to tease Paul
+about the mash you made on old What&#8217;s-his-name&mdash;about your sitting off
+on a sofa with him, and being so wrapped up you didn&#8217;t even notice when
+the whole gang of us came to look at you&mdash;and maybe I stretched it some
+about how you looked leaning forward and gazing into his eyes&mdash;&#8221; She
+broke off with a laugh, cheerfully unable to continue a serious attitude
+toward life. &#8220;Oh, never you mind! It does a married man good to make him
+jealous once in a while. Keeps &#8217;em from getting too stodgy and
+husbandy.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Jealous!&#8221; cried Lydia. &#8220;Paul jealous! Of me! Never!&#8221; Her certainty on
+the point was instant and fixed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, you&#8217;d ha&#8217; thought he was, if you&#8217;d seen him. I was jollying him
+along&mdash;we were in the trolley, going to Endbury. I had to take that
+early car so&#8217;s to keep a date with Briggs, and, oh, Lydia! that brown
+suit he&#8217;s making for me is a <i>dream</i>, simply a dream! He&#8217;s put a little
+braid, just the least little bit, along&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What did Paul say?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Paul? Oh, yes&mdash;How&#8217;d I get switched off onto Briggs? Why, Paul didn&#8217;t
+say <i>anything</i>; that was what made me see he wasn&#8217;t taking it right. He
+just sat still and listened and listened till it made me feel foolish. I
+thought he&#8217;d jolly me back, you know. He&#8217;s usually a great hand for
+that. And then when I looked at him I saw he looked as black as a
+thundercloud&mdash;that nasty look <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_320" id="pg_320">320</a></span>he has when he&#8217;s real mad. When we were
+children and he&#8217;d look that way, I&#8217;d grab up any old thing and hit him
+quick, so&#8217;s to get it in before he hit me. Well, I was awfully sorry,
+and I said, &#8216;Why, hold on a minute, Paul, let me tell you&mdash;&#8217; but he said
+he guessed I&#8217;d told him about enough, and before I could open my mouth
+he dropped off the car. We&#8217;d got in as far as Hayes Avenue. I wanted to
+explain, you know, that the Frenchman was old enough to be our
+<i>grandfather</i>!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;When did this happen?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, I don&#8217;t know; three or four days ago&mdash;why, Thursday, it must have
+been, for after I got through with Briggs I went on to that&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And this is Monday,&#8221; said Lydia; &#8220;four days.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>At the sight of her sister-in-law&#8217;s troubled eyes, Madeleine was again
+overcome with facile remorse. She clapped her on the shoulder
+hearteningly. &#8220;I&#8217;m awfully sorry, Lyd, but don&#8217;t you go being afraid of
+Paul. You&#8217;re too gentle with him, anyhow. A married woman can&#8217;t afford
+to be. You have to keep the men in their places, and you can&#8217;t do that
+if you don&#8217;t knock &#8217;em the side of the head once in so often. It&#8217;s good
+for &#8217;em. Honest! And about this, don&#8217;t you worry your head a minute.
+Like as not Paul&#8217;s forgot everything about it. He&#8217;d forget anything, you
+know he would, if an interesting job came up in business. And if he ever
+does say anything, you just laugh and tell him about old Thingamajig&#8217;s
+white hair and pop eyes, and he&#8217;ll laugh at the joke on himself.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia drew back with a gesture of extreme repugnance. &#8220;Don&#8217;t talk so&mdash;as
+though Paul could be so&mdash;so vulgar.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Madeleine laughed. &#8220;I guess you won&#8217;t find a man in <i>this</i> world that
+isn&#8217;t &#8216;vulgar&#8217; that way.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, I&#8217;ve been <i>married</i> to Paul for years&mdash;he wouldn&#8217;t think I&mdash;no
+matter what you told him, he couldn&#8217;t conceive of my&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Lowder, as usual, found her brother&#8217;s wife very diverting. &#8220;Of your
+doing a little hand-holding on the <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_321" id="pg_321">321</a></span>side? Oh, go on! Flirting&#8217;s no
+crime! And you did&mdash;honest to goodness, you did, turn that old fellow&#8217;s
+head. You ought to have seen the way he looked after you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia cut her off with a sharp &#8220;Oh, <i>don&#8217;t</i>!&#8221; She was now sitting, still
+absently grasping the dust-cloth.</p>
+
+<p>Madeleine stood for a moment looking at her in a meditative silence
+rather unusual for her. &#8220;Lydia, you don&#8217;t look a bit well,&#8221; she said
+kindly. &#8220;Are you still bothered with that nausea?&#8221; She sat down by her
+sister-in-law and put her arms around her with an impulse of
+affectionate pity that almost undid Lydia, always so helplessly
+responsive to tenderness. &#8220;What&#8217;s the matter, Lyd?&#8221; Madeleine went on.
+&#8220;Something&#8217;s not going just right. Are you scared about this second
+confinement? Is Paul being horrid about something? You just take my
+advice, and if you want anything out of him, you fight for it. Nobody
+gets anything in this world if they don&#8217;t put up a fight for it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia began to say that there were some things which lost their value if
+obtained by fighting, but suddenly she stopped her faltering words, drew
+a long breath, and laid her head on the other&#8217;s shoulder. More than
+wifely loyalty kept her silent. All her lifelong experience of Madeleine
+crystallized into a certainty of her limitations, and with this
+certainty came the realization that Madeleine stood for all the circle
+of people about her. Lydia had learned one lesson of life. She knew, she
+now knew intensely, that there was no cry by which she could reach the
+spiritual ear of the warm human beings so close to her in the body. She
+knew there was no language in which she could make intelligible her
+travail of soul. In the moment the two women sat thus, she renounced,
+once for all, any hope of outside aid in her perplexities. They lay
+between herself and Paul. She could hope to find expression and relief
+for them only through that unique privilege of marriage, utter intimacy.</p>
+
+<p>She kissed her husband&#8217;s sister gently, comforted somewhat by the mere
+fact of her presence. &#8220;You&#8217;re good to <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_322" id="pg_322">322</a></span>bother about me, Maddely,&#8221; she
+said, using a pet name of their common childhood. &#8220;I guess I&#8217;m not
+feeling very well these days. But that&#8217;s to be expected.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, I tell you what, I wouldn&#8217;t be so patient about it as <i>you</i> are!&#8221;
+cried the other wife. &#8220;It&#8217;s simply horrid to have all this a second
+time, and Ariadne so little yet. It&#8217;s <i>mean</i> of Paul.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She continued voicing an indignant sympathy with her usual energy. Lydia
+looked at her with a vague smile. At the first words of the childless
+woman, she had been filled with the mother-hunger which gave savor to
+her life during those days. As Madeleine went on, she sat unheeding,
+lost in a fond impatience to feel the tiny body on her knees, the downy
+head against her cheek. Her arms ached with emptiness. For an instant,
+so vivid was her sense of it, the child seemed to be there, in her arms.
+She felt the eager tug of the soft lips at her breast. She looked
+down&mdash;&#8220;Well, anyhow, you poor, dear thing! I hope you will bottle-feed
+this one! It would be just a little <i>too</i> much if they made you nurse
+it!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia did not even attempt a protest. Her submissive, entire acceptance
+of spiritual isolation seemed an answer to many of the conflicting
+impulses which had hitherto distracted her. She wished that she could
+reassure Madeleine by telling her that she would never again make
+another &#8220;odd&#8221; speech to her. She renounced all common life except the
+childlike, harmless, animal-like one of mutual material wants, and this
+renunciation brought her already a peace which, though barren, was
+infinitely calming after her former struggling uncertainties. &#8220;How did
+those waists come out that you sent to the cleaner&#8217;s, Madeleine?&#8221; she
+asked, in a bright, natural tone of interest. &#8220;I hope the blue one
+<i>didn&#8217;t</i> fade.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Madeleine reported to her husband that Lydia had seemed in one of her
+queer notional moods at first, but cheered up afterward and talked more
+&#8220;like folks,&#8221; and seemed more like herself than she had since her father
+died. They had a real good visit together she said, and she began to
+think <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_323" id="pg_323">323</a></span>she could get some good satisfaction out of having Lydia for a
+neighbor, after all.</p>
+
+<p>But after Lydia was alone, there sprang upon her the terror of living on
+such terms with Paul. No, no! Never that! It would be dying by inches!
+Beaten back to this last inner stronghold of the dismantled castle of
+her ideals of life, she prepared to defend it with the energy of
+desperation.</p>
+
+<p>She did not believe Madeleine&#8217;s story, or, at least, not her
+interpretation of Paul&#8217;s attitude, but she felt a dreary chill at his
+silence toward her. It seemed to her that their marriage ought to have
+brought her husband an irresistible impulse to have in all their
+relations with each other a perfect openness. She resolved that she
+would begin to help him to that impulse that very day; now, at once.</p>
+
+<p>When Paul came in, he seemed abstracted, and went directly upstairs to
+pack a satchel, stating with his usual absence of explanatory comment
+that he was called to Evanston on business. He ate his dinner rather
+silently, glancing furtively at the paper. Only at the
+breakfast-table&mdash;such was their convention&mdash;did he allow himself to
+become absorbed in the news.</p>
+
+<p>Ariadne prattled to her mother of her adventures in the kitchen, where
+Patsy O&#8217;Hern, &#8217;Stashie&#8217;s cousin Patsy, was visiting her, and he made
+Ariadne a &#8220;horse out of a potato and toothpicks for legs, and a little
+wagon out of a matchbox, and a paper doll to sit and drive, and Patsy
+was perfectly loverly, anyhow, and he was making such a lot of money
+every day, and, oh, he made the wheels out of potato, too, as round as
+could be he cut it, and he gave every cent of it to his grandmother and
+she loved him as much as she did &#8217;Stashie, and wasn&#8217;t it good to have
+&#8217;Stashie back, and&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Paul frowned silently over his pie.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Come, dear; it&#8217;s seven o&#8217;clock and bedtime,&#8221; said Lydia, leading the
+little girl away.</p>
+
+<p>When she came back she noticed by the clock that she had been gone
+almost half an hour. She was surprised to <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_324" id="pg_324">324</a></span>see Paul still in the
+dining-room, as though he had not stirred since she left him. He was
+sitting in an attitude of moody idleness, singular with him, his elbows
+on the table, his chin in his hands. He looked desperately, tragically
+tired.</p>
+
+<p>No inward monitor gave any warning to Lydia of what the next few moments
+were to be in her life. She crossed the room quickly to her husband,
+feeling a great longing to be close to him.</p>
+
+<p>As she did so, a rattling clatter of tin was heard from the kitchen,
+followed by a shout of roaring laughter. Something in Paul&#8217;s tense face
+snapped. He started up, overturning his chair. &#8220;Oh, <i>damn</i> that idiot!&#8221;
+he cried.</p>
+
+<p>The door opened behind them. &#8217;Stashie stood there, her red hair hidden
+in a mass of soft dough that was beginning to ooze down over her
+perspiring, laughing face. &#8220;I just wanted to show you what a comycal
+thing happened, Mis&#8217; Hollister,&#8221; she began, in her familiar way.
+&#8220;&#8217;Twould make a pig laugh, now! I&#8217;d begun my bread dough, and put it on
+a shelf, an&#8217;&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, get out of here!&#8221; Paul yelled at her furiously. &#8220;And less noise out
+of you in the kitchen!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He slammed the door shut on her retreat, and turned to Lydia with a face
+she did not recognize. The room grew black before her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I suppose you still prefer that dirty Irish slut to my wishes,&#8221; he
+said.</p>
+
+<p>His words, his accent, the quality of his voice, were the zigzag of
+lightning to his wife. The storm burst over her head like thunder.</p>
+
+<p>She was amazed to feel a great wave of anger surge up in her, responsive
+to his own. She cried, in outraged resentment at his injustice: &#8220;You
+know very well&mdash;&#8221; and stopped, horrified at the passion which rose
+clamoring to her lips.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I know very well that my home is the last place where my wishes are
+consulted,&#8221; said Paul, catching her up.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_325" id="pg_325">325</a></span>&#8220;I will dismiss &#8217;Stashie to-morrow,&#8221; returned Lydia with a bitter,
+proud brevity.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;re rather slow to take a hint. How long has she been with us? As
+for your saying that you can&#8217;t get anyone else, and can&#8217;t keep house
+decently as other decent people do, there isn&#8217;t a word of truth in it!
+You can do whatever you care enough about to try to do. You didn&#8217;t make
+an incompetent mess of taking care of the baby as you did out of that
+disgusting dinner party!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was the first time he had ever spoken outright to her of that
+experience. Lydia was transfixed to hear the poison of the memory as
+fresh in his voice as though it had happened yesterday.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m simply not worth putting yourself out for,&#8221; went on Paul, turning
+away and picking up his overcoat. &#8220;I&#8217;m only a common, ignorant,
+materialistic beast of an American husband!&#8221; He added in an insulting
+tone: &#8220;I suppose you&#8217;d like two husbands; one to earn your living for
+you, and one to talk to about your soul and to exchange near-culture
+with!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He had not looked at Lydia as he poured out this sudden flood of
+acrimony, but at her quick, fierce reply, he faced her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;d like <i>one</i> husband,&#8221; she cried white with indignation.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And I&#8217;d like a wife!&#8221; Paul flashed back at her hotly. &#8220;A wife that&#8217;d be
+a help and not a hindrance to everything I want to do&mdash;a wife that&#8217;d be
+loyal to me behind my back, and not listen to sneaking foreigners
+telling her that she&#8217;s a misunderstood martyr&mdash;<i>martyr</i>!&#8221; His sense of
+injury exalted him. &#8220;Yes; all you American wives are martyrs, all right,
+I must say. While your husbands are working like dogs to make you money,
+you&#8217;re sitting around with nothing to do but drink tea and listen to a
+foreigner who tells you&mdash;in summer time, while you&#8217;re enjoying the cool
+breeze out here on a&mdash;maybe you think a dynamo-room&#8217;s a funny place to
+be, with the thermometer standing at&mdash;what am I <i>doing</i> when I&#8217;m away
+from you? Enjoying <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_326" id="pg_326">326</a></span>myself, no doubt. Maybe you think it&#8217;s enjoyment to
+travel all night on a&mdash;maybe you think it&#8217;s nice to make yourself
+conspicuous with another man that&#8217;s been abusing your&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia could hear no more for a loud roaring in her ears. She knew then
+the blackest moment of her life&mdash;a sickening scorn for the man before
+her. Madeleine had been right, then. They were of the same blood. His
+sister knew him better than&mdash;she, his wife, his wedded wife, was not to
+be spared the pollution of having her husband&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I didn&#8217;t take any stock in Madeleine&#8217;s nasty insinuations about your
+flirting with him, of course, but it showed me what you&#8217;ve been thinking
+about me all this time I&#8217;ve been working like a&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia drew the first conscious breath since the beginning of this
+nightmare. The earth was still under her feet, struck down to it though
+she was. The roaring in her ears stopped. She heard Paul say:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Maybe you think I&#8217;m made of iron! I tell you I&#8217;m right on my nerves
+every minute! Dr. Melton threatens me with a breakdown every time I see
+him!&#8221; There was a sort of angry pride in this statement. &#8220;I can&#8217;t sleep!
+I&#8217;m doing ten men&#8217;s work! And what do I get from you? Any rest? Any
+quiet? Why, these first years, when you might have made things easier
+for me by taking all other cares off my mind and leaving me free for
+business&mdash;they&#8217;ve actually been harder because of you!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He thrust his arms into his overcoat and caught up his satchel. &#8220;I
+haven&#8217;t wanted anything so hard to give! Good Lord! All I asked for was
+a well-kept house where I could invite my friends without being ashamed
+of it, and to live like other decent people!&#8221; He moved to the door, and
+put one hand, one strong, thin hand, on the knob. With the unearthly
+clearness of one in a terrible accident, Lydia noticed every detail of
+his appearance. He was flushed, a purple, congested color, singularly
+unlike his usual indoor pallor; hurried pulses throbbed visibly, almost
+audibly, at his temples; one eyelid twitched rapidly and steadily, <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_327" id="pg_327">327</a></span>like
+a clock ticking. With a gesture as automatic as drawing breath, he
+jerked out his watch and looked at it, apparently to make sure of
+catching his trolley, although his valedictory was poured out with such
+a passionate unpremeditation that the action must have been involuntary
+and unconscious. &#8220;But I don&#8217;t even ask that now&mdash;since it doesn&#8217;t suit
+you to bother to give it! All I ask now ought to be easy enough for any
+woman to do&mdash;not to <i>bother</i> me! Leave me alone! Keep your everlasting
+stewing and fussing and hysterical putting-on to yourself! I don&#8217;t
+bother you with my affairs&mdash;I haven&#8217;t, and I never will&mdash;why, for God&#8217;s
+sake, can&#8217;t you&mdash; Some men marry women who help them, and pull with them
+loyally, instead of pulling the other way all the time! Such a woman
+would have made me a thousand times more successful than I&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia broke in with a loud voice of anguished questioning: &#8220;Do they make
+them better men?&#8221; she asked piercingly.</p>
+
+<p>Her husband looked at her over his shoulder. &#8220;Oh, you and your
+goody-goody cant!&#8221; he said, and going out without further speech, closed
+the door behind him.</p>
+
+<p>The clock struck the half-hour. Their conversation had lasted less than
+five minutes.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<a name="TRIBUTE_TO_THE_MINOTAUR_11804" id="TRIBUTE_TO_THE_MINOTAUR_11804"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XXX</p>
+<p class="l c">TRIBUTE TO THE MINOTAUR</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The scene of Paul&#8217;s departure was no worse than many an outbreak in the
+ordinary married life of ordinary, quick-tempered, over-tired married
+people, for whom an open quarrel brings relief like the clearing of the
+air after an electric storm, but to Lydia it was no such surface
+manifestation of nerves. The impulse that had made them both break out
+into the cruel words came from some long-gathering bitterness, the very
+existence of which was like the end of all things to her. A single flash
+of lightning had showed her to the edge of what a terrifying precipice
+they had strayed, and then had left her in darkness.</p>
+
+<p>That was how it seemed to her; she was in the most impenetrable
+blackness, though the little girl played on beside her with a child&#8217;s
+cheerful blindness to its elder&#8217;s emotion, and Anastasia detected
+nothing but that her mistress had a better color than before and stepped
+about quite briskly.</p>
+
+<p>It was the restless activity of a tortured animal which drove Lydia from
+one household task to another, hurrying her into a trembling physical
+exhaustion, which, however, brought with it no instant&#8217;s cessation of
+the tumult in her heart. The night after Paul&#8217;s departure was like a
+black eternity to her turning wildly on her bed, or rising to walk as
+wildly about the silent house. &#8220;But I can&#8217;t stand this!&mdash;to hate and be
+hated! I can not bear it! I must do something&mdash;but what? but what?&#8221; Once
+she feared she had screamed out these ever-recurring words, so audibly
+like a cry of agony did they ring in her ears; but, forcing <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_329" id="pg_329">329</a></span>herself to
+an instant&#8217;s immobility, she heard Ariadne&#8217;s light, regular breathing
+continue undisturbed.</p>
+
+<p>She sat down on her bed and told herself that she would go out of her
+mind if she could not think something different from this chaos of angry
+misery. She fell on her knees, she sent her soul out in a supreme appeal
+for help and, still kneeling, she felt the intolerable tension within
+her loosen. She began to cry softly. The unnatural strength which had
+sustained her gave way; she sank together in a heap, her head leaning
+against the bed, her arms thrown out across it. Here Anastasia found her
+the next morning, apparently asleep, although upon being called she
+seemed to come to herself from a deeper unconsciousness.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever it had been, the hour or two of oblivion that lay back of her
+was like a wall between her soul and the worst phase of her suffering.
+In answer to her cry for help, perhaps an appeal to the best in her own
+nature, there had come a cessation of what was to her the only
+unbearable pain&mdash;the bitter, blaming anger which had flared up in her,
+answering her husband&#8217;s anger like the reflection of a torch in a
+mirror. In that silent hour before dawn, she had seen Paul suddenly as a
+victim to forces outside himself quite as much as she was; poor, tired
+Paul, with his haggard face, flushed with a wrath that was not his own,
+but an involuntary expression of suffering, the scream of a man caught
+in the cogs of a great machine. She hung before her mental vision now,
+constantly, the picture of Paul as she had seen him when she came
+downstairs; Paul leaning his chin on his hands, his jaded face white and
+drawn under his thinning, graying hair.</p>
+
+<p>The alleviation which came through this conception of her husband was
+tempered by the final disappearance of her old feeling that Paul was
+stronger, clearer-headed, than she, and that if she could but once make
+him stop and understand the forces in their life which she feared, he
+could conquer them as easily as he conquered obstacles in the way of
+their material success. She now felt that he was not even as strong as
+she, since he could not get even her faint <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_330" id="pg_330">330</a></span>glimpse of their common
+enemy, this Minotaur of futile materialism which had devoured the young
+years of their marriage and was now threatening to destroy the
+possibility of a great, strongly-rooted affection which had lain so
+clearly before them. She felt staggered by the responsibility of having
+to be strong enough for two; and as another day wore on this new
+preoccupation became almost as absorbing an obsession as her anger of
+the night before.</p>
+
+<p>But this was steadying in the very velocity with which her mind swept
+around the circle of possible courses of action. Her thoughts hummed
+with a steady, dizzy speed around and around the central idea that
+something must be done and that she was now the only one to do it.
+&#8217;Stashie thought to herself that she had never seen Mrs. Hollister look
+so well, her eyes were so bright, her cheeks so pink.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia had set herself the task of getting down and sorting the curtains
+in the house, preparatory to sending them to the cleaner. Above the
+piles of dingy drapery, her face shone, as &#8217;Stashie had noted, with a
+strange, feverish brightness. Her knees shook under her, but she walked
+about quickly. Ariadne ran in and out of the house, chirping away to her
+mother of various wonderful discoveries in the world of outdoors. Lydia
+heard her as from a distance, although she gave relevant answers to the
+child&#8217;s talk.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It has come down,&#8221; she was saying to herself, &#8220;to a life-and-death
+struggle. It isn&#8217;t a question now of how much of the best in Paul, in
+me, in our life, we can save. It&#8217;s whether we can save <i>any</i>! How dirty
+lace curtains get! It must be the soft coal&mdash;yes, it is a life and death
+struggle&mdash;I must see to Ariadne&#8217;s underwear. It is too warm for these
+sunny days.&mdash;Oh! Oh! Paul and I have quarreled! And what about! About
+such sickeningly trivial things&mdash;how badly &#8217;Stashie dusts! There are
+rolls of dust under the piano&mdash;but I thought people only
+quarreled&mdash;quarreled terribly&mdash;over great things: unfaithfulness,
+cruelty, differences in religion! Oh, if I only now had a religion, a
+religion which would&mdash;Yes, Ariadne; but only to the edge of the driveway
+and back. How muddy the driveway is! <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_331" id="pg_331">331</a></span>Paul said it should have more
+gravel&mdash;<i>Paul!</i> How <i>can</i> he come back to me after such&mdash;Madeleine says
+married people always quarrel&mdash;how can they look into each other&#8217;s eyes
+again! We must escape that sort of life! We must! We <i>must</i>!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The thought of what she had hoped from her marriage and of what she had,
+filled her with the most passionate self-reproach. It must be at least
+half her fault, since she and Paul made up but one whole. As she helped
+&#8217;Stashie sort the dingy curtains, she was saying over and over to
+herself that she was responsible, responsible as much as for Ariadne&#8217;s
+health. This conception so possessed her now that she felt herself able
+to accomplish anything, even the miracle needed.</p>
+
+<p>To have achieved this state of passionate resolution gave her for a
+moment the sense of having started upon the straight road to escape from
+her nightmare; and for the first time since the door had slammed behind
+Paul she drew a long breath and was able to give more than a blind gaze
+to the world about her.</p>
+
+<p>She noticed that, though it was after twelve o&#8217;clock, Ariadne had not
+been told to come to luncheon. When the little girl came running at her
+mother&#8217;s call, her vivid face flushed with happy play, Lydia knew a
+throb of that exquisite, unreasoning parent&#8217;s joy, lying too near the
+very springs of life for any sickness of the spirit to affect it. Like
+everything else, however, the touch of the child&#8217;s tight-clinging arms
+about her neck brought her back to her preoccupation. Ariadne must not
+be allowed to grow up to such a regret as she felt, that she had never
+known her father. There were moments, she saw them clearly, when Paul
+realized with difficulty the fact of his daughter&#8217;s existence, and he
+never realized it as a fact involving any need for a new attitude on his
+part.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;When is Daddy coming back to us <i>vis</i> time?&#8221; asked Ariadne over her
+egg.</p>
+
+<p>Anastasia paused furtively at the door. She had had a divination of
+trouble in the last talk between her master and <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_332" id="pg_332">332</a></span>mistress. The door had
+slammed. Mr. Hollister had not called for the tie she was pressing for
+him in the kitchen&mdash;&#8217;Stashie told herself fiercely that &#8220;killing wud be
+too good for her, makin&#8217; trouble like the divil&#8217;s own!&#8221; She listened
+anxious for Lydia&#8217;s answer.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Daddy&#8217;s coming back to us as soon as his business is done,&#8221; said Paul&#8217;s
+wife. At the turn of her phrase she turned cold, and added with a quick
+vehemence: &#8220;No, no! before that! Long before that!&#8221; She went on, to
+cover her agitation and get the maid out of the room, &#8220;&#8217;Stashie, get the
+baby a glass of milk.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The front door bell&#8217;s ringin&#8217;,&#8221; said &#8217;Stashie, departing in that
+direction, with the assurance of her own ability to choose the proper
+task for herself, so exasperating to her master.</p>
+
+<p>She came back bringing Miss Burgess in her wake, Miss Burgess
+apologizing for &#8220;coming right <i>in</i>, that way,&#8221; exclaiming effusively at
+the pretty picture made by mother and child,&mdash;&#8220;She must be such company
+for you, Miss Lydia&#8221;&mdash;Miss Burgess, deferential, sure of her own
+position and her hostess&#8217;, and determinedly pleased with the general
+state of things. Lydia repressed a sigh of impatience, but, noting the
+tired lines in the little woman&#8217;s face, told Anastasia to make another
+cup of tea for Miss Burgess and cook her an egg.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, delighted, I&#8217;m sure! Quite an honor to have the same lunch with
+little Miss Hollister.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Ariadne did not smile at this remark, though from the speaker&#8217;s accent
+it was meant as a pleasantry.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Burgess cast about in her mind for another bit of suitable
+badinage, but finding none, she began at once on the object of her
+visit.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now, my dear, I want you to listen to all I have to say before you make
+one objection. It&#8217;s an idea of my very own. You&#8217;ll let me get through
+without interruption?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, oh, yes,&#8221; murmured Lydia, lifting Ariadne down from her high-chair
+and untying the napkin from about her thin little neck.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_333" id="pg_333">333</a></span>The introduction of a new element in her surroundings had for a moment
+broken the thread of her exalted resolutions. She wondered with a sore
+heart, as though it had been a common lovers&#8217; quarrel, how she and Paul
+could ever get over the first sight of each other again. She was
+wondering how, with the most passionate resolve in the world, she could
+do anything at all under the leaden garment of physical fatigue which
+would weigh her down in the months to come.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Burgess began in her best style, which she so evidently considered
+very good indeed, that she could not doubt Lydia&#8217;s attention. It was all
+about a home for working-women she explained; a new charity which had
+come from the East, had caught on like anything among the Smart Set of
+Columbus, and was about to be introduced into Endbury. The most
+exclusive young people in Columbus&mdash;the East End Set (Miss Burgess had a
+genius for achieving oral capitalization) gave a parlor play for the
+first benefit there, in one of the Old Broad Street Homes, and they were
+willing to repeat it in Endbury to introduce it there. A Perfectly
+splendid crowd was sure to come, tickets could be Any Price, and the
+hostess who lent her house to it could have the glory of a most unique
+affair. Mrs. Lowder would be overwhelmed with delight to have the pick
+of the Society of the Capital at her house, but Miss Burgess had thought
+it such an opportunity for Miss Lydia to come out of mourning with,
+since it was for charity. She motioned Lydia, about to speak, sternly to
+silence: &#8220;You said you wouldn&#8217;t interrupt! And you haven&#8217;t let me say
+<i>half</i> yet! That&#8217;s your side of it&mdash;the side your dear mother would
+think of if she were only here; but there&#8217;s another side that you can&#8217;t,
+you <i>oughtn&#8217;t</i> to resist!&#8221; She finished her tea with a hasty swallow
+and, going around the table, sat down by Lydia, laying her hand
+impressively on the young matron&#8217;s slim arm. &#8220;You&#8217;re the sweetest thing
+in the world, of course, but, like other people of your fortunate class,
+you can&#8217;t realize how perfectly awfully lucky you are, nor how unlucky
+<i>poor</i> people are! Of <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_334" id="pg_334">334</a></span>course it stands to reason that you can&#8217;t even
+imagine the life of a working-woman&mdash;you, a woman of entire leisure,
+with every want supplied before you speak of it by a husband who adores
+you! Why, Miss Lydia, to give you some idea let me tell you just one
+little thing. Lots and lots of the working-women of Endbury live with
+their families in two or three rooms right on that horrid Main Street
+near their work because they can&#8217;t afford <i>carfares</i>!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia looked at her without speaking. She remembered her futile,
+desperate, foolish proposition to Paul to get more time together by
+living near his work. With a roar, the flood of her bewilderment,
+diverted for a time, broke over her again. She braced herself against
+it. Through her companion&#8217;s dimly-heard exhortations that, from her high
+heaven of self-indulgence, she stoop to lend a hand to her less favored
+sisters, she repeated to herself, clinging to the phrase as though it
+were a magic formula: &#8220;If I can only wish hard enough to make things
+better, nothing can prevent me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The telephone bell rang, and Miss Burgess interrupted herself to say:
+&#8220;It&#8217;s for me, I know. I told them at the office to call me up here.&#8221; She
+got herself out of the room in her busy way, her voice soon coming in a
+faint murmur from the far end of the hall.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia walked to the window to call Ariadne in to put on a wrap, the
+thought and action automatic. She had buttoned the garment about the
+child&#8217;s slender body before she responded again to the little living
+presence. Then she took her in a close embrace. With the child&#8217;s breath
+on her face, with her curls exhaling the fresh outdoor air, there came
+to pass for poor Lydia one of the strange, happy mysteries of the
+contradictory tangle that is human nature. She had felt it often with
+Paul after one of their long separations&mdash;how mere physical presence can
+sometimes bring a consolation to the distressed spirit.</p>
+
+<p>As she held her child to her heart, things seemed for a moment quite
+plain and possible. Why, Paul was Ariadne&#8217;s <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_335" id="pg_335">335</a></span>father! As soon as he was
+with her again, all would be well. It must be. Nothing could separate
+her from the father of her baby! They were one flesh now. There was
+still all their lifetime to grow to be one in spirit. She had only to
+try harder. They had simply started on a false track. They were so
+young. So many years lay before them. There was plenty of time to turn
+back and start all over again&mdash;there was plenty of time to&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, my dear! my dear!&#8221; Miss Burgess faltered weakly into the room and
+sank upon a chair.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia sprang up, Ariadne still in her arms, and faced her for a long
+silent instant, searching her face with passion. Then she set the little
+girl down gently. &#8220;Run out and play, dear,&#8221; she said, and until the door
+had shut on the child she did not stir. Her hand at her throat, &#8220;Well?&#8221;
+she asked.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Burgess began to cry into her handkerchief.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s Paul!&#8221; said Lydia with certainty. She sat down.</p>
+
+<p>The weeping woman nodded.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He has left me,&#8221; Lydia continued in the same dry tone of affirmation.
+&#8220;I know. We had a quarrel, and he has left me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Miss Burgess looked up, quite wild with surprise, her sobs cut short,
+her face twisted. &#8220;Oh, no&mdash;no&mdash;no!&#8221; she cried, running across the room
+and putting her arms about the other. &#8220;No; it&#8217;s not that! He&mdash;he&mdash;the
+man who telephoned said they were testing the dynamo, and your husband
+insisted on&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia came to life like a swimmer emerging into the air after a long
+dive. &#8220;Oh, he&#8217;s hurt! He&#8217;s hurt!&#8221; she cried, bounding to her feet. &#8220;I
+must go to him. I must go to him!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She tore herself away from the reporter and darted toward the door. The
+older woman ran after her, stumbling, sobbing, putting hands of
+imploring pity on her.</p>
+
+<p>Although no word was spoken, Lydia suddenly screamed out as though she
+had been stabbed. &#8220;<i>NO! Not that!</i>&#8221; she cried.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_336" id="pg_336">336</a></span>&#8220;Yes, yes, my poor darling!&#8221; said the other.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia turned slowly around. &#8220;Then it is too late. We never can do
+better,&#8221; she said.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Burgess tried helplessly to unburden her kind heart of its aching
+sympathy. &#8220;You spoke of a little disagreement, but, oh, my dear, don&#8217;t
+let that be the last thought. Think of the years of perfect love and
+knowledge you had together.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We never knew each other,&#8221; said Lydia. Her voice did not tremble.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, don&#8217;t! don&#8217;t!&#8221; pleaded Miss Burgess, alarmed. &#8220;You mustn&#8217;t let it
+unhinge you so! Such a perfect marriage!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We were never married,&#8221; said Lydia. She leaned against the wall and
+closed her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, help! Someone!&#8221; called the poor reporter. &#8220;Somebody come quick.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia opened her eyes. She spoke still in a low, steady voice, but in it
+now was a shocking quality from which the other shrank back terrified.
+&#8220;<i>I could have loved him!</i>&#8221; she said.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Quick&mdash;&#8217;Stashie&mdash;hurry&mdash;keep the baby out of the room! Your mistress
+has fainted!&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class="bookbreak" />
+
+<p class="xl c">BOOK IV</p>
+
+<p class="xl c i">&#8220;BUT IT IS NOT TOO LATE FOR ARIADNE&#8221;</p>
+
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_337" id="pg_337">337</a></span>
+<a name="PROTECTION_FROM_THE_MINOTAUR_12131" id="PROTECTION_FROM_THE_MINOTAUR_12131"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XXXI</p>
+<p class="l c">PROTECTION FROM THE MINOTAUR</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton burst open the door of the house in the Black Rock woods, and
+running to the owner caught hold of his bared brown arm. &#8220;Paul Hollister
+is dead!&#8221; he cried.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I read the papers,&#8221; said Rankin, looking down at him without stirring.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The damn fool!&#8221; cried the doctor, his face working. &#8220;Just now! There&#8217;s
+another child expected.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin&#8217;s inscrutable gravity did not waver at this speech. He felt the
+hand that rested on his arm tremble, and he was thinking, as Judge Emery
+had so often thought, that perhaps one reason for the doctor&#8217;s success
+in treating women was a certain community of too-responsive nerves. &#8220;You
+can hardly blame a man because the date of his death is inconvenient,&#8221;
+he said reasonably. He drew up one of his deep chairs and pushed the
+doctor into it. &#8220;Sit down and get your breath. You look sick. How do you
+happen to be up so early? It&#8217;s hardly daylight.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Up! You don&#8217;t suppose I&#8217;ve been to bed! Lydia&mdash;&#8221; His voice halted.</p>
+
+<p>Rankin&#8217;s quiet face stirred. &#8220;She feels it&mdash;terribly?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I can&#8217;t make her out! I can&#8217;t make her out!&#8221; The doctor flung this
+confession of failure before him excitedly. &#8220;I don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s in her
+mind, but she&#8217;s evidently <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_338" id="pg_338">338</a></span>dangerously near&mdash;women in her condition
+never have a very settled mental poise, anyhow, and this sudden
+shock&mdash;they <i>telephoned</i> it&mdash;and there was nobody there but that fool
+Flora&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do you mean that Mrs. Hollister is out of her mind?&#8221; asked Rankin
+squarely.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t know! I don&#8217;t know, I tell you! She says strange
+things&mdash;strange things. When I got there yesterday afternoon, she was
+holding Ariadne&mdash;you knew, didn&#8217;t you? that she called their little girl
+Ariadne&mdash;?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin sat down, white to the lips. &#8220;No,&#8221; he said, &#8220;I didn&#8217;t know that.
+I never heard anything about&mdash;about her married life.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, she was holding Ariadne as close as though she was expecting
+kidnapers. I came in and she looked up&mdash;God! Rankin, with what a face of
+fear! It wasn&#8217;t grief. It was terror! She said: &#8216;I must save the
+children&mdash;I mustn&#8217;t let it get the children, too.&#8217; I asked her what she
+meant, and she went on in a whisper that fairly turned the blood
+backward in my veins, &#8216;The Minotaur! He got Paul&mdash;I must hide the
+children from him!&#8217; And that&#8217;s all she would say. I managed to put
+Ariadne to bed, though Lydia screamed at the idea of having her out of
+her sight, and I gave Lydia a bromide and made her lie down. I think she
+knew me&mdash;oh, yes, I&#8217;m sure she did&mdash;why, she seemed like herself in
+every way but that one&mdash;but all night long she has wakened at intervals
+with a shriek and would not be quieted until she had felt of Ariadne.
+Nothing I said has had the slightest effect. I&#8217;m at my wits&#8217; end! If she
+doesn&#8217;t get quieted soon&mdash;I finally gave her an opiate&mdash;enough to drug
+her senseless for a time&mdash;I don&#8217;t know what to do! I don&#8217;t know what to
+do!&#8221; He dropped his head into his hands and sat silent, shivering.</p>
+
+<p>Rankin was looking at him, motionless, his powerful hands gripping his
+knees. He did not seem to breathe at all.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor sprang up and began to trot about, kicking <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_339" id="pg_339">339</a></span>at the legs of
+the furniture and biting his nails. &#8220;Yes, I can, too! I do blame him for
+the date of his death!&#8221; He went back angrily to an earlier remark.
+&#8220;Hollister killed himself as gratuitously as if he had taken a pistol!
+And he did it out of sheer, devilish vanity&mdash;ambition! He had worked
+himself almost insane, anyhow. I&#8217;d warned him that he must take it easy,
+get all the rest he could. His nerves were like fiddle-strings. And what
+did he do? Made a night trip to Evanston to superintend a job entirely
+outside his work. The inspector gave the machines the regular test; but
+Paul wasn&#8217;t satisfied. Said they hadn&#8217;t come up to what he&#8217;d guaranteed
+to get the contract; took charge of the test himself, ran the speed up
+goodness knows how high. The inspector said he warned him, but Paul had
+got going and nothing could stop
+him&mdash;speed-mad&mdash;efficiency-mad&mdash;whatever you call it. And at last the
+fly-wheel on the engine couldn&#8217;t stand it. It went through four floors
+and tore a hole in the roof&mdash;they say, in their ghastly phrase, there
+isn&#8217;t enough left of him for a funeral! The other men left widows and
+children, too, I suppose&mdash;Oh, damn! damn! damn!&#8221; He stopped short in the
+middle of the floor, his teeth chattering, his hand at his mouth.</p>
+
+<p>Rankin&#8217;s face showed that he was making a great effort to speak. &#8220;Would
+I be allowed to see her?&#8221; he asked finally.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor spun round on him, amazed. &#8220;You? Lydia? Why in the world?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Perhaps I could quiet her. I have been able to quiet several delirious
+sick people when others couldn&#8217;t.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t even know she&#8217;s delirious&mdash;that&#8217;s what puzzles me. She seems&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Will you let me try?&#8221; asked Rankin again.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>When they reached the house in Bellevue, Lydia was still in a heavy
+stupor, so Mrs. Sandworth told them, showing no surprise at Rankin&#8217;s
+appearance. The two men sat down outside the door of her room to wait.
+It was a long hour <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_340" id="pg_340">340</a></span>they passed there. Rankin sat silent, holding on his
+knee little Ariadne, who amused herself quietly with his watch and the
+leather strap that held it. He took the back off, and let her see the
+little wheel whirring back and forth. His eyes never left the child&#8217;s
+serious, rosy face. Once or twice he laid his large, work-roughened hand
+gently on her dark hair.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton fidgeted about, making excursions into the sick room and
+downstairs to look after his business by telephone, and, when he sat by
+the door, relieving his overburdened heart from time to time in some
+sudden exclamation. &#8220;Paul hasn&#8217;t left a penny, of course,&#8221; one of these
+ran, &#8220;and he hadn&#8217;t finished paying for the house. But she&#8217;ll come
+naturally to live with Julia and me.&#8221; At these last words, in spite of
+his painful preoccupation, a tender look of anticipation lighted his
+face.</p>
+
+<p>Again, he said: &#8220;What crazy notion can it be about the whatever-it-was
+getting Paul?&#8221; Later, &#8220;Was there ever such a characteristic death?&#8221;
+Finally, with a long sigh: &#8220;Poor Paul! Poor Paul! It doesn&#8217;t seem more
+than yesterday that he was a little boy. He was a brave little boy!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Sandworth came to the door. &#8220;She&#8217;s beginning to come to herself, I
+think. She stirs, and moves her hands about.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>As she spoke, there was a scream from the bedroom: &#8220;My baby! My baby!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin sprang to his feet, holding Ariadne on one arm, and stepped
+quickly inside. &#8220;Here is the baby,&#8221; he said in a quiet voice. &#8220;I was
+holding her all the time you slept. I will not let the Minotaur come
+near her.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia looked at him long, with no sign of recognition. The room was
+intensely silent. A drop of blood showed on Dr. Melton&#8217;s lower lip where
+his teeth gripped it.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Nobody else sees it,&#8221; said Lydia in a hurried, frightened tone. &#8220;They
+won&#8217;t believe me when I say it is there. They won&#8217;t take care of
+Ariadne. They can&#8217;t&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_341" id="pg_341">341</a></span>&#8220;I see it,&#8221; Rankin broke in. He went on steadily: &#8220;I will take care
+that it does not hurt Ariadne.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do you promise?&#8221; asked Lydia solemnly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I promise,&#8221; said Rankin.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia looked about her wonderingly, with blank eyes. &#8220;I think, then, I
+will lie down and rest a little,&#8221; she said, in a thin, weak voice. &#8220;I
+feel very tired. I can&#8217;t seem to remember what makes me so tired.&#8221; She
+sank back on the pillows and closed her eyes. Her face was like a sick
+child&#8217;s in its appealing, patient look of suffering. She looked up at
+Rankin again. &#8220;You will not go far?&#8221; she asked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I shall be close at hand,&#8221; he answered.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You are very kind,&#8221; murmured Lydia, closing her eyes again. &#8220;I am sorry
+to be so much trouble to you&mdash;but it is so important about Ariadne. I am
+sorry to be so&mdash;you are&mdash;very&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Melton touched the other man&#8217;s arm and motioned him to the door.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_342" id="pg_342">342</a></span>
+<a name="AS_ARIADNE_SAW_IT_12300" id="AS_ARIADNE_SAW_IT_12300"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XXXII</p>
+<p class="l c">AS ARIADNE SAW IT</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>All that day, the tall, ruddy-haired man in working clothes sat in the
+hall, within sight, though not within hearing, of the sick room, playing
+with the rosy child, and exerting all his ingenuity to invent quiet
+games that they could play there &#8220;where Muvver tan see us&#8221;; Ariadne soon
+learned the reason for staying in one place so constantly. She was very
+happy that day. Never in her life had she had so enchanting a
+playfellow. He showed her a game to play with clothespins and tin plates
+from the kitchen&mdash;why, it was so much fun that &#8217;Stashie herself had to
+join in as she went past. And he told one story after another without a
+sign of the usual grown-up fatigue. They had their lunch there at the
+end of the hall, on the little sewing-table with two dolls beside them
+and the new man made Ariadne laugh by making believe feed the dolls out
+of her doll&#8217;s tea-set.</p>
+
+<p>It was a little queer, of course, to stay right there all the time, and
+to have Muvver staring at them from the bedroom at the other end of the
+hall, and not to be allowed to do more than tiptoe in once or twice and
+kiss her without saying a word; but when Ariadne grew confused with
+trying to think this out, and the little eyes drooped heavily, the new
+man picked her up and tucked her away in his arms so comfortably that,
+though she meant to reach up and feel if his beard felt as red as it
+looked, she fell asleep before she could raise her hand.</p>
+
+<p>When she woke up it was twilight, but she was still in his arms. She
+stirred sleepily, and he looked down and smiled at her. His face looked
+like an old friend&#8217;s&mdash;as <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_343" id="pg_343">343</a></span>though she had always known it. He had a
+friendly smile. She was very happy. Uncle Marius came toward them,
+teetering on his toes, the way he always did. &#8220;I think it&#8217;s safe to
+leave now, Rankin,&#8221; he said. &#8220;She has fallen into a natural sleep.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The new man stood up, still holding Ariadne. How tall he was! She kept
+going up and up, and when she peered over his shoulder she found herself
+looking down on Uncle Marius&#8217; white head.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How about to-morrow?&#8221; asked the new man.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We&#8217;ll see. We&#8217;ll see,&#8221; said Dr. Melton; and then they all went
+downstairs and had toast and boiled eggs for supper. Ariadne informed
+her companions, looking up from her egg with a yolky smile, &#8220;Daddy told
+Muvver the other day that &#8217;Stashie had certainly learned to boil eggs
+something <i>fine</i>! And he laughed, but Muvver didn&#8217;t. Was it a joke?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They are very good eggs indeed, and well boiled,&#8221; the new man answered.
+She loved the way in which he conversed with her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ought we to give her some idea?&#8221; asked the doctor in a low voice.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I would wait until she asks,&#8221; said the other.</p>
+
+<p>But Paul&#8217;s child never asked. Once or twice she remarked that Daddy was
+away longer than usual &#8220;<i>vis</i> time,&#8221; but he had never been a very
+steadily recurrent phenomenon in her life, and soon her little brain,
+filled with new impressions, had forgotten that he ever used to come
+back.</p>
+
+<p>There were many new impressions. A great deal was happening nowadays.
+Every morning something different, every day new people going and
+coming. Aunt Marietta, Auntie Madeleine, Uncle George from Cleveland,
+whom she&#8217;d seen only once or twice before, and Great-Aunt Hollister,
+whom she knew very well and feared as well as she knew her. After a time
+even the husbands began to appear, the husbands she had seen so rarely;
+Aunt Marietta&#8217;s husband, and Aunt Madeleine&#8217;s&mdash;fat, bald Mr. Lowder, who
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_344" id="pg_344">344</a></span>smelled of tobacco and soap and took her up on his lap&mdash;as much as he
+had&mdash;and gave her a big round dollar and kissed her behind her ear and
+smiled at her very kindly and held her very close. He said he liked
+little girls, and he wished Auntie Madeleine would get him one some day
+for a Christmas present. She informed him, filled with admiration at the
+extent of her own knowledge, that he couldn&#8217;t get a Christmas present
+some day, but only just Christmas Day.</p>
+
+<p>Mostly, however, they paid no attention to her, these many aunts and
+uncles who came and went. And, oddly enough, Uncle Marius always shut
+the door to Muvver&#8217;s room when they came, and wouldn&#8217;t let them, no
+matter how much they wanted to, go in and see Muvver, who was, she
+gathered, very sick. Ariadne didn&#8217;t see, really, why they came at all,
+since they couldn&#8217;t see Muvver and they certainly never so much as
+looked at &#8217;Stashie, dear darling &#8217;Stashie&mdash;more of a comfort these queer
+days than ever before&mdash;and they never, never spoke to the new man, who
+came and went as though nobody knew he was there. They would look right
+at him and never see him. Everything was very hard for a little girl to
+understand, and she dared ask no questions.</p>
+
+<p>Everybody seemed to be very angry, and yet not at her. Indeed, she took
+the most prodigious care to avoid doing anything naughty lest she
+concentrate on herself this now widely diffused disapprobation. Never in
+her life had she tried so hard to be good, but nobody paid the least
+attention to her&mdash;nobody but the new man and &#8217;Stashie, and they weren&#8217;t
+the angry ones. The others stood about in groups in corners, talking in
+voices that started in to be low and always got loud before they
+stopped. Ariadne added several new words to her vocabulary at this time,
+from hearing them so constantly repeated. When her dolls were bad now,
+she shook them and called them &#8220;Indecent! indecent!&#8221; and asked them,
+with as close an imitation as she could manage, of Great-Aunt
+Hollister&#8217;s tone, &#8220;What <i>do</i> you suppose people are thinking! What <i>do</i>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_345" id="pg_345">345</a></span>you suppose people are thinking!&#8221; Or she knocked them into a corner and
+said &#8220;Shocking! Shocking!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>One day she stopped Uncle Marius, hurrying past her up the stairs, and
+asked him: &#8220;What are you thinking of, Uncle Marius?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What am I thinking of? What do you mean?&#8221; he repeated, his face and
+eyes twitching the way they did when he couldn&#8217;t understand something
+right off.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, Auntie Madeleine keeps asking everybody all the time, &#8216;What <i>can</i>
+the doctor be thinking of?&#8217; I just wondered.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He bent to kiss her raspingly&mdash;there were stiff little stubby white
+hairs coming out all over his face&mdash;and he said, as he trotted on up the
+stairs, &#8220;I am thinking of making sure that you have a mother, my poor
+dear.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And then there was a bigger change one day. She went to bed in her own
+little crib, and when she woke up she wasn&#8217;t there at all, but in a big
+bed in a room at Aunt Julia&#8217;s; and Aunt Julia was smiling at her, and
+hugging her, and saying she was so glad she had come to live with her
+and Uncle Marius for a while. Ariadne found out that Uncle Marius had
+brought her and Muvver the night before in a carriage all the way from
+Bellevue. She regretted excessively that she had not been awake to enjoy
+the adventure.</p>
+
+<p>At Aunt Julia&#8217;s, things were quieter. All at once the other people, the
+other uncles and aunts, had disappeared. That, of course, was because
+she and Muvver were at Aunt Julia&#8217;s. She conceived of the house in
+Bellevue as still filled with their angry faces and voices, still
+echoing to &#8220;Indecent! indecent!&#8221; and &#8220;What <i>do</i> you suppose people
+are saying?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There was a long, long time after this when nothing special happened.
+The new man continued to come here, and his visits were the only events
+in Ariadne&#8217;s quiet days. Apparently he came to see Ariadne, for he never
+went to see Muvver at all, as he used to do in Bellevue. He took Ariadne
+out in the back yard as the weather began to get <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_346" id="pg_346">346</a></span>warmer, and showed her
+lots of outdoor plays. He was as nice as ever, only a good deal whiter;
+and that was odd, for they were now in May, and from playing outdoors
+all the time Ariadne herself was as brown as a berry. At least, that was
+what Aunt Julia said. Ariadne accepted it with her usual patient
+indulgence of grown-ups&#8217; mistakes. There was not, of course, a single
+berry that was anything but red or black, or at least a sort of blue,
+like huckleberries in milk. She and &#8217;Stashie had gone over them, one by
+one; they knew.</p>
+
+<p>Uncle Marius remembered to shave himself nowadays. In fact, everything
+was more normal. Ariadne began to forget about the exciting time in
+Bellevue. Muvver wasn&#8217;t in bed all the time now, but sat up in a chair
+for part of the day and even, if one were ever so quiet, could listen to
+accounts of what happened in Ariadne&#8217;s world and could be told how Aunt
+Julia said that &#8217;Stashie was quite a help as second girl if you just
+remembered to put away the best china, and that they had had eight new
+cooks since Ariadne had been there, but the second <i>would</i> have stayed,
+only her mother got sick. The others just left. But Aunt Julia didn&#8217;t
+mind. When there wasn&#8217;t any cook, if it happened to be &#8217;Stashie&#8217;s day
+off, they all had bread and milk for supper, just as she had, and they
+let her set the table, and she could do it ever so well only she forgot
+<i>some</i> things, of course, and Uncle Marius never got mad. He just said
+he hoped eating bread and milk like her would make him as good as she
+was&mdash;and she <i>was</i> good&mdash;oh, Muvver, she was trying ever so hard to be
+good&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Come, dear,&#8221; said Aunt Julia, &#8220;Mother&#8217;s getting tired. We&#8217;d better go.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was only after she went away, sometimes only when she lay awake in
+her strange big bed, that Ariadne remembered that Muvver never said a
+word, but only smoothed her hair and kissed her.</p>
+
+<p>She and the new man used to play out in the old grape-arbor in the back
+yard, and it was there, one day in mid-May, that Uncle Marius came
+teetering out and called the <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_347" id="pg_347">347</a></span>new man to one side, only Ariadne could
+hear what they said. Uncle Marius said: &#8220;It&#8217;s no use, Rankin. It&#8217;s a
+fixed idea with her. She isn&#8217;t violent any more, but she hasn&#8217;t changed.
+She is certainly a little deranged, but not enough for legal restraint.
+She could take Ariadne and disappear any day. I&#8217;m in terror lest she do
+that. I&#8217;ve no authority to prevent her. She won&#8217;t talk to me freely
+about what she is afraid of. She doesn&#8217;t seem to trust me&mdash;<i>me</i>!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Ariadne found the conversation as dull as all overheard grown-ups&#8217; talk,
+and tried to busy herself with a corn-cob house the new man had been
+showing her how to build. Two or three times lately he had taken her out
+to his little house in the woods and showed her a lot of tools, and told
+her what they were for, and said if she were older he would teach her
+how to use them. Ariadne&#8217;s head was full of the happy excitement of
+those visits. Corn-cob houses were for babies, she thought now.</p>
+
+<p>After a time, Uncle Marius went away, slamming the front gate after him
+and stamping away up the street as though he were angry, only he did all
+kinds of queer things without being angry. In fact, she had never seen
+him angry. Perhaps he and Muvver were different from other people and
+never were.</p>
+
+<p>She looked up with a start. The new man had come back to the arbor, but
+he did not look like play. He looked queer, so queer that Ariadne&#8217;s
+sensitive lower lip began to tremble and the corners of her mouth to
+draw down. She could <i>not</i> remember having done anything naughty. She
+was frightened by the way he looked. And yet, he picked her up quite
+gently, and held her on his knee, and asked her if Muvver could walk
+about the house yet.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, yes,&#8221; she told him, &#8220;and came down to dinner last night.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The new man put her down, and asked her with a &#8220;please&#8221; and &#8220;I&#8217;d be much
+obliged&#8221; as though she were a grown-up herself, if she would do
+something for him&mdash;go to Muvver and ask her if she felt strong enough to
+come <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_348" id="pg_348">348</a></span>down into the grape-arbor to see him. Tell her he had something
+very special to say to her.</p>
+
+<p>Ariadne went, skipping and hopping in pleasurable excitement at her own
+importance, and returned triumphantly to say that Muvver said she would
+come. She wondered if he felt too grown-up for cob houses himself. He
+hadn&#8217;t built it any higher when she was gone. He looked as if he hadn&#8217;t
+even winked. While she stood wondering at his silence, his face got very
+white. He stood up looking toward the house. Muvver was coming out, very
+slowly, leaning on the railing to the steps&mdash;Muvver in the nightgowny
+dress Aunt Julia had made her, only it wasn&#8217;t really nightgowny, because
+it was all over lace&mdash;Muvver with her hair in two braids over her
+shoulders and all mussed up where she&#8217;d been lying down. Ariadne
+wondered that she hadn&#8217;t smoothed it a little. She knew what people
+would say to <i>her</i> if she came around with her hair looking like that.</p>
+
+<p>The man went forward to meet Muvver, and gave her his hand, and they
+neither of them smiled or said how do you do, but came back together
+toward the arbor. And when they got there Muvver sat down quick, as
+though she were tired, and laid her head back against the chair. The man
+lifted Ariadne up and kissed her&mdash;he had never done that before. Now she
+knew how his beard felt&mdash;very soft. She felt it against her face for a
+long time. And he told her to go into the house to &#8217;Stashie.</p>
+
+<p>So she went. Ariadne always did as she was told. &#8217;Stashie was trying to
+make some ginger cookies, and the oven &#8220;jist would <i>not</i> bake thim,&#8221; she
+said. They were all doughy when they came out, very much as they were
+when they went in; but the dough was deliciously sweet and spicy.
+&#8217;Stashie and Ariadne ate a great deal of it, because &#8217;Stashie knew very
+well from experience that the grown-ups have an ineradicable prejudice
+against food that comes out of the oven &#8220;prezackly&#8221; the way it went in.</p>
+
+<p>After that they had to wash their hands, all sticky with dough, and
+after that &#8217;Stashie took Ariadne on her lap and <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_349" id="pg_349">349</a></span>told her Irish fairy
+stories, all about Cap O&#8217;Rushes and the Leprechaun, till they were
+startled by the boiling over of the milk &#8217;Stashie had put on the stove
+to start a pudding. &#8217;Stashie certainly did have bad luck with her
+cooking, as she herself frequently sadly admitted.</p>
+
+<p>But, oh! wasn&#8217;t she darling to Ariadne! It made the lonely little girl
+warm all over to be loved the way &#8217;Stashie loved her. Sometimes when
+Ariadne woke up with a bad dream it was &#8217;Stashie who came to quiet her,
+and she just hugged her up close, close, so that she could feel her
+heart go thump, thump, thump. And she always, always had time to explain
+things. It was wonderful how much time &#8217;Stashie had for that&mdash;or
+anything else Ariadne needed.</p>
+
+<p>She was putting more milk on the stove when in dashed Uncle Marius, his
+mouth wide open and his hands jumping around. &#8220;Where&#8217;s your mother?
+Where&#8217;s Mrs. Hollister?&#8221; he cried.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Out in the arbor,&#8221; said Ariadne.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Alone?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, no&mdash;&#8221; Ariadne began to explain, but the doctor had darted to the
+window. You could see the grape-arbor plainly from there&mdash;Muvver sitting
+with her hair all mussed up around her face, listening to the new man,
+who sat across the table from her and talked and talked and talked, and
+never moved a finger. Uncle Marius put his hand up quick to his side and
+said something Ariadne couldn&#8217;t catch. She looked up, saw his face, and
+ran away, terrified, to hide her face in &#8217;Stashie&#8217;s dirty apron. Now she
+knew how Uncle Marius looked when he was angry. She heard him go out and
+down the steps, and went fearfully to watch him. He went across the
+grass to the arbor. The others looked toward him without moving, and
+when he came close and leaned against the table, Muvver looked up at him
+and said something, and then leaned back again, her head resting against
+the chair, her eyes closed, her hands dropped down. How tired Muvver
+always looked!</p>
+
+<p>And just then &#8217;Stashie spilled all the cocoa she was going <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_350" id="pg_350">350</a></span>to use to
+flavor the pudding with. She spilled it on the stove, and it smoked and
+stinked&mdash;there was nobody nowadays to forbid Ariadne to use &#8217;Stashie&#8217;s
+words&mdash;and &#8217;Stashie said there wasn&#8217;t any more and they&#8217;d have to go off
+to the grocery-store to get some, and if Ariadne knew where that nickel
+was Mis&#8217; Sandworth give her, they could get a soda-water on the way, and
+with two straws it would do for both.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_351" id="pg_351">351</a></span>
+<a name="WHAT_IS_BEST_FOR_THE_CHILDREN_12591" id="WHAT_IS_BEST_FOR_THE_CHILDREN_12591"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XXXIII</p>
+<p class="l c">WHAT IS BEST FOR THE CHILDREN?</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Lydia lifted her face, white under the shadow of her disordered hair,
+and said: &#8220;It is Mr. Rankin who must take care of the children&mdash;Ariadne,
+and the baby if it lives.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She spoke in a low, expressionless voice, as though she had no strength
+to spare. Dr. Melton&#8217;s hand on the table began to shake. He answered: &#8220;I
+have told you before, my dear, that there is no reason for your fixed
+belief that you will not live after the baby&#8217;s birth. You must not dwell
+on that so steadily.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia raised her heavy eyes once more to his. &#8220;I want him to have the
+children,&#8221; she said.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor took a step or two away from the table. He was now shaking
+from head to foot, and when he came back to the silent couple and took a
+chair between them he made two or three attempts at speech before he
+could command his voice. &#8220;It is very hard on me, Lydia, to&mdash;to have you
+turn from me to a&mdash;to a stranger.&#8221; His voice had grotesque quavers.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia raised a thin, trembling hand, and laid it on her godfather&#8217;s
+sinewy fingers. She tried to smile into his face. &#8220;Dear Godfather,&#8221; she
+said wistfully, &#8220;if it were only myself&mdash;but the children&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What do you mean, Lydia? What do you mean?&#8221; he demanded with tremulous
+indignation.</p>
+
+<p>She dropped her eyes again and drew a long, sighing breath. &#8220;I haven&#8217;t
+strength to explain to you all I mean,&#8221; she said gently, &#8220;and I think
+you know without my telling you. You have always known what is in my
+heart.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_352" id="pg_352">352</a></span>&#8220;I had thought there was some affection for me in your heart,&#8221; said the
+doctor, thrusting out his lips to keep them from trembling.</p>
+
+<p>Lydia&#8217;s drooping position changed slightly. She lifted her hands and
+folded them together on the table, leaning forward, and bending full on
+the doctor the somber intensity of her dark, deep-sunken eyes. &#8220;Dear
+Godfather, I have no time or strength to waste.&#8221; The slowness with which
+she chose her words gave them a solemn weight. &#8220;I cannot choose. If it
+hurts you to have me speak truth, you must be hurt. You know what a
+failure I have made of my life, how I have missed everything worth
+having&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton, driven hard by some overmastering emotion, drew back, and
+threw aside precipitately the tacit understanding he and Lydia had
+always kept. &#8220;Lydia, what are you talking about! You have been more than
+usually favored&mdash;you have been loved and cherished as few women&mdash;&#8221; His
+voice died away under Lydia&#8217;s honest, tragic eyes.</p>
+
+<p>She went on as though he had not spoken. &#8220;My children must know
+something different. My children must have a chance at the real things.
+If I die, who can give it to them? Even if I live, shall I be wise
+enough to give them what I had not wisdom or strength enough to get for
+myself?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You speak as though I were not in the world, Lydia,&#8221; the doctor broke
+in bitterly, &#8220;or as though you hated and mistrusted me. Why do you look
+to a stranger to&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Could you do for my children what you have not done for yourself?&#8221; she
+asked him earnestly. &#8220;How much would you see of them? How much would you
+know of them? How much of your time would you be willing to sacrifice to
+learn patiently the inner lives of two little children? You would be
+busy all day, like the other people I know, making money for them to
+dress like other well-to-do children, for them to live in this fine, big
+house, for them to go to expensive private schools with the children of
+the <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_353" id="pg_353">353</a></span>people you know socially&mdash;for them to be as much as possible like
+the fatherless child I was.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia clenched her thin hands and went on passionately: &#8220;I would rather
+my children went ragged and hungry than to be starved of real
+companionship.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor made a shocked gesture. &#8220;But, Lydia, someone must earn the
+livings. You are&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia broke in fiercely: &#8220;They are not earning livings&mdash;they are earning
+more dresses and furniture and delicate food than their families need.
+They are earning a satisfaction for their own ambitions. They are
+willing to give their families anything but time and themselves.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Lydia! Lydia! I never knew you to be cruel before! They can not help
+it&mdash;the way their lives are run. It&#8217;s not that they wish to&mdash;they can
+not help it! It is against an economic law you are protesting.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That economic law has been broken by <i>one</i> person I know,&#8221; said Lydia,
+&#8220;and that is the reason I&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor flushed darkly. The tears rose to his eyes. &#8220;Lydia, oh, my
+dear! trust me&mdash;trust me! I, too, will&mdash;I swear I will do all that you
+wish&mdash;don&#8217;t turn away from me&mdash;trust me&mdash;!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia&#8217;s mouth began to quiver. &#8220;Ah! don&#8217;t make me say what must sound so
+cruel!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor stared at her hard. &#8220;Make you say, you mean, that you <i>don&#8217;t</i>
+trust me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She drew a little, pitiful breath, and turned away her head. &#8220;Yes; that
+is what I mean,&#8221; she said. She went on hurriedly, putting up appealing
+hands to soften her words, &#8220;You see&mdash;it&#8217;s the children&mdash;I <i>must</i> do what
+is best for them. It must be done once for all. Suppose you found you
+couldn&#8217;t now, after all these years, turn about and be different?
+Suppose you found you couldn&#8217;t arrange a life that the children could be
+a part of, and help in, and really do their share and live with you. You
+<i>mean</i> to&mdash;I&#8217;m sure you mean to! But you never <i>have</i> yet! How dare I
+let you try if you are not sure? I can&#8217;t <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_354" id="pg_354">354</a></span>come back if I am dead, you
+know, and make a new arrangement. Mr. Rankin has proved that he can&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>At the name, the doctor&#8217;s face darkened. He shot a black look at the
+younger man sitting beside him in his strange silence. &#8220;What has Rankin
+done?&#8221; he asked bitterly. &#8220;I should say the very point about him is that
+he has done nothing.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He has tried, he has tried, he is trying,&#8221; cried Lydia, beating her
+hands on the table. &#8220;Think! Of all the people I know, he is the only one
+who is even trying. That was all I wanted myself. That is all I dare ask
+for my children&mdash;a chance to try.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To try what?&#8221; asked the doctor challengingly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To try not to have life make them worse instead of better. That&#8217;s not
+much to ask&mdash;but nobody I know, but one only has&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Simplicity and right living don&#8217;t come from camping out in a shed,&#8221;
+said the doctor angrily. &#8220;Externals are nothing. If the heart is right
+and simple&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If the heart is right and simple, nothing else matters. That is what I
+say,&#8221; answered Lydia.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton gave a gesture of cutting the question short. &#8220;Well, of
+course it&#8217;s quite impossible! Rankin can&#8217;t possibly have any claim on
+your children in the event of your death. Think of all your family, who
+would be&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<i>I think of them</i>,&#8221; said Lydia with an accent so strange that the
+doctor was halted. &#8220;Oh, I have thought of them!&#8221; she said again. She put
+her hands over her eyes. &#8220;Could I not make a will, and appoint as
+guardian&mdash;&#8221; she began to ask.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton cut her short with a sound like a laugh, although his face
+was savage. &#8220;Did you never hear of wills being contested? How long do
+you suppose a will you make under the present circumstances would stand
+against an attack on it by your family and the Hollisters, with their
+money and influence!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh! Oh!&#8221; moaned Lydia, &#8220;and I shall not be here to&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_355" id="pg_355">355</a></span>Rankin stirred throughout all his great height and broke his silence.
+He said to Lydia: &#8220;There is some way&mdash;there must be some way. I will
+find it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lydia took down her hands and showed a face so ravaged by the emotions
+of the colloquy that the physician in her godfather sprang up through
+the wounded jealousy of the man. &#8220;Lydia, my dear, you must stop&mdash;this is
+idiotic of me to allow you&mdash;not another word. You must go into the house
+this instant and lie down and rest&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He bent over her with his old, anxious, exasperated, protecting air.
+Lydia seized his hands. Her own were hot and burning. &#8220;Rest! I can&#8217;t
+rest with all this unsettled! I go over and over it&mdash;how can I sleep!
+How can you think that your little opiates will make me forget that my
+children may be helpless, with no one to protect them&mdash;&#8221; She looked
+about her wildly. &#8220;Why, little Ariadne may be given to <i>Madeleine</i>!&#8221; Her
+horrified eyes rested again on her godfather. She drew him to her. &#8220;Oh,
+help me! You&#8217;ve always been kind to me. Help me now!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There was a silence, the two exchanging a long gaze. The man&#8217;s forehead
+was glistening wet. Finally, his breath coming short, he said: &#8220;Yes; I
+will help you,&#8221; and, his eyes still on hers, put out a hand toward
+Rankin.</p>
+
+<p>The younger man was beside them in a stride. He took the hand offered
+him, but his gaze also was on the white face of the woman between them.
+&#8220;We will do it together,&#8221; he told her. &#8220;Rest assured. It shall be done.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The corners of Lydia&#8217;s mouth twitched nervously. &#8220;You are a good man,&#8221;
+she said to her godfather. She looked at Rankin for a moment without
+speaking, and then turned toward the house, wavering. &#8220;Will you help me
+back?&#8221; she said to the doctor, her voice quite flat and toneless; &#8220;I am
+horribly tired.&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>When the doctor came back again to the arbor, Mrs. Sandworth was with
+him, her bearing, like his, that of a person in the midst of some
+cataclysmic upheaval. It was <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_356" id="pg_356">356</a></span>evident that her brother had told her.
+Without greeting Rankin, she sat down and fixed her eyes on his face.
+She did not remove them during the talk that followed.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor stood by the table, drumming with his fingers and grimacing.
+&#8220;You must know,&#8221; he finally made a beginning with difficulty, &#8220;I don&#8217;t
+know whether you realize, not being a physician, that she is really not
+herself. She has for the present a mania for providing as she thinks
+best for her children&#8217;s future. Of course no one not a monomaniac would
+so entirely ignore your side, would conceive so strange an idea. She is
+so absorbed in her own need that she does not realize what an unheard-of
+request she is making. To burden yourself with two young children&mdash;to
+mortgage all your future&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin broke in with a shaking voice and a face of exultation: &#8220;Good
+God, Doctor! Don&#8217;t grudge me this one chance of my life!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor stared, bewildered. &#8220;What are you talking about?&#8221; he asked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;About myself. I don&#8217;t do it often&mdash;let me now. Do you think I haven&#8217;t
+realized all along that what you said of me is true&mdash;that I have done
+nothing? Done nothing but succeed smugly in keeping myself in comfort
+outside the modern economic treadmill! What else could I do? I&#8217;m no
+orator, to convince other people. I haven&#8217;t any universal panacea to
+offer! I&#8217;m only an inarticulate countryman, a farmer&#8217;s son, with the
+education the state gives everyone&mdash;who am I, to try to lead? Apparently
+there was nothing for me to do but ignobly to take care of myself&mdash;but
+now, God be thanked! I have my chance. Someone has been hurt in their
+infernal squirrel-cage, and I can help&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The older man was looking at him piercingly, as though struck by a
+sudden thought. He now cut him short with, &#8220;You&#8217;re not deceiving
+yourself with any notion that she&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The other answered quickly, with a smile of bitter humility: &#8220;You have
+seen her look at me. She does not know whether I am a human being or
+not&mdash;I am to her <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_357" id="pg_357">357</a></span>any strong animal, a horse, an ox&mdash;any force that can
+carry Ariadne safely!&#8221; He added, in another tone, his infinitely gentle
+tone: &#8220;I see in that the extremity of her anxiety.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor put his hand on the other man&#8217;s powerful arm. &#8220;Do you realize
+what you are proposing to yourself? You are human. You are a young man.
+Are you strong enough to keep to it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin looked at him. Mrs. Sandworth leaned forward.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I am,&#8221; said Rankin finally.</p>
+
+<p>The words echoed in a long silence.</p>
+
+<p>The younger man stood up. &#8220;I am going to see a lawyer,&#8221; he announced in
+a quiet voice of return to an everyday level. &#8220;Until then, we have all
+more to think over than to talk about, it seems to me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>After he had left them the brother and sister did not speak for a time.
+Then the doctor said, irritably: &#8220;Julia, say something, for Heaven&#8217;s
+sake. What did you think of what he said?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I didn&#8217;t hear what he said,&#8221; answered Mrs. Sandworth; &#8220;I was looking at
+him.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well?&#8221; urged her brother.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He is a good man,&#8221; she said.</p>
+
+<p>A sense that she was holding something in reserve kept him silent,
+gazing expectantly at her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How awfully he&#8217;s in love with her!&#8221; she brought out finally. &#8220;That&#8217;s
+the whole point. He&#8217;s in love with her! All this talk about &#8216;ways of
+living&#8217; and theories and things that they make so much of&mdash;it just
+amounts to nothing but that he&#8217;s in love with her.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, you sentimental idiot!&#8221; cried the doctor. &#8220;I hoped to get some
+sense out of you.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s sense,&#8221; said Mrs. Sandworth.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It hasn&#8217;t anything to do with the point! Why, as for that, Paul was in
+love with&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He was <i>not</i>!&#8221; cried Mrs. Sandworth, with a sudden loud certainty.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_358" id="pg_358">358</a></span>The doctor caught her meaning and considered it frowningly. When he
+spoke, it was to burst out pathetically: &#8220;<i>I</i> have loved her all her
+life.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, you!&#8221; retorted his sister, with a sad conclusiveness.</p>
+
+<p>Ariadne came running out to them. &#8220;I just went to look into Muvver&#8217;s
+room, and she was sound asleep! Honest! She was!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The child had heard enough of the doctor&#8217;s long futile struggles with
+the horrors of Lydia&#8217;s sleepless nights to divine that her news was
+important. She was rewarded with a startled look from her elders.
+&#8220;Come!&#8221; said the doctor.</p>
+
+<p>They went into the house, and silently to Lydia&#8217;s half-open door. She
+lay across the bed as she had dropped down when she came in, one long
+dark braid hanging to the floor. They stood looking at her almost with
+awe, as though they were observing for the first time the merciful
+miracle of sleep. Her bosom rose and fell in long, regular breaths. The
+drawn, haggard mask that had overlain her face so many months was
+dissolved away in an utter unconsciousness. Her eyelashes lay on a cheek
+like a child&#8217;s; her mouth, relaxed and drooping, fell again into the
+lines they had loved in her when she was a little girl. She looked like
+a little girl again to them.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Sandworth&#8217;s hand went to her throat. She looked at her brother
+through misty eyes. He closed the door gently, and drew her away, making
+the gesture of a man who admits his own ignorance of a mystery.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_359" id="pg_359">359</a></span>
+<a name="THROUGH_THE_LONG_NIGHT_12903" id="THROUGH_THE_LONG_NIGHT_12903"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XXXIV</p>
+<p class="l c">THROUGH THE LONG NIGHT</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>&#8220;They must have gone crazy, simply crazy!&#8221; said Madeleine, making quick,
+excited gestures. &#8220;Mrs. Sandworth, of course&mdash;a person can hardly blame
+her for anything! She&#8217;s a cipher with the rim off when the doctor has
+made up his mind. But, even so, shouldn&#8217;t you think in common decency
+she&#8217;d have let us know what they were up to in time to prevent it? <i>I</i>
+never heard a word of this sickening business of Ariadne&#8217;s adoption till
+day before yesterday. Did <i>you</i>?&#8221; she ended half-suspiciously.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Mortimer stopped her restless pace up and down the old-fashioned,
+high-ceilinged room, and made a gesture for silence. &#8220;I thought I heard
+something&mdash;up there,&#8221; she explained, motioning to the upper part of the
+house. &#8220;I wonder what made Lydia so sure beforehand that she wouldn&#8217;t
+live through this?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, I guess from what the nurse told me there <i>isn&#8217;t</i> much chance for
+her,&#8221; said Madeleine in a hard voice. Her color was not so high as
+usual, her beautiful face looked grim, and she spoke in a bitter tone of
+seriousness that made her seem quite another person. Marietta&#8217;s thin,
+dark countenance gave less indication of her mood, whatever it was. She
+looked sallow and worn, and only her black eyes, hot and gloomy, showed
+emotion.</p>
+
+<p>Both women were silent a moment, listening to the sound of footsteps
+overhead. &#8220;It seems as though it <i>must</i> be over soon now!&#8221; cried the
+childless one of the two, drawing in her breath sharply. &#8220;It makes me
+furious to think of women suffering so. Bertha Williamson was telling me
+the other day about when her little Walter was born&mdash;it made me <i>sick</i>!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_360" id="pg_360">360</a></span>The matron looked at her and shivered a little, but made no response.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The nurse says Lydia is mostly unconscious now. Perhaps the worst is
+over for her! Poor Lyd! What do you suppose made her act so?&#8221; went on
+Madeleine, moving about restlessly, her voice uncertain. She went to the
+window, and drew aside the shade to look out into the blackness. &#8220;Oh, I
+wish the men would come! What time is it, do you suppose? Yes, I see;
+half-past three. Oh, it <i>must</i> be over soon! I wish they&#8217;d come! You
+telegraphed George, didn&#8217;t you? Heavens! how it rains!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He was to come on the midnight train. Is your husband&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, he was horrid about it&mdash;wanted me to do it all myself. He&#8217;s in the
+midst of some big deal or other. But I told him he&#8217;d <i>have</i> to come and
+help out, or I&#8217;d&mdash;I&#8217;d <i>kill</i> him! He&#8217;ll bring the lawyer.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Where do you suppose?&#8221; began Marietta, looking over her shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Out in his shanty in the Black Rock woods,&#8221; said Madeleine harshly,
+&#8220;with no idea of what&#8217;s going on. Just before you came, the doctor sent
+out for a messenger to take him word, and you&#8217;d better believe I got
+hold of that messenger!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Of course that&#8217;ll make things easier,&#8221; said Marietta.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, it won&#8217;t be hard at all,&#8221; Madeleine assured her; &#8220;the lawyer&#8217;ll be
+right at hand; it&#8217;ll be over in a minute.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Marietta&#8217;s face altered. She drew back from the other woman. &#8220;Oh,
+Madeleine! you act as though&mdash;you were counting on Lydia&#8217;s&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No; I&#8217;m not. I used to think a lot of Lydia before she disgraced poor
+Paul&#8217;s memory in this way! But you see it&#8217;ll be easy to do, one way or
+the other. If she&mdash;if she doesn&#8217;t&mdash;why, Marietta, you know Lydia! She
+never can hold out against you and George, the nearest she has in the
+world. I should think you&#8217;d feel awfully about what people are
+saying&mdash;her letting Ariadne be adopted in that scandalous way when she
+had brothers and sisters. I should <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_361" id="pg_361">361</a></span>think you&#8217;d feel like asserting
+yourselves. <i>I</i> do, certainly! I&#8217;m just as near to Ariadne as you are!
+And I know George is perfectly furious about the whole business!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But maybe the doctor won&#8217;t let us go in, right in to her&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A long-cherished grudge rose to the surface in Mrs. Lowder&#8217;s energetic
+reply: &#8220;Well, I guess this is one time when the high-and-mighty Dr.
+Melton&#8217;ll have to be shoved on one side, and if necessary I&#8217;ll do the
+shoving!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You feel justified?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Justified! I should think I do! Justified in keeping my brother&#8217;s child
+out of the clutches of that&mdash;and if my husband and your brother together
+can&#8217;t raise the cash and the pull to get Ariadne away from him, too, I
+miss my guess. They will; of course they will, or what&#8217;s the use of
+having money when you go to law!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Marietta was silent. Madeleine took her lack of responsiveness as due to
+the resentment of a poor person to her remarks as to the value of wealth
+in a democracy. She frowned, regretting a false step, and went on
+conciliatorily: &#8220;Of course we&#8217;re only doing what any decent family is
+bound to do&mdash;protecting the children. It&#8217;s what Lydia herself would want
+if she were in her right mind.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>She fell silent now, restless, fidgeting about, picking up small objects
+and setting them down unseeingly, and occasionally going to the window
+to look out at the hot, rainy night. She was in mourning for Paul, and
+above her black draperies her face was now like marble.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Mortimer, also in black, sat in a determinedly passive silence.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, the younger woman broke out: &#8220;Oh, I&#8217;ll go crazy if I just stay
+here! I&#8217;m going upstairs to see the nurse again.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In an instant she was back, her face whiter than before.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s a boy&mdash;alive, all right&mdash;half an hour ago. Would you think they&#8217;d
+let us sit here and never tell us&mdash;&#8221; Her voice changed. &#8220;A little boy&mdash;&#8221;
+She sat down.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How is Lydia?&#8221; asked Lydia&#8217;s sister.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_362" id="pg_362">362</a></span>&#8220;&mdash;a little boy,&#8221; said Madeleine. She addressed the other woman
+peremptorily. &#8220;I want him! You can have Ariadne!&#8221; She flushed as she
+spoke, and added defiantly: &#8220;I know I always said I didn&#8217;t want
+children!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;How is Lydia?&#8221; Marietta broke in with an angry impatience.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Very low, the nurse said; Dr. Melton wouldn&#8217;t give any hope.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Marietta&#8217;s face twitched. Her large white hands clasped each other hard.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m going into the doctor&#8217;s office to telephone my husband,&#8221; went on
+Madeleine; &#8220;there&#8217;s not a minute to lose.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>After she was alone, Mrs. Mortimer&#8217;s thin, dark face settled into tragic
+repose. She leaned back her head and closed her eyes, from which a slow
+tear ran down over her sallow cheeks. There was no sound but the patter
+of summer rain on the porch roof outside.</p>
+
+<p>Firm, light steps came hastily to the outer door, the door clicked open
+and shut, the steps came down the hall. Mrs. Mortimer sat up and opened
+her eyes. She saw a tall man in rough clothes, hatless, with raindrops
+glistening on his bright, close-cropped hair and beard. He was
+hesitating at the foot of the stairs, but at her slight movement he
+caught sight of her and rushed toward her. &#8220;Has she&mdash;is there&mdash;&#8221; he
+began.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Mortimer gazed intently into his quivering face. &#8220;My sister has
+given birth to a son, and lies at the point of death,&#8221; she said with her
+unsparing conciseness, but not harshly.</p>
+
+<p>The man she addressed threw up one hand as though she had struck him,
+and took an aimless, unsteady step. Mrs. Mortimer did not turn away her
+eyes from the revelation of his face. Her own grew sterner. She was
+trying to bring herself to speak again. She put her hand on his arm to
+attract his attention, and looked with a fierce earnestness into his
+face. &#8220;Listen,&#8221; she said. &#8220;We were wrong, all of us, about Lydia. We
+were wrong about everything. You were right. I wanted to tell you. If my
+sister had <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_363" id="pg_363">363</a></span>lived&mdash;she is so young&mdash;I hoped&mdash;&#8221; She turned away to hide
+the sudden break-up of her rigid calm. &#8220;Little Lydia!&#8221; she cried. &#8220;Oh,
+misery! misery!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Behind them was the sound of a shutting door and a key turned in the
+lock. They both spun about and saw Mrs. Lowder slip the key into the
+bosom of her dress. Her aspect of white determination suited this
+theatrical gesture, as she placed herself quickly before the door. &#8220;If
+you will promise me solemnly that you will leave the house at once, I
+will let you out,&#8221; she said, in a high, shaking voice.</p>
+
+<p>Rankin did not answer. He looked at her as though he did not see her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What business have you here, anyhow?&#8221; she went on fiercely.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I am here to adopt Mrs. Hollister&#8217;s second child,&#8221; stated Rankin,
+collecting himself with an effort.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Lowder&#8217;s pale face flushed. &#8220;You&#8217;ll do nothing of the sort. I shall
+adopt my brother&#8217;s child myself! How <i>dare</i> you&mdash;a perfect stranger&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mrs. Hollister wishes it,&#8221; said Rankin.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Lydia is out of her mind&mdash;if she is alive!&#8221; said Madeleine, trembling
+excitedly, &#8220;and the child&#8217;s own relatives are the proper&mdash;you needn&#8217;t
+think you are going to keep Ariadne, either! It can be proved in any
+court that Lydia was crazy, and that her family are the ones that ought
+to&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That will be decided in the future,&#8221; said Rankin. &#8220;For the present I
+have a legal right to Ariadne, and I shall have to the boy!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Do you mean you would dare to lay hands on a woman?&#8221; cried Madeleine,
+extending her arms across the door.</p>
+
+<p>Rankin turned, and in one stride had reached the window, which stood
+open to the hot, rainy summer night. He was gone in an instant.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Quick! quick! Lock the front door!&#8221; cried Madeleine, fumbling with the
+key. She turned it and darted into the hallway, and fell back, crying
+angrily: &#8220;Oh, no! there&#8217;s the back door&mdash;and the doctor&#8217;s office and all
+the windows. <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_364" id="pg_364">364</a></span>It&#8217;s no use! It&#8217;s no use!&#8221; She broke into a storm of sobs.
+&#8220;You didn&#8217;t help a bit!&#8221; she cried furiously to the other woman. &#8220;You
+didn&#8217;t even try to help!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was an accusation against which Marietta did not attempt to defend
+herself.</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_365" id="pg_365">365</a></span>
+<a name="THE_SWAYING_BALANCE_13109" id="THE_SWAYING_BALANCE_13109"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XXXV</p>
+<p class="l c">THE SWAYING BALANCE</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Dr. Melton was at the top of the stairs as the other man came bounding
+up. &#8220;Where in God&#8217;s name have you been?&#8221; he demanded. &#8220;Did you start as
+soon as my messenger&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No messenger came&mdash;only &#8217;Stashie just now. I started the instant she&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Have you the paper&mdash;the contract&mdash;whatever it&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin showed a flash of white in his pocket. &#8220;Is she able to sign it?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh, she <i>must</i>! She won&#8217;t have an instant&#8217;s peace until she does. She
+has been wild because you were so late in&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Their hurried, broken colloquy was cut short by a nurse who came to Dr.
+Melton, saying, &#8220;The patient is always asking if the gentleman who is
+to&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, yes; he is here.&#8221; The doctor motioned her to precede them. &#8220;Go in;
+you&#8217;re needed as a witness.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He held Rankin back an instant at the door. &#8220;Remember! No heroics! Just
+have the signing done as quickly as possible and get out!&#8221; His little
+wizened face looked ghastly in the dim light of the hall, but his voice
+was firm, and his hand did not tremble.</p>
+
+<p>Rankin followed him into the bedroom, which was filled with a strong
+odor of antiseptics. The nurse turned on the electric light, shading it
+with her hand so that the light fell only on the lower part of the bed,
+leaving Lydia&#8217;s head in the shadow.</p>
+
+<p>She lay very straight and stark, as though, thought Rankin despairingly,
+she were already dead. Her right arm was out over the sheet, her thin
+hand nerveless. Her face <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_366" id="pg_366">366</a></span>was very white, her lips swollen and bleeding
+as though she had bitten them repeatedly. She was absolutely motionless,
+lying on her back with closed eyes. At the slight sound made by the men
+in entering, she opened her eyes and looked at them. Every vestige of
+color dropped out of Rankin&#8217;s face. Her eyes were alive, sane,
+exalted&mdash;Lydia&#8217;s own eyes again.</p>
+
+<p>He was holding the paper open in his hand, and without a word knelt down
+by the bed, offering it to her mutely. Their eyes met in a long gaze.
+The doctor and nurse looked away from this mute communion. Rankin put a
+pen in Lydia&#8217;s fingers and held up the paper. With, a faint, sighing
+breath, loud in the silent room, she raised her hand. It fell to the bed
+again. Dr. Melton then knelt beside her, put his own sinewy, corded
+fingers around it and guided it to the paper. The few lines were traced.
+Lydia&#8217;s hand dropped and her eyes closed. Rankin stood up to go.</p>
+
+<p>The nurse turned off the light and the room was again in a half
+obscurity, the deep, steady voice of the rain coming in through the open
+windows, the sweet summer-night smells mingling with the acrid odor of
+chemicals, Lydia lying straight and stark under the sheet&mdash;but now her
+eyes were open, shining, fixed on Rankin. Their light was the last he
+saw as he closed the door behind him.</p>
+
+<p>After a time the doctor came out and joined Rankin waiting at the head
+of the stairs. He looked very old and tired, but the ghastly expression
+of strain was replaced with a flickering restlessness. He came up to
+Rankin, blinking rapidly, and touched him on the arm. &#8220;Look here!&#8221; he
+whispered. &#8220;Her pulse has gone down from a hundred and fifty to a
+hundred and thirty.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He sat down on the top step, clasped his hands about his knees, and
+leaned his white head against the balustrade. He looked like some small,
+weary, excited old child. &#8220;Lord, Rankin! Sit down when you get a
+chance!&#8221; he whispered. &#8220;If you&#8217;d been through what I have! And you
+needn&#8217;t try to get me to add another word to what I&#8217;ve just told you. I
+don&#8217;t dare! It may mean nothing, <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_367" id="pg_367">367</a></span>you know. It may very likely mean
+nothing. Good Heavens! The mental sensitiveness of women at this time!
+It&#8217;s beyond belief. I never get used to the miracle of it. Everything
+turns on it&mdash;everything! If the pulse should go down ten more now, I
+should&mdash;Oh, Heaven bless that crazy Celt for getting you here! Good
+Lord! If you hadn&#8217;t come when you did! I don&#8217;t see what could have
+become of the messenger I sent&mdash;why, hours ago&mdash;I knew that nothing
+could go right if you weren&#8217;t&mdash;is that the door?&#8221; He sprang up and sank
+back again&mdash;&#8220;I told the nurse to report as soon as there was any
+change&mdash;I was afraid if I stayed in the room she would feel the
+twitching of my damned nerves&mdash;yes, really&mdash;it&#8217;s so&mdash;she&#8217;s in a state
+when a feather&#8217;s weight&mdash;suppose &#8217;Stashie hadn&#8217;t brought you! I couldn&#8217;t
+have kept Madeleine off much longer&mdash;God! if <i>Madeleine</i> had gone into
+that room, I&mdash;Lydia&mdash;but nobody told &#8217;Stashie to go! It must have been
+an inspiration. I thought of course my messenger&mdash;I was expecting you
+every instant. She&#8217;s been crouching out here in the hall all night, not
+venturing even to ask a question, until I caught sight of her eyes&mdash;she
+loves Lydia too! I told her then the baby had come and that her mistress
+had no chance unless you were here. She must have&mdash;when did she&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin gave a sound like a sob, and leaned against the wall. He had not
+stirred before since the doctor&#8217;s first words. &#8220;You don&#8217;t mean there&#8217;s
+<i>hope</i>?&#8221; he whispered, &#8220;any hope at all?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The doctor sprang at him and clapped his hand over his mouth. &#8220;I didn&#8217;t
+say it! I didn&#8217;t say it!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The door behind them opened, and the nurse stepped out with a noiseless
+briskness. The doctor walked toward her steadily and listened to her
+quick, low-toned report. Then he nodded, and she stepped back into the
+bedroom and shut the door. He stood staring at the floor, one hand at
+his lips.</p>
+
+<p>Rankin made an inarticulate murmur of appeal. His face glared white
+through the obscurity of the hall.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_368" id="pg_368">368</a></span>The older man went back to him, and looked up earnestly into his eyes.
+&#8220;Yes; there&#8217;s every hope,&#8221; he said. He added, with a brave smile: &#8220;For
+you and Lydia there&#8217;s every hope in the world. For me, there&#8217;s the usual
+lot of fathers.&#8221;</p>
+
+<hr class="major" />
+<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em">
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_369" id="pg_369">369</a></span>
+<a name="ANOTHER_DAY_BEGINS_13228" id="ANOTHER_DAY_BEGINS_13228"></a>
+<p class="xl c">CHAPTER XXXVI</p>
+<p class="l c">ANOTHER DAY BEGINS</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>They started. From below came a wail of fright. As they listened the
+sound came nearer and nearer. &#8220;That&#8217;s Ariadne&mdash;a bad dream&mdash;get her
+quiet, for the Lord&#8217;s sake.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Where is she sleeping?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In the room next the parlor.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin gave an exclamation, and leaped down the stairs. At the foot he
+was met by a little figure in sleeping-drawers. &#8220;Favver! Favver!&#8221; she
+sobbed, holding up her arms.</p>
+
+<p>Rankin caught her up and held her close. &#8220;You promised you wouldn&#8217;t get
+so afraid of dreams, little daughter,&#8221; he said in a low, tender voice of
+reproach.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But this was a nawful one!&#8221; wept Ariadne. &#8220;I fought I heard a lot of
+voices, men&#8217;s and ladies&#8217; as mad&mdash;Oh! awful mad&mdash;and loud!&#8221; She went on
+incoherently that she had been too frightened to stir, even though after
+a while she dreamed that the front door slammed and they all went away.
+But then she was <i>too</i> frightened, and came out to find Favver.</p>
+
+<p>Rankin took her back to her bed, and sat down beside it, keeping one big
+hand about the trembling child&#8217;s cold little fingers. &#8220;It was only a bad
+dream, Ariadne. Just go to sleep now. Father&#8217;ll sit here till you do.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You won&#8217;t let them come back?&#8221; asked the child, drawing long, shaken
+breaths.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No,&#8221; he said quietly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;ll always be close, to take care of me?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, dear.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And of Muvver and &#8217;Stashie?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_370" id="pg_370">370</a></span>There was a pause.</p>
+
+<p>Ariadne spoke in grieved astonishment. &#8220;Why, of <i>course</i> of Muvver and
+&#8217;Stashie, Favver.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Rankin took a sudden great breath. &#8220;I hope so, Ariadne.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, you <i>can</i> if you want to,&#8221; the child gravely gave her assent.</p>
+
+<p>She said no more for a time, clutching tightly to his hand. Then,
+&#8220;Favver.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, dear.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I fink I could go to sleep better if I had my bunny.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, dear,&#8221; said the man patiently; &#8220;where is he?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I fink he&#8217;s under ve chair where my clothes are&mdash;ve <i>big</i> chair.
+&#8217;Stashie lets me put my clothes on ve biggest chair.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The man fumbled about in the dark. Then, &#8220;Here&#8217;s your bunny, Ariadne.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The child murmured something drowsily unintelligible. The man took his
+seat again by the bed. There was a pause. The child&#8217;s breathing grew
+long and regular. The rain sounded loud in the silence.</p>
+
+<p>In the distance a street-car rattled noisily by. Ariadne started up with
+a scream: &#8220;Favver! Favver!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Right here, dear. Just the trolley-car.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It &#8217;minded me of ve mad ladies&#8217; voices,&#8221; explained Ariadne
+apologetically, breathing quickly. She added: &#8220;Vat was such a <i>nawful</i>
+dream, Favver. I wonder could I have your watch to hear tick in my hand
+to go me to sleep.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, dear; but only for to-night because of the bad dream.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There were little nestling noises, gradually quieting down. Then,
+sleepily:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Favver, please.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes, dear.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I fink I could go <i>all</i> to sleep if you&#8217;d pit your head down on my
+pillow next my bunny.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg_371" id="pg_371">371</a></span>A stir in the darkness, and an instant&#8217;s quiet, followed by, &#8220;Why,
+Favver, what makes your face all over water?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There was no answer.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And your beard is as wet as&mdash;&#8221; She broke off to explain to herself:
+&#8220;Oh, it&#8217;s rain, of tourse. I forgot it&#8217;s raining. <i>Now</i> I remember how
+to <i>really</i> go all to sleep. I did before. I listen to it going patter,
+patter, patter, patter&mdash;&#8221; The little voice died away.</p>
+
+<p>There was no sound at all in the room but the swift, light voice of the
+watch calling out that Time, Time, Time can cure all, can cure all, can
+cure all&mdash;and outside the brooding murmur of the rain.</p>
+
+<p>A faint, clear gray began to show at the windows.</p>
+
+<p style="margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:3em; text-align:center;">THE END</p>
+
+<hr class="dashed" />
+
+<p class="c nm b">ROMAIN ROLLAND&#8217;S</p>
+<p class="l c nm b">JEAN-CHRISTOPHE</p>
+<p class="c nm b">DAWN - MORNING - YOUTH - REVOLT</p>
+<p class="c nm">Translated by GILBERT CANNAN.</p>
+
+<p class="c">600 pp. $1.50 net; by mail, $1.62.</p>
+
+<p>It commences with vivid episodes of this musician&#8217;s childhood, his
+fears, fancies, and troubles, and his almost uncanny musical sense. He
+plays before the Grand Duke at seven, but he is destined for greater
+things. An idol of the hour, in some ways suggesting Richard Strauss,
+tries in vain to wreck his faith in his career. Early love episodes
+follow, and at the close the hero, like Wagner, has to fly, a hopeful
+exile.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;Hats off, gentlemen&mdash;a genius.&#8217; ... Has the time come for the 20th
+century to uncover before a master work? A book as big, as elemental, as
+original as though the art of fiction began to-day.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Springfield
+Republican.</i> (<i>Entire notice on application.</i>)</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The most momentous novel that has come to us from France, or from any
+other European country, in a decade.... Highly commendable and effective
+translation ... the story moves at a rapid pace. It never lags.&#8221;&mdash;<i>E. F.
+Edgett in Boston Transcript</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="l c nm b">JEAN-CHRISTOPHE IN PARIS</p>
+<p class="c nm b">THE MARKET-PLACE</p>
+<p class="c nm b">ANTOINETTE - THE HOUSE</p>
+<p class="c">473 pp. $1.50 net; by mail, $1.62.</p>
+
+<p>A writer in the <i>London Daily Mail</i> comments on the French volumes here
+translated as follows:&mdash;&#8220;In &#8216;The Market-Place,&#8217; we are with the hero in
+his attempt to earn his living and to conquer Paris. The author
+introduces us to the numberless &#8216;society&#8217; circles in Paris and all the
+cliques of so-called musicians in pages of superb and bitter irony and
+poetic fire. Christophe becomes famous. In the next volume, Antoinette
+is the sister of Christophe&#8217;s great friend, Olivier. She loves
+Christophe.... This, the best volume of the series, is a flawless gem.
+&#8216;The House&#8217; introduces us to the friends and enemies of the young
+musician. They gravitate around Christophe and Olivier, amid the noisy
+and enigmatic whirl of Parisian life.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It is worth adding that toward the close of this book a war-cloud
+appears between France and Germany. Christophe, with Olivier, visits his
+mother and his Fatherland.</p>
+
+<table summary="" width="100%">
+<tr><td colspan="2"><hr style="width: 100%; margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: 0em; border:none; border-bottom:1px solid;" /></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center">HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY</td></tr>
+<tr class="cs"><td align="left">PUBLISHERS</td><td align="right">NEW YORK</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr class="full" />
+
+<p class="l c b">WILLIAM DE MORGAN&#8217;S JOSEPH VANCE</p>
+
+<p>A touching story, yet full of humor, of lifelong love and heroic
+sacrifice. While the scene is mostly in and near the London of the
+fifties, there are some telling glimpses of Italy, where the author
+lives much of the time ($1.75).</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The book of the last decade; the best thing in fiction since Mr.
+Meredith and Mr. Hardy; must take its place as the first great English
+novel that has appeared in the twentieth century.&#8221;&mdash;<span class="smcap">Lewis Melville</span> in
+<i>New York Times Saturday Review</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;If the reader likes both &#8216;David Copperfield&#8217; and &#8216;Peter Ibbetson,&#8217; he
+can find the two books in this one.&#8221;&mdash;The <i>Independent</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="l c b">WILLIAM DE MORGAN&#8217;S ALICE-FOR-SHORT</p>
+
+<p>This might paradoxically be called a genial ghost-and-murder story, yet
+humor and humanity again dominate, and the most striking element is the
+touching love story of an unsuccessful man. The reappearance in
+Nineteenth Century London of the long-buried past, and a remarkable case
+of suspended memory, give the dramatic background ($1.75).</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Really worth reading and praising ... will be hailed as a masterpiece.
+If any writer of the present era is read a half century hence, a quarter
+century, or even a decade, that writer is William De Morgan.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Boston
+Transcript</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is the Victorian age itself that speaks in those rich, interesting,
+over-crowded books.... Will be remembered as Dickens&#8217; novels are
+remembered.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Springfield Republican</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="l c b">WILLIAM DE MORGAN&#8217;S SOMEHOW GOOD</p>
+
+<p>The purpose and feeling of this novel are intense, yet it is all
+mellowed by humor, and it contains perhaps the author&#8217;s freshest and
+most sympathetic story of young love. Throughout its pages the &#8220;God be
+praised evil has turned to good&#8221; of the old Major rings like a trumpet
+call of hope. This story of to-day tells of a triumph of courage and
+devotion ($1.75).</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A book as sound, as sweet, as wholesome, as wise, as any in the range
+of fiction.&#8221;&mdash;<i>The Nation</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Our older novelists (Dickens and Thackeray) will have to look to their
+laurels, for the new one is fast proving himself their equal. A higher
+quality of enjoyment than is derivable from the work of any other
+novelist now living and active in either England or America.&#8221;&mdash;<i>The
+Dial</i>.</p>
+
+<table summary="" width="100%">
+<tr><td colspan="2"><hr style="width: 100%; margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: 0em; border:none; border-bottom:1px solid;" /></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center">HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY</td></tr>
+<tr class="s"><td align="left">34 WEST 33D STREET</td><td align="right">NEW YORK</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr class="full" />
+
+<p class="l c b">WILLIAM DE MORGAN&#8217;S IT NEVER CAN HAPPEN AGAIN</p>
+
+<p>This novel turns on a strange marital complication. The beautiful Judith
+Arkroyd, with her stage ambitions, the pathetic Lizarann and her father,
+Blind Jim, are striking figures. There are strong dramatic episodes
+($1.75).</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;De Morgan at his very best, and how much better his best is than the
+work of any novelist of the past thirty years.&#8221;&mdash;<i>The Independent</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There has been nothing at all like it in our day. The best of our
+contemporary novelists ... do not so come home to our business and our
+bosoms ... most enchanting ... infinitely lovable and pathetic.&#8221;&mdash;<i>The
+Nation</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="l c b">WILLIAM DE MORGAN&#8217;S AN AFFAIR OF DISHONOR</p>
+
+<p>A dramatic story of England in the time of the Restoration. It commences
+with a fatal duel, and shows a new phase of its remarkable author
+($1.75).</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;An artistic triumph.... He is a persistent humorist.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Boston
+Transcript</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A better story than any of the others, so far as sustained interest is
+concerned.... The rich, suggestive, highly metaphorical the M. I.
+style.... A marvelous example of Mr. De Morgan&#8217;s inexhaustible fecundity
+of invention.... Shines as a romance quite as much as &#8216;Joseph Vance&#8217;
+does among realistic novels.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Chicago Record-Herald</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="l c b nm">WILLIAM DE MORGAN&#8217;S A LIKELY STORY</p>
+<p class="c nm"> $1.35 net.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Begins comfortably enough with a little domestic quarrel in a
+studio.... The story shifts suddenly, however, to a brilliantly told
+tragedy of the Italian Renaissance embodied in a girl&#8217;s portrait ...
+which speaks and affects the life of the modern people who hear it....
+The many readers who like Mr. De Morgan will enjoy this charming fancy
+greatly.&#8221;&mdash;<i>New York Sun</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In the forefront of English fiction.... Both ingenious and amusing....
+All in his highly personal and individual manner, the result of which is
+a novel with an emphatic difference from all other works of contemporary
+fiction.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Boston Transcript</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;One sparkling stream, where realism in its sweeter, human and humorous
+aspects shall appear at its best.... Humor, wisdom, artists&#8217; jargon from
+the studios, psychic phenomena.... All in Mr. De Morgan&#8217;s best vein....
+The advancing chapters ... how realistically modern they are, with the
+exactness of finish, appositeness of delineation, humor in dialog, and
+condensed dramatic action!&#8221;&mdash;<i>The Independent</i>.</p>
+
+<table summary="" width="100%">
+<tr><td colspan="2"><hr style="width: 100%; margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: 0em; border:none; border-bottom:1px solid;" /></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><span style="font-size:small">A thirty-two page illustrated leaflet about Mr. De Morgan, with<br />complete
+reviews of his first four books, sent on request.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center">HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY</td></tr>
+<tr class="s"><td align="left">PUBLISHERS</td><td align="right">NEW YORK</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr class="full" />
+
+<p class="l c b nm">INEZ HAYNES GILLMORE&#8217;S JANEY</p>
+<p class="c nm">Illustrated by <span class="smcap">Ada C. Williamson</span>. $1.25 net.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Being the record of a short interval in the journey thru life and the
+struggle with society of a little girl of nine, in which she repudiates
+her duties as an amateur mother, snares the most blundering of birds,
+successfully invades Grub Street, peers behind the veil of the seen into
+the unseen, interprets the great bard, grubs at the root of all evil,
+faces the three great problems&mdash;Birth&mdash;Death&mdash;Time&mdash;and finally, in
+passing thru the laborious process of becoming ten, discovers the great
+illusion,&#8221; says the descriptive title.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Our hearts were captive to &#8216;Phoebe and Ernest,&#8217; and now accept &#8216;Janey.&#8217;
+... She is so engaging.... Told so vivaciously and with such
+good-natured and pungent asides for grown people.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Outlook</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Janey&#8217;s naturalness in quest of the whys of life is the naturalness of
+the child who lives in the world instead of between the covers of a
+delightfully written book.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Washington Evening Star</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Depicts youthful human nature as one who knows and loves it. Her
+&#8216;Phoebe and Ernest&#8217; studies are deservedly popular, and now, in &#8216;Janey,&#8217;
+this clever writer has accomplished an equally charming
+portrait.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Chicago Record-Herald</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="l c b nm">INEZ HAYNES GILLMORE&#8217;S PHOEBE AND ERNEST</p>
+<p class="c nm">With 30 illustrations by <span class="smcap">R. F. Schabelitz</span>. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>Parents will recognize themselves in the story, and laugh
+understandingly with, and sometimes at, Mr. and Mrs. Martin and their
+children.</p>
+
+<p>Youths and maidens will understand Phoebe and Ernest&#8217;s experiences and
+problems.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Attracted delighted attention in the course of its serial publication.
+Sentiment and humor are deftly mingled in this clever book.&#8221;&mdash;<i>N. Y.
+Tribune</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We must go back to Louisa Alcott for their equals.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Boston
+Advertiser</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;For young and old alike we know of no more refreshing story.&#8221;&mdash;<i>New
+York Evening Post</i>.</p>
+
+<table summary="" width="100%">
+<tr><td colspan="2"><hr style="width: 100%; margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: 0em; border:none; border-bottom:1px solid;" /></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center">HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY</td></tr>
+<tr class="s"><td align="left">PUBLISHERS</td><td align="right">NEW YORK</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr class="full" />
+
+<p class="l c b nm">HENRY WILLIAMS&#8217;S THE UNITED STATES NAVY</p>
+<p class="c nm">A Handbook.</p>
+
+<p>By <span class="smcap">Henry Williams</span>, Naval Constructor, U. S. Navy. With 32 full-page
+illustrations and a number in the text. 12mo. $1.50 net; by mail, $1.67.</p>
+
+<p>This is a neat, crisp, matter-of-fact account of our Navy, with an
+occasional illuminating anecdote of famous court-martials and such. It
+has been passed by high authorities and its publication officially
+sanctioned. The <i>Contents</i> includes: Naval History&mdash;The Navy&#8217;s
+Organization&mdash;The Navy&#8217;s Personnel&mdash;Man-of-War in Commission&mdash;Classes of
+Ships in the Navy&mdash;Description&mdash;High Explosives; Torpedoes; Mines;
+Aeroplanes&mdash;Designing and Building a Warship; Dry Docks&mdash;The National
+Defense.</p>
+
+<p class="l c b nm">THOMAS LEAMING&#8217;S</p>
+<p class="l c b nm">A PHILADELPHIA LAWYER IN THE LONDON COURTS</p>
+
+<p>Illustrated by the Author. 8vo. $2.00 net; by mail, $2.15. (Circular on
+application.)</p>
+
+<p>A trained observer&#8217;s graphic description of the English Law Courts, of
+their ancient customs yet up-to-date methods; of the lives and
+activities of the modern barrister and solicitor&mdash;the &#8220;K. C.,&#8221; the
+&#8220;Junior,&#8221; the &#8220;Devil&#8221;&mdash;and of the elaborate etiquette, perpetuated by
+the Inns of Court, which still inflexibly rules them, despite the
+tendencies of the times and growth of socialism.</p>
+
+<p><i>Nation</i>:&mdash;&#8220;The style of narrative, the conciseness of statement, and
+the wealth of allusion make this book one which certainly the lawyer,
+and probably many laymen, will wish to finish at one sitting, and not
+hurriedly.... We hope to see the author appear again, and as a
+Philadelphia Lawyer at Home.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Bookman</i>.&mdash;&#8220;This quiet recital of facts ought of itself to create a
+revolution in this country.... He disclaims any intention of entering
+upon odious comparisons.... When the Bar of America is aroused to the
+necessity of reform it will find these observations ... a mine of
+well-digested information and helpful suggestions.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Dial</i>:&mdash;&#8220;His interesting account of the trial and conviction of Madar
+La Dhingra.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>New York Evening Sun</i>:&mdash;&#8220;A suitable mixture of anecdote and
+generalization to give the reader a pleasant and clear idea of English
+courts, their ways and plan.... One of the most valuable chapters
+relates to the discipline of the bar.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Philadelphia Press</i>:&mdash;&#8220;A vast deal of useful and often fascinating
+information.... An eminently readable volume, which, although designed
+primarily for the lay reader, has already elicited hearty commendation
+from not a few leaders of the profession.... American lawyers are
+beginning to see that much may be learned from modern English
+practice.... On the subject of the ethics of the English bar Mr. Leaming
+has much to say that is worth careful perusal.&#8221;</p>
+
+<table summary="" width="100%">
+<tr><td colspan="2"><hr style="width: 100%; margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: 0em; border:none; border-bottom:1px solid;" /></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center">HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY</td></tr>
+<tr class="s"><td align="left">34 WEST 33D STREET</td><td align="right">NEW YORK</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr class="full" />
+
+<p class="c" style="text-decoration:underline">SIXTH EDITION, ENLARGED AND WITH PORTRAITS</p>
+
+<p class="c b">HALE&#8217;S DRAMATISTS OF TO-DAY</p>
+
+<p class="c">ROSTAND, HAUPTMANN, SUDERMANN,<br />PINERO, SHAW, PHILLIPS, MAETERLINCK</p>
+
+<p class="c nm">By <span class="smcap">Prof. Edward Everett Hale, Jr.</span>, of Union College.<br />With gilt top,
+$1.50 net; by mail, $1.60.</p>
+
+<p>Since this work first appeared in 1905, Maeterlinck&#8217;s <span class="smcap">Sister Beatrice</span>,
+<span class="smcap">The Blue Bird</span> and <span class="smcap">Mary Magdalene</span>, Rostand&#8217;s <span class="smcap">Chantecler</span> and Pinero&#8217;s
+<span class="smcap">Mid-channel</span> and <span class="smcap">The Thunderbolt</span>&mdash;among the notable plays by some of Dr.
+Hale&#8217;s dramatists&mdash;have been acted here. Discussions of them are added
+to this new edition, as are considerations of Bernard Shaw&#8217;s and Stephen
+Phillips&#8217; latest plays. The author&#8217;s papers on Hauptmann and Sudermann,
+with slight additions, with his &#8220;Note on Standards of Criticism,&#8221; &#8220;Our
+Idea of Tragedy,&#8221; and an appendix of all the plays of each author, with
+dates of their first performance or publication, complete the volume.</p>
+
+<p><i>Bookman</i>: &#8220;He writes in a pleasant, free-and-easy way.... He accepts
+things chiefly at their face value, but he describes them so accurately
+and agreeably that he recalls vividly to mind the plays we have seen and
+the pleasure we have found in them.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>New York Evening Post</i>: &#8220;It is not often nowadays that a theatrical
+book can be met with so free from gush and mere eulogy, or so weighted
+by common sense ... an excellent chronological appendix and full index
+... uncommonly useful for reference.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Dial</i>: &#8220;Noteworthy example of literary criticism in one of the most
+interesting of literary fields.... Provides a varied menu of the most
+interesting character.... Prof. Hale establishes confidential relations
+with the reader from the start.... Very definite opinions, clearly
+reasoned and amply fortified by example.... Well worth reading a second
+time.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>New York Tribune</i>: &#8220;Both instructive and entertaining.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Brooklyn Eagle</i>: &#8220;A dramatic critic who is not just &#8216;busting&#8217; himself
+with Titanic intellectualities, but who is a readable dramatic
+critic.... Mr. Hale is a modest and sensible, as well as an acute and
+sound critic.... Most people will be surprised and delighted with Mr.
+Hale&#8217;s simplicity, perspicuity and ingenuousness.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>The Theatre</i>: &#8220;A pleasing lightness of touch.... Very readable book.&#8221;</p>
+
+<table summary="" width="100%">
+<tr><td colspan="2"><hr style="width: 100%; margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: 0em; border:none; border-bottom:1px solid;" /></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center">HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY</td></tr>
+<tr class="s"><td align="left">PUBLISHERS</td><td align="right">NEW YORK</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Squirrel-Cage, by Dorothy Canfield
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SQUIRREL-CAGE ***
+
+***** This file should be named 23768-h.htm or 23768-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
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+</body>
+</html>
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@@ -0,0 +1,13980 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Squirrel-Cage, by Dorothy Canfield
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Squirrel-Cage
+
+Author: Dorothy Canfield
+
+Illustrator: John Alanzo Williams
+
+Release Date: December 8, 2007 [EBook #23768]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SQUIRREL-CAGE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Paul stood by her, looking down into her eyes, bending
+over her, smiling, pressing, confident, masterful. (Page 96)]
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+                           THE SQUIRREL-CAGE
+
+                                   By
+                            DOROTHY CANFIELD
+
+                         With Illustrations By
+                          JOHN ALONZO WILLIAMS
+
+                                New York
+                         HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+                                  1912
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+                         Copyright, 1911, 1912,
+                                   By
+                          THE RIDGWAY COMPANY
+
+                            Copyright, 1912,
+                                   By
+                         HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+
+                         Published March, 1912
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+                                CONTENTS
+
+
+                                 BOOK I
+
+                           THE FAIRY PRINCESS
+
+ CHAPTER                                                            PAGE
+
+       I An American Family                                            3
+      II American Beauties                                            12
+     III Picking up the Threads                                       22
+      IV The Dawn                                                     32
+       V The Day Begins                                               42
+      VI Lydia's Godfather                                            55
+     VII Outside the Labyrinth                                        61
+    VIII The Shadow of the Coming Event                               78
+      IX Father and Daughter                                          88
+       X Casus Belli                                                  99
+
+
+                                BOOK II
+
+                         IN THE LOCOMOTIVE CAB
+
+      XI What is Best for Lydia                                      115
+     XII A Sop to the Wolves                                         122
+    XIII Lydia Decides in Perfect Freedom                            131
+     XIV Mid-Season Nerves                                           139
+      XV A Half-Hour's Liberty                                       154
+     XVI Engaged to be Married                                       165
+    XVII Card-Dealing and Patent Candles                             177
+
+
+                                BOOK III
+
+                          A SUITABLE MARRIAGE
+
+   XVIII Two Sides to the Question                                   193
+     XIX Lydia's New Motto                                           207
+      XX An Evening's Entertainment                                  215
+     XXI An Element of Solidity                                      226
+    XXII The Voices in the Wood                                      233
+   XXIII For Ariadne's Sake                                          244
+    XXIV "Through Pity and Terror Effecting a
+         Purification of the Heart"                                  261
+     XXV A Black Mile-stone                                          270
+    XXVI A Hint from Childhood                                       277
+   XXVII Lydia Reaches Her Goal and has Her Talk with Her Husband    289
+  XXVIII "The American Man"                                          307
+    XXIX ".........In Tragic Life, God Wot, No Villain Need be.
+         Passions Spin the Plot"                                     318
+     XXX Tribute to the Minotaur                                     328
+
+
+                                BOOK IV
+
+                   BUT IT IS NOT TOO LATE FOR ARIADNE
+
+    XXXI Protection from the Minotaur                                337
+   XXXII As Ariadne Saw It                                           342
+  XXXIII What is Best for the Children?                              351
+   XXXIV Through the Long Night                                      359
+    XXXV The Swaying Balance                                         365
+   XXXVI Another Day Begins                                          369
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+                             ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+Paul stood by her, looking down into her eyes,
+bending over her, smiling, pressing, confident,
+masterful (Page 96)                                         Frontispiece
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+"You say beautiful things!" he replied quietly. "My
+rough quarters are glorified for me"                                  69
+
+"No, no; I can't--see him--I can't stand any more--"                 137
+
+"I see everything now," she went on. "He could not stop."            272
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+                           THE SQUIRREL-CAGE
+
+                                 BOOK I
+
+                           THE FAIRY PRINCESS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+AN AMERICAN FAMILY
+
+
+The house of the Emery family was a singularly good example of the
+capacity of wood and plaster and brick to acquire personality. It was
+the physical symbol of its owners' position in life; it was the history
+of their career, written down for all to see, and as such they felt in
+it the most justifiable pride. When Mr. and Mrs. Emery, directly after
+their wedding in a small Central New York village, had gone West to Ohio
+they had spent their tiny capital in building a small story-and-a-half
+cottage, ornamented with the jig-saw work and fancy turning popular in
+1872, and this had been the nucleus of their present rambling,
+picturesque, many-roomed home. Every step in the long series of changes
+which had led from its first state to its last had a profound and
+gratifying significance for the Emerys, and its final condition,
+prosperous, modern, sophisticated, with the right kind of woodwork in
+every room that showed, with the latest, most unobtrusively artistic
+effects in decoration, represented their culminating well-earned
+position in the inner circle of the best society of Endbury.
+
+Moreover, they felt that just as the house had been attained with
+effort, self-denial and careful calculations, yet still without
+incurring debt, so their social position had been secured by unremitting
+diligence and care, but with no loss of self-respect or even of dignity.
+They were honestly proud both of their house and of their list of
+acquaintances and saw no reason to regard them as less worthy
+achievements of an industrious life than their four creditable grown-up
+children or Judge Emery's honorable reputation at the bar. In their
+youth they had conceived of certain things as worth attaining. They had
+worked hard for these things and their unabashed pleasure in possessing
+them had the vivid and substantial quality which comes from a keen
+memory of battles with a world none too ready to grant human desires.
+
+The two older children, George and Marietta, could remember those early
+struggling days with almost as fresh an emotion as that of their
+parents. Indeed, Marietta, now a competent, sharp-eyed matron of
+thirty-two, could not see the most innocuous colored lithograph without
+an uncontrollable wave of bitterness, so present to her mind was the
+period when they painfully groped their way out of chromos.
+
+The date of that epoch coincided with the date of their first
+acquaintance with the Hollisters. The Hollisters were Endbury's First
+Family; literally so, for they had come up from their farm in Kentucky
+to settle in Endbury when it was but a frontier post. It was a part of
+their superiority over other families that their traditions took
+cognizance of the time when great stumps from the primeval forest stood
+in what was now Endbury's public square, the hub of interurban trolley
+traffic, whence the big, noisy cars started for their infinitely
+radiating journeys over the flat, fertile country about the little city.
+The particular Mrs. Hollister who, at the time the Emerys began to
+pierce the upper crust, was the leader of Endbury society, had discarded
+chromos as much as five years before. Mrs. Emery and Marietta, newly
+admitted to the honor of her acquaintance, wondered to themselves at the
+cold monotony of her black and white engravings. The artlessness of this
+wonder struck shame to their hearts when they chanced to learn that the
+lady had repaid it with a worldly-wise amusement at their own
+highly-colored waterfalls and snow-capped mountain-peaks. Marietta
+could recall as piercingly as if it were yesterday, in how crestfallen a
+chagrin she and her mother had gazed at their parlor after this
+incident, their disillusioned eyes open for the first time to the
+futility of its claim to sophistication. As for the incident that had
+led to the permanent retiring from their table of the monumental
+salt-and-pepper "caster" which had been one of their most prized wedding
+presents, the Emerys refused to allow themselves to remember it, so
+intolerably did it spell humiliation.
+
+Even the oldest son, prosperous, well-established manufacturer that he
+was, could not recall without a shudder his first dinner-party. A branch
+of the Hollisters had moved next door to the Emerys and, to Mrs. Emery's
+great satisfaction, an easy neighborly acquaintance had sprung up
+between the two families. Secure in this familiarity, and not
+distinguishing the immense difference between a chance invitation to
+drop in to dinner and a formal invitation to dine, the young
+business-man had almost forgotten the date for which he had been bidden.
+Remembering it with a start, he had gone straight from his office to the
+house of his hosts, supposing that he would be able, as he had done many
+times before, to wash his face and hands in the bath-room and brush his
+hair in the room of the son of the house.
+
+The sight of a black man in evening dress, who opened the door to him
+instead of the usual maid, sent a vague apprehension through his
+preoccupied mind, but it was not until he found himself in the room set
+apart for the masculine guests and saw everyone arrayed in
+"swallow-tails," as he thought of them, that he realized what he had
+done. The emotion of the moment was one that made a mark on his life.
+
+He had an instant's wild notion of making some excuse to go home and
+dress, for his plight was by no means due to necessity. He had a correct
+outfit of evening clothes, bought at the urgent command of his mother,
+which he had worn several times at public dinners given by the city
+Board of Trade and once at a dancing party at the home of the head of
+his firm. However, the hard sense which made him successful in his
+business kept him from a final absurdity now. He had been seen, and he
+decided grimly that he would be, on the whole, a shade more laughable if
+he appeared later in a changed costume.
+
+He was twenty-one years old at that time; he considered himself a man
+grown. He had been in business for five years and his foot was already
+set firmly on the ladder of commercial success on which he was to mount
+high, but not for nothing had he felt about him all his life the
+inextinguishable desire of his family to outgrow rusticity. He chided
+himself for unmanly pettiness, but the fact remained that throughout the
+interminable evening the sight of his gray striped trousers or colored
+cuffs affected him to a chagrin that was like a wave of physical nausea.
+Four years later he had married a handsome young lady from among the
+Hollister connections, and, moving away to Cleveland, where no memory of
+his antecedents could handicap him, had begun a new social career as
+eminently successful as his rapid commercial expansion. He forced
+himself sometimes to think of that long-past evening as one presses on a
+scar to learn how much soreness is left in an old wound, and he smiled
+at the little tragedy of egotism it had been to him. But it was a wry
+smile.
+
+A brighter recollection to all the Emerys was the justly complacent and
+satisfied remembrance of the house grounds during the first really
+successful social event they had achieved. It was a lawn-fete, given for
+the benefit of St. Luke's church, which Mrs. Emery and Marietta had
+recently joined. Socially, it was the first fruits of their conversion
+from Congregationalism. The weather was fine, the roses were out, the
+very best people were there, the bazaar was profitable, and the dowager
+of the Hollister matrons had spoken warm words of admiration of the
+competent way in which the occasion had been managed to Mrs. Emery,
+smiling and flushed in an indomitably self-respecting pleasure. The
+older Emerys still sometimes spoke of that afternoon and evening as
+parents remember the hour when their baby first walked alone, with
+something of the same mixture of pride in the later achievements of the
+child and of tenderness for its early weakness.
+
+The youngest of the Emerys, many years the junior of her brothers and
+sister, knew nothing at all of the anxious bitter-sweet of these early
+endeavors for sophistication. By the time she came to conscious,
+individual life the summit had been virtually reached. It is not to be
+denied that Lydia had witnessed several abrupt changes in the family
+ideal of household decoration or of entertaining, but since they were
+exactly contemporaneous with similar changes on the part of the
+Hollisters and other people in their circle, these revolutions of taste
+brought with them no sense of humiliation. Such, for instance, was the
+substitution for carpets of hardwood floors and rugs as oriental as the
+purse would allow. Lydia could remember gorgeously flowered carpets on
+every Emery floor, but since they also covered all the prosperous floors
+in town at the same time, it was not more painful to have found them
+attractive than to have worn immensely large sleeves or preposterously
+blousing shirt waists, to have ridden bicycles, or read E. P. Roe, or
+anything else that everybody used to do and did no more. She could
+remember, also, when charades and book-parties were considered amusing
+pastimes for grown-ups, but in passing beyond these primitive tastes the
+Emerys had been well abreast of their contemporaries. The last charade
+party had not been held in _their_ parlors, they congratulated
+themselves.
+
+A philosophic observer who had known the history of Mrs. Emery's life
+might have found something pathetic in her pleasure at Lydia's
+light-hearted jesting at the funny old things people used to think
+pretty and the absurd pursuits they used to think entertaining. It was
+to her a symbol that her daughter had escaped what had caused her so
+much suffering, the uneasy, self-distrusting dread lest she might still
+be finding pretty things that up-to-date people thought grotesque; lest
+suddenly what she had toiled so painfully to obtain should somehow turn
+out to be not the "right thing" after all. Marietta did not recall more
+vividly than did her mother the trying period that had elapsed between
+their new enlightenment on the subject of chromos and the day when an
+unexpected large fee from a client of Mr. Emery (not yet Judge) enabled
+them to hang their Protestant walls with engravings of pagan gods and
+Roman Catholic saints. For their problem had never been the simple one
+of merely discovering the right thing. There had always been added to it
+the complication of securing the right thing out of an income by no
+means limitless. The head of the household had enjoyed the success that
+might have been predicted from his whole-souled absorption in his
+profession, but Judge Emery came of old-fashioned rural stock with
+inelastic ideas of honesty, and though he was more than willing to toil
+early and late to supply funds for his family and satisfy whatever form
+of ambition his women-folk might decree to be the best one, he was not
+willing to take advantage of the perquisites of his position, and never,
+as the phrase in the town ran, "made on the side." Of his temptations
+and of his stout resistance to them, his wife and children knew no more,
+naturally, than of any of the other details of his professional life,
+which, according to the custom of their circle, were as remote and
+hidden from them as if he had departed each morning after his hearty
+early breakfast into another planet; but his wife was proud of the
+integrity which she divined in her husband and, as she often declared
+roundly to Marietta, would not have exchanged his good name for a much
+larger income.
+
+Indeed, the acridity which for Marietta lingered about the recollection
+of their efforts to make themselves over did not exist in the more amply
+satisfied mind of her mother. The difference showed itself visibly in
+the contrast between the daughter's face, stamped with a certain tired,
+unflagging intensity of endeavor, and the freshness of the older woman.
+At thirty-two, Marietta looked, perhaps, no older than her age, but
+obviously more worn by the strain of life than her mother at fifty-six.
+Sometimes, as she noted in her mirror the sharp lines of a fatigue that
+was almost bitterness, she experienced a certain unnerving uncertainty,
+a total lack of zest for what she so eagerly struggled to attain, and
+she envied her mother's single-minded satisfaction in getting what she
+wanted.
+
+Mrs. Emery had enjoyed the warfare of her life heartily; the victories
+for their own sake, the defeats because they had spurred her on to fresh
+and finally successful efforts, and the remembrance of both was sweet to
+her. She loved her husband for himself and for what he had been able to
+give her, and she loved her children ardently, although she had been
+sorely vexed by her second son's unfortunate marriage. He had always
+been a discordant note in the family concert, the veiled, unconscious,
+uneasy skepticism of Marietta bursting out openly in Henry as a
+careless, laughing cynicism, excessively disconcerting to his mother.
+She sometimes thought he had married the grocer's daughter out of
+"contrariness." The irritation which surrounded that event, and the play
+of cross-purposes and discord which had filled the period until the
+misguided young people had voluntarily exiled themselves to the Far
+West, remained more of a sore spot in Mrs. Emery's mind than any blow
+given or taken in her lifelong campaign for distinction. She admitted
+frankly to herself that it was a relief that Harry was no longer near
+her, although her mother's heart ached for the Harry he had seemed to
+her before his rebellion. She fancied that she would enjoy him as of old
+if the litter of inconvenient persons and facts lying between them could
+but be cleared away; with a voluntary blindness not uncommon in parents,
+refusing to recognize that these superficial differences were only the
+outward expression of a fundamental alienation within. At all events, it
+was futile to speculate about the matter, since the width of the
+continent and her son's intense distaste for letter-writing separated
+them. She had come, therefore, to turn all her attention and proud
+affection on her youngest child.
+
+It seemed to her sometimes that Lydia had been granted her by a
+merciful Providence in order that she might make that "fresh start all
+over again" which is the never-realized ideal of erring humanity.
+Marietta had been a young lady fourteen years before, and fourteen years
+meant much--meant everything to people who progressed as fast as the
+Emerys. Uncertain of themselves, they had not ventured to launch
+Marietta boldly upon the waves of a society the chart of which was so
+new to them. She had no coming-out party. She simply put on long skirts,
+coiled her black hair on top of her head, and began going to evening
+parties with a few young men who were amused by the tart briskness of
+her tongue and attracted by the comeliness of her healthful youth. She
+had married the first man who proposed to her--a young insurance agent.
+Since then they had lived in a very comfortable, middling state of
+harmony, apparently on about the same social scale as Marietta's
+parents. That this feat was accomplished on a much smaller income was
+due to Marietta's unrivaled instinct and trained capacity for keeping up
+appearances.
+
+All this history had been creditable, but nothing more; and Mrs. Emery
+often looked at her elder daughter with compunction for her own earlier
+ignorance and helplessness. She could have done so much more for
+Marietta if she had only known how. Mrs. Mortimer was, however, a rather
+prickly personality with whom to attempt to sympathize, and in general
+her mother felt the usual -in-law conclusion about her daughter's life:
+that Marietta could undoubtedly have done better than to marry her
+industrious, negligible husband, but that, on the whole, she might have
+done worse; and it was much to be hoped that her little boy would
+resemble the Emerys and not the Mortimers.
+
+No such philosophical calm restrained her emotions about Lydia. She was
+in positive beauty and charm all that poor Marietta had not been, and
+she was to have in the way of backing and management all that poor
+Marietta had lacked. It seemed to Mrs. Emery that her whole life had
+been devoted to learning what to do and what not to do for Lydia. As the
+time of action drew nearer she nerved herself for the campaign with a
+finely confident feeling that she knew every inch of the ground. Her
+expectancy grew more and more tense as her eagerness rose. During the
+long year that Lydia was in Europe, receiving a final gloss, even higher
+than that imparted by the expensive and exclusive girls' school where
+she had spent the years between fourteen and eighteen, Mrs. Emery laid
+her plans and arranged her life with a fervent devotion to one end--the
+success of Lydia's first season in society. Every room in the house
+seemed to her vision to stand in a bright vacancy awaiting the arrival
+of the debutante.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+AMERICAN BEAUTIES
+
+
+On the morning of Lydia's long-expected return, as Mrs. Emery moved
+restlessly about the large double parlors opening out on a veranda where
+the vines were already golden in the September sunlight, it seemed to
+her that the very walls were blank in hushed eagerness and that the
+chairs and tables turned faces like hers, tired with patience, toward
+the open door. She had not realized until the long separation was almost
+over how unendurably she had missed her baby girl, as she still thought
+of the tall girl of nineteen. She could not wait the few hours that were
+left. Her fortitude had given way just too soon. She must have the dear
+child now, now, in her arms.
+
+She moved absently a spray of goldenrod which hid a Fra Angelico angel
+over the mantel and noted with dramatic self-pity that her hand was
+trembling. She sat down suddenly, and lost herself in a vain attempt to
+recall the well-beloved sound of Lydia's fresh young voice. A knot came
+in her throat, and she covered her face with her large, white,
+carefully-manicured hands.
+
+Marietta came in briskly a few moments later, bringing a bouquet of
+asters from her own garden. She was dressed, as always, with a severe
+reticence in color and line which, though due to her extreme need for
+economy, nevertheless gave to the rather spare outlines of her tall
+figure a distinction, admired by Endbury under the name of stylishness.
+Her rapid step had carried her half-way across the wide room before she
+saw to her surprise that her mother, usually so self-contained, was
+giving way to an inexplicable emotion.
+
+"Good gracious, Mother!" she began in the energetic fashion which was
+apt to make her most neutral remarks sound combative.
+
+Mrs. Emery dried her eyes with a gesture of protest, adjusted her gray
+pompadour deftly, and cut off her daughter's remonstrance, "Oh, you
+needn't tell me I'm foolish, Marietta. I know it. I just suddenly got so
+impatient it didn't seem as though I could wait another minute!"
+
+The younger woman accepted this explanation of the tears with a murmured
+sound of somewhat enigmatic intonation. Her thin dark face settled into
+a repose that had a little grimness in it. She began putting the flowers
+into a vase that stood between the reproduction of a Giotto Madonna and
+a Japanese devil-hunt, both results of the study of art taken up during
+the past winter by her mother's favorite woman's club. Mrs. Emery
+watched the process in the contemplative relief which follows an
+emotional outbreak, and her eyes wandered to the objects on either side
+the vase. The sight stirred her to speech. "Oh, Marietta, how _do_ you
+suppose the house will seem to Lydia after she has seen so much? I hope
+she won't be disappointed. I've done so much to it this last year,
+perhaps she won't like it. And Oh, I _was_ so tried because we weren't
+able to get the new sideboard put up in the dining-room yesterday!"
+
+Mrs. Mortimer glanced without smiling at a miniature of her sister,
+blooming in a shrine-like arrangement on her mother's writing-desk. She
+shook her dark head with a gesture like her father's, and said with his
+blunt decisiveness, "Really, Mother, you must draw the line about Lydia.
+She's only human. I guess if the house is good enough for you and father
+it is good enough for her."
+
+She crossed the room toward the door with a brisk rattle of starched
+skirts, but as she passed her mother her hand was caught and held.
+"That's just it, Marietta--that's just what came over me! _Is_ what's
+good enough for us good enough for Lydia? Won't anything, even the best,
+in Endbury be a come-down for her?"
+
+The slightly irritated impatience with which Mrs. Mortimer had listened
+to the first words of this speech gave way to a shrewd amusement. "You
+mean that you've put Lydia up on such a high plane to begin with that
+whichever way she goes will be a step down," she asked.
+
+"Yes, yes; that's just it," breathed her mother, unconscious of any
+irony in her daughter's accent. She fixed her eyes, which, in spite of
+her having long since passed the half-century mark, were still very
+clear and blue, anxiously upon Marietta's opaque dark ones. She felt not
+only a need to be reassured in general by anyone, but a reluctant faith
+in the younger woman's judgment.
+
+Marietta released herself with a laugh that was like a light, mocking
+tap on her mother's shoulder. "Well, folks that haven't got real worries
+will certainly manufacture them! To worry about Lydia's future in
+Endbury! Aren't you afraid the sun won't rise some day? If ever there
+was any girl that had a smooth road in front of her--"
+
+The door-bell rang. "They've come! They've come!" cried Mrs. Emery
+wildly.
+
+"Lydia wouldn't ring the bell, and her train isn't due till ten," Mrs.
+Mortimer reminded her.
+
+"Oh, yes. Well, then, it's the new sideboard. I am so--"
+
+"It's a boy with a big pasteboard box," contradicted Mrs. Mortimer,
+looking down the hall to the open front door.
+
+Seeing someone there to receive it, the boy set the box inside the
+screen door and started down the steps.
+
+"Bring it here! Bring it here!" called Mrs. Mortimer, commandingly.
+
+"It's for Lydia," said Mrs. Emery, looking at the address. She spoke
+with an accent of dramatic intensity, and a flush rose to her fair
+cheeks.
+
+Her olive-skinned daughter looked at her and laughed. "What did you
+expect?"
+
+"But he didn't care enough about her coming home to be in town to-day!"
+Mrs. Emery's maternal vanity flared up hotly.
+
+Mrs. Mortimer laughed again and began taking the layers of crumpled
+wax-paper out of the box. "Oh, that was the trouble with you, was it?
+That's nothing. He had to be away to see about a new electrical plant in
+Dayton. Did you ever know Paul Hollister to let anything interfere with
+business?" This characterization was delivered with an intonation that
+made it the most manifest praise.
+
+Her mother seconded it with unquestioning acquiescence. "No, that's a
+fact; I never did."
+
+Mrs. Mortimer in her turn had an accent of dramatic intensity as she
+cried out, "Oh! they are American Beauties! The biggest I ever saw!"
+
+The two women looked at the flowers, almost awestruck at their size.
+
+"Have you a vase?" Mrs. Mortimer asked dubiously.
+
+Mrs. Emery rose to the occasion. "The Japanese umbrella stand."
+
+There was a pause as they reverently arranged the great sheaf of
+enormous flowers. Then Mrs. Emery began, "Marietta--" She hesitated.
+
+"Well," Mrs. Mortimer prompted her, a little impatiently.
+
+"Do you really think that he--that Lydia--?"
+
+Marietta accepted with a somewhat pinched smile her mother's boundary
+lines of reticence. "Of course. Did you ever know Paul Hollister to give
+up anything he wanted?"
+
+Her mother shook her head.
+
+Mrs. Mortimer rose with a "Well, then!" and the air of one who has said
+all there is to be said on a subject, and again crossed the room toward
+the door. Her mother drifted aimlessly in that direction also, as though
+swept along by the other's energy.
+
+"Well, it's a pity he is not here now, anyhow," she said, adding in a
+spirited answer to her daughter's expression, "Now, you needn't look
+that way, Marietta. You know yourself that Lydia is very romantic and
+fanciful. It would be a very different matter if she were like Madeleine
+Hollister. She wouldn't need any managing."
+
+Mrs. Mortimer smiled at the idea. "Yes, I'd like to see somebody try to
+manage Paul's sister," she commented.
+
+"They wouldn't _have_ to," her mother pointed out, "she's so
+levelheaded and sane. But Lydia's different. It's part of her
+loveliness, of course, only you do have to manage her. And she'll be in
+a very unsettled state for the first week or two after she gets home
+after such a long absence. The impressions she gets then--well, I wish
+he were here!"
+
+Mrs. Mortimer waved her hand toward the roses.
+
+"Of course, of course," assented her mother, subsiding peaceably down
+the scale from anxiety to confidence with the phrase. She looked at the
+monstrous flowers with the gaze of acquired admiration so usual in her
+eyes. "They don't look much like roses, do they?" she remarked
+irrelevantly.
+
+Mrs. Mortimer turned in the doorway, her face expressing an extreme
+surprise. "Good gracious, no," she cried. "Why, of course not. They cost
+a dollar and a half apiece."
+
+She did not stop to hear her mother's vaguely assenting reply. Mrs.
+Emery heard her firm, rapid tread go down the hall to the front door and
+then suddenly stop. Something indefinable about the pause that followed
+made the mother's heart beat thickly. "What is it, Marietta?" she
+called, but her voice was lost in Mrs. Mortimer's exclamation of
+surprise, "Why it can't be--why, _Lydia_!"
+
+As from a great distance, the mother heard a confused rush in the hall,
+and then, piercing through the dreamlike unreality of the moment, came
+the sweet, high note of a girl's voice, laughing, but with the liquid
+uncertainty of tears quivering through the mirth. "Oh, Marietta! Where's
+Mother? Aren't you all slow-pokes--not a soul to meet us at the
+train--where's Mother? Where's Mother? Where's--" The room swam around
+Mrs. Emery as she stood up looking toward the door, and the girl who
+came running in, her dark eyes shining with happy tears, was not more
+real than the many visions of her that had haunted her mother's
+imagination during the lonely year of separation. At the clasp of the
+young arms about her face took light as from an inner source, and
+breath came back to her in a sudden gasp. She tried to speak, but the
+only word that came was "Lydia! Lydia! Lydia!"
+
+The girl laughed, a half-sob breaking her voice as she answered
+whimsically, "Well, who did you expect to see?"
+
+Mrs. Mortimer performed her usual function of relieving emotional
+tension by putting a strong hand on Lydia's shoulder and spinning her
+about. "Come! I want to see if it _is_ you--and how you look."
+
+For a moment the ardent young creature stood still in a glowing quiet.
+She drank in the dazzled gaze of admiration of the two women with an
+innocent delight. The tears were still in Mrs. Emery's eyes, but she did
+not raise a hand to dry them, smitten motionless by the extremity of her
+proud satisfaction. Never again did Lydia look to her as she did at that
+moment, like something from another sphere, like some bright,
+unimaginably happy being, freed from the bonds that had always weighed
+so heavily on all the world about her mother.
+
+Before she could draw breath, Lydia moved and was changed. Her mother
+saw suddenly, with that emotion which only mothers know, reminiscences
+of little-girlhood, of babyhood, even of long-dead cousins and aunts, in
+the lovely face blooming under the wide hat. She felt the sweet
+momentary confusion of individuality, the satisfied sense of complete
+ownership which accompanies a strong belief in family ties. Lydia was
+not only altogether entrancing, but she was of the same stuff with those
+who loved her so dearly. It gave a deeper note to her mother's passion
+of affectionate pride.
+
+The girl turned with a pretty, defiant tilt of her head. "Well, and how
+_do_ I look?" she asked; and before she could be answered she flew at
+Mrs. Mortimer with a gentle roughness, clasping her arms around her
+waist until the matron gasped. "_You_ look too good to be true--both of
+you--if you are such lazybones that you wouldn't go to the station to
+meet the prodigal daughter!"
+
+"Well, if you will come on an earlier train than you telegraphed--"
+began Mrs. Mortimer, "Everybody's getting ready to meet you with a brass
+band. What did you do with Father?"
+
+The girl moved away, putting her hands up to her hat uncertainly as
+though about to take out the hat-pins. There was between the three a
+moment of that constraint which accompanies the transition from
+emotional intensity down to an everyday level. In Lydia's voice there
+was even a little flatness as she answered, "Oh, he put me in the hack
+and went off to see about business. I heard him 'phoning something to
+somebody about a suit. We got through the customs sooner than we thought
+we could, you see, and caught an earlier train."
+
+Mrs. Emery turned her adoring gaze from Lydia's slim beauty and looked
+inquiringly at her elder daughter. Mrs. Mortimer understood, and nodded.
+
+"What are you two making faces about?" Lydia turned in time to catch the
+interchange of glances.
+
+Mrs. Emery hesitated. Marietta spoke with a crisp straightforwardness
+which served as well in this case as nonchalance for keeping her remark
+without undue significance. "We were just wondering if now wasn't a good
+time to show you what Paul Hollister did for your welcome home. He
+couldn't be here himself, so he sent those." She nodded toward the
+bouquet.
+
+As Lydia turned toward the flowers her two elders fixed her with the
+unscrupulously scrutinizing gaze of blood-relations; but their
+microscopic survey showed them nothing in the girl's face, already
+flushed and excited by her home-coming, beyond a sudden amused surprise
+at the grotesque size of the tribute.
+
+"Why, for mercy's sake! Did you ever see such monsters! They are as big
+as my head! Look!" She whirled her hat from the pretty disorder of her
+brown hair and poised it on the topmost of the great flowers, stepping
+back to see the effect and laughing, "They don't look any more like
+roses, do they?" she added, turning to her mother. Mrs. Emery's answer
+rose so spontaneously to her lips that she was not aware that she was
+echoing Marietta. "Good gracious, no; of course not. They cost a dollar
+and a half apiece."
+
+Lydia neither assented to nor dissented from this apothegm. It started
+another train of thought in her mind. "As much as all that! Why, Paul
+oughtn't to be so extravagant! He can't afford it, and I should have
+liked something else just as--"
+
+Her sister broke in with an ample gesture of negation. "You don't know
+Paul. If he goes on the way he's started--he's district sales manager
+for southern Ohio already."
+
+Lydia paid to this information the passing tribute of a moment's
+uncomprehending surprise. "Think of that! The last time Paul told me
+about himself he was working day and night in Schenectady, learning the
+business, and getting--oh, I don't know--fifty cents an hour, or some
+such starvation wages."
+
+Mrs. Mortimer's bitterly acquired sense of values revolted at this.
+"What are you talking about, Lydia? Fifty cents an hour starvation
+wages!"
+
+"Well, perhaps it was five cents an hour. I don't remember. And he
+worked with his hands and was always in danger of getting shot through
+with a million volts of electricity or mashed with a breaking fly-wheel
+or something. He said electricians were the soldiers of modern
+civilization. I told that to a German woman we met on the boat when she
+said Americans have no courage because they don't fight duels. The
+idea!"
+
+She began pulling off her gloves, with a quick energetic gesture. Mrs.
+Mortimer went on, "Well, he certainly has a brilliant future before
+him. Everybody says that--" She stopped, struck by her rather heavy
+emphasis on the theme and by a curious look from Lydia. The girl did not
+blush, she did not seem embarrassed, but for a moment the childlike
+clarity of her look was clouded by an expression of consciousness.
+
+Mrs. Emery made a rush upon her, drawing her away toward the door with a
+displeased look at Marietta. "Never mind about Paul's prospects," she
+said. "With Lydia just this minute home, to begin gossiping about the
+neighbors! Come up to your room, darling, and see the little outdoor
+sitting-room we've had fixed over the porch."
+
+Mrs. Mortimer was not given to bearing chagrin, even a passing one, with
+undue self-restraint. She threw into the intonation of her next sentence
+her resentment at the rebuke from her mother. "I still live, you know,
+even if Lydia has come home!" As Mrs. Emery turned with a look of
+apology, she added, "Oh, I only wanted to make you turn around so that I
+could tell you that I am going to bring my two men-folks over here
+to-night, to the gathering of the clans, and that I must go home until
+then. Dr. Melton and Aunt Julia are coming, aren't they?"
+
+"Oh, yes!" cried Lydia. "It doesn't seem to me I can wait to see
+Godfather. I sort of half hoped he might be here now."
+
+"Well, _Lydia_!" her mother reproached her jealously.
+
+"Oh, you might as well give in, Mother, Lydia likes the little old
+doctor better than any of the rest of us."
+
+"He talks to me," said Lydia defensively.
+
+"_We_ never say a word," commented Mrs. Mortimer.
+
+Lydia broke away from her mother's close clasp and ran back to her
+sister. She was always running, as though to keep up with the rapidity
+of her swift impulses. She held her subtly-curved cheek up to the
+other's strongly-marked face. "You just kiss me, Etta dear," she pleaded
+softly, "and stop teasing."
+
+Mrs. Mortimer looked long into the clear dark eyes with an unmoved
+countenance. Then her face melted suddenly till she looked like her
+mother. She put her arms about the girl with a fervent gesture of
+tenderness. "Dear little Lydia," she murmured, with a quaver in her
+voice.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+PICKING UP THE THREADS
+
+
+After she was alone she looked again at the miniature of Lydia. The
+youthful radiance of the face had singularly the effect of a perfect
+flower. Mrs. Mortimer glanced at the hat still drooping its wide brim
+over the rose where Lydia had forgotten it, and stood still in a reverie
+that had, from her aspect, something of sadness in it. After a moment
+she sighed out, "Poor little Lydia!"
+
+"What's the matter with Lydia?" asked someone behind her.
+
+She turned and faced a dark, elderly personage, the robust dignity of
+whose bearing was now tempered with shamefacedness. Mrs. Mortimer's face
+sharpened in affectionate malice. "What are you doing here at this hour
+of the morning?" she asked with a humorously exaggerated air of
+amazement. "No self-respecting man is ever seen in his house during
+business hours!" She went on, "Oh, I know well enough. You let Mother
+have her first to make up for her being sick and not able to go to meet
+her ship; but you can't stay away."
+
+The Judge waved her raillery away with a smile. The physical resemblance
+between father and daughter was remarkable. "I asked you what was the
+matter with Lydia," he repeated.
+
+Mrs. Mortimer's face clouded. "Oh, it's a hateful, horrid sort of world
+we're all so eager to push her into. It's like a can full of angleworms,
+everlastingly squirming and wriggling to get to the top. I was just
+thinking that it would be better for her, maybe, if she could always
+stay a little girl and travel 'round to see things."
+
+"Why, Etta! I tell you _I'm_ glad to have Lydia get through with her
+traveling 'round. Maybe I can see something of her if I hurry up and do
+it now before your mother gets things going. I won't after that, of
+course. I never have."
+
+To this his daughter had one of her abrupt, disconcerting responses.
+"You'd better hurry and do it before you get so deep in some important
+trial that you wouldn't know Lydia from a plaster image. There are more
+reasons than just Mother and card parties why you don't see much of her,
+I guess."
+
+Judge Emery forbore to argue the point. "Where are they now?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, upstairs, out of my way. Mother's usual state of mind about Lydia
+is more so than ever, I warn you. She thought I wasn't refined enough
+company."
+
+"Now, Etta, you know your mother never thought any such thing."
+
+"Well, I know she was inconsistent, whatever she thought. While we were
+here alone she was speculating about Paul Hollister like anything. And
+yet, because I just happened to mention to Lydia that he is getting on
+in the world, I got put down as if I'd tried to make her marry him for
+his prospects."
+
+There was an edge in her voice which her father deprecated, rubbing his
+shaven chin mildly. He deplored the appearance of a flaw in the smooth
+surface of harmony he loved to see in his family.
+
+"Well, you know, Marietta, we aim to have everything about right for
+Lydia. She's all we've got left now the rest of you are settled."
+
+The deepening of the careworn lines in the woman's face seemed a
+justification for the undisguised bitterness of her answer. "I don't see
+why nobody must breathe a word to her about what everybody knows is so.
+What's the use of pretending that we'd be satisfied or she'd be
+comfortable a minute if Paul didn't promise to be a money-maker--or at
+least to have a good income?"
+
+She turned away and walked rapidly down the hall, followed by her
+father, half apologetic, half reproachful. "Why, Daughter, you don't
+grudge your sister! We couldn't do so much for you; but we're better off
+since you were a young lady and we want Lydia to have the benefit."
+
+Mrs. Mortimer paused on the veranda and stood looking in a troubled
+silence at the broad, well-kept lawn, stretching down to the asphalt
+street, shaded by vigorous young maples. Her father waited for her to
+speak, too good a lawyer to spoil by superfluous words the effect of a
+well-calculated appeal.
+
+Finally she turned to him contritely. "I'm hateful, Dad, and I'm sorry.
+Of course I don't grudge dear little Lydia anything. Only I have a
+pretty hard time of it scratching along, and when I'm awfully tired of
+contriving and calculating how to manage somehow and anyhow, it's hard
+to come up to the standard of saying everything's lovely that you and
+Mother want for Lydia."
+
+"Anything the trouble specially?" asked her father guardedly.
+
+"Oh, no; same old thing. Keeping up a two-maid and a man establishment
+on a one-maid income, and mostly not being able to hire the one maid.
+There aren't _any_ girls to be had lately. It means I have to be the
+other maid and the man all of the time, and all three, part of the
+time." She was starting down the step, but paused as though she could
+not resist the relief that came from expression. "And the cost of
+living--the necessities are bad enough, but the other things--the things
+you have to have not to be out of everything! I lie awake nights. I
+think of it in church. I can't think of anything else but the way the
+expenses mount up. Everybody's getting so reckless and extravagant and I
+_won't_ go into debt! I'll come to it, though. Everybody else does!
+We're the only people that haven't oriental rugs now. Why, the
+Gilberts--and everybody knows how much they still owe Dr. Melton for
+Ellen's appendicitis, and their grocer told Ralph they owe him several
+hundred dollars--well, they have just got an oriental rug that they paid
+a hundred and sixty dollars for. Mrs. Gilbert said they 'just _had_ to
+have it, and you can always have what you have to have.' It makes me
+sick! Our parlor looks so common! And the last dinner party we gave
+cost--" She detected a wavering in her father's attention, as though he
+were listening for sounds inside the house, and broke off abruptly with
+a hurt and impatient "Oh, well, no matter!" and ran down the steps.
+
+Judge Emery called after with a relieved belittling of her complaints,
+"Oh, if that's all you mean. Why, that's half the fun. I remember when
+you were a baby your mother did the washings so that we could have a
+nurse to take you out with the other children and their nurses."
+
+Mrs. Mortimer was palpably out of earshot before he finished his
+exhortation, so he wasted no more breath but turned back eagerly in
+response to a call from Lydia, who came skimming down the hall. "Oh,
+Daddy dearest, it's a jewel of a little sitting-room, the one you fixed
+up for me--and Mother says we can serve punch there the night of my
+coming-out party."
+
+Mrs. Emery was at her heels. Her husband laughed at his wife's
+expression, and drew her toward him. "Here, Mother, stop staring at
+Lydia long enough to welcome me home, too." He bent over her and rubbed
+his cheek against hers. "Come, tell me the news. Are you feeling
+better?" He gave her a little playful push toward the door of the
+parlor. "Here, let's go in and visit for a while. I'm an old fool! I
+can't do any work this morning. I kept Lydia from telling me a thing all
+the way from New York, so that we could hear it together."
+
+Lydia protested. "Tell you! After those monstrous great letters I've
+written! There's nothing you don't know. There's nothing much to tell,
+anyhow. I've been museumed and picture-galleried, and churched, and
+cultured generally, till I'm full--up to there!" She drew her hand
+across her slim white throat and added cheerfully, "But I forgot the
+most of that the last three months in Paris. Nearly every girl in the
+party was going home to come out in society, and of course we just
+concentrated on clothes. You don't mind, do you?"
+
+As she hesitated, with raised eyebrows of doubt, her mother, heedless of
+what she was saying, was suddenly overcome by her appealing look and
+drew her close with a rush of little incoherent tender cries choked with
+tears. It was as though she were seeing her for the first time. Judge
+Emery twice tried to speak before his husky voice was under control. He
+patted his wife on the shoulder. "There, there, Mother," he said
+vaguely. To Lydia he went on, "You've been gone quite a while, you know,
+and--well, till you have a baby-girl of your own I guess you won't have
+much notion of how we feel."
+
+Lydia's dark eyes filled, responsive to the emotion about her. "I'm just
+about distracted," she cried. "I love everybody and everything so, I
+can't stand it! I want to kiss you both and I can't make up my mind
+which to kiss first--and it's that way about everything! It's all so
+good I don't know what to begin on." She brought their faces together
+and achieved a simultaneous kiss with a shaky laugh. "Now, look here! If
+we stand here another minute we'll all cry. Come and show me the house.
+I want to see every single thing. All the old things, and all the new
+ones Mother's been writing about." She seized their hands and pulled
+them into the parlor. "I've been in this room already, but I didn't see
+it. I don't believe I even touched the floor when I walked, I was so
+excited. Oh, it's lovely--it's lovely!"
+
+She darted about the room like a humming-bird, recognizing what was
+familiar with fond little exclamations. "Oh, that darling little wicker
+chair!--the picture of the dog!--oh! oh! here's my china lamb!" and
+crying out in admiration over new acquisitions.
+
+"Oh, Mother, what a perfectly lovely couch--sofa--what do you call it?
+Why, it is so beautifully _different_! Wherever did you get that?"
+
+Mrs. Emery turned to her husband. "There, Nathaniel, what did I tell
+you?" she triumphed.
+
+"That's one of your mother's latest extravagances," explained Judge
+Emery. "There's a crazy fad in Endbury for special handmade furniture.
+Maybe it's all right, but I can't see it's so much better than what you
+buy in the department stores. Grand Rapids is good enough for me."
+
+"He doesn't like the man who made it," said Mrs. Emery accusingly.
+
+"What's the matter with him?" asked Lydia, rubbing her hand luxuriously
+over the satin-smooth, lusterless wood of the sofa's high back.
+
+Judge Emery replied, with his laugh of easy, indifferent tolerance for
+everything outside the profession of the law, "Oh, I never said I didn't
+like him; I only said he struck me as a crack-brained, self-willed,
+conceited--"
+
+Lydia laughed. She thought her father's dry, ironic turns very witty.
+
+"I never saw anything conceited about him," protested Mrs. Emery,
+admitting the rest of the indictment.
+
+Judge Emery sat down on the sofa in question and pulled his tie into
+shape. "Well, folks are always conceited who find the ordinary ways of
+doing things not good enough for them. Lydia, what do you think of this
+tie? Nobody pays a proper attention to my ties but you."
+
+"I've brought you some beauties from London," said Lydia. Then reverting
+with a momentary curiosity to the subject they had left, "Whatever does
+this man do that's so queer?"
+
+"Oh, he's just one of the back-to-all-fours faddists," said her father.
+
+"Back-to-all-fours?" Lydia was dim as to his meaning, but willing to be
+amused.
+
+"That's just your father's way," exclaimed Mrs. Emery, who had not her
+daughter's fondness for the Judge's tricks of speech.
+
+"He lives as no Dago ditch-digger with a particle of get-up-and-get in
+him would be willing to," said Judge Emery finally.
+
+Lydia turned to her mother.
+
+"Why, it's nothing that would interest you in the least, dear," said the
+matron, taking in admiringly Lydia's French dress. "Only for a little
+while everybody was talking about how strangely he acted. He was an
+insurance man, like Marietta's husband, and getting on finely, when all
+of a sudden, for no reason on earth, he threw it all up and went to live
+in the woods. Do you mean to say you only paid twenty dollars for that
+dress?"
+
+"In the woods!" repeated Lydia.
+
+"Yes; the real woods. His father was a farmer, and left him--why you
+know, you've been there ever so many times--the Black Rock woods, the
+picnic woods. He has built him a little hut there and makes his
+furniture out of the trees."
+
+Lydia's passing curiosity had faded. "Not quite twenty, even--only
+ninety-two francs," she at last answered her mother's question. "You
+never saw anything like the bargains there in summertime. Well, I should
+think your carpenter man _was_ crazy." She glanced down with
+satisfaction at the hang of her skirt.
+
+"Oh, not dangerous," her mother reassured her; "just socialistic, I
+suppose, and all that sort of thing."
+
+"Well, who's crazier than a socialist?" cried her father genially. He
+added, "Where are you going, Daughter?"
+
+Lydia stopped in the doorway, with a look of apology for her lack of
+interest in their talk. "I thought I'd just slip into the hall and see
+if there's anything new there. There's so much I want to see--all at
+once."
+
+Her fond impatience brought her parents forward with a start of
+pleasure, and the tour of inspection began. She led them from one room
+to another, swooping with swallow-like motions upon them for sudden
+caresses, dazzling them with her changing grace. She liked it
+all--all--she told them, a thousand times better than she remembered.
+She liked the new arrangement of the butler's pantry; she loved the
+library for being all done over new; she adored the hall for being left
+exactly the way it was. The dining-room was the best of all, she
+declared, with so much that was familiar and so much that was new. "Only
+no sideboard," she commented. "Have they gone out of fashion while I was
+away?"
+
+Mrs. Emery, whose delight at Lydia's approval had been mounting with
+every breath, looked vexed. "I knew you'd notice that!" she said. "We
+tried so hard to get the new one put in before you got back, but Mr.
+Rankin won't deliver a thing till it's just so!"
+
+"Rankin!" cried Lydia, stopping so short in one of her headlong rushes
+across the room that she gave the impression of having encountered an
+invisible obstacle, "Who's that?"
+
+"Oh, that's the crazy cabinet-maker we were talking about. The one
+who--"
+
+"Why, I've met a Mr. Rankin," said Lydia, with more emphasis than the
+statement seemed to warrant.
+
+"It's a common enough name," said her mother, struck oddly by her
+accent.
+
+"But here, in Endbury. Only it can't be the same person. He wasn't
+queer; he was awfully nice. I met him once when a crowd of us were out
+skating that last Christmas I was home from school; the time when you
+and Father were in Washington and left me at Dr. Melton's with Aunt
+Julia. I used to see him there a lot. He used to talk to the doctor by
+the hour, and Aunt Julia and I were doing that set of doilies in
+Hardanger work and we used to sit and sew and count threads and listen."
+
+"That's the one," said her father. "Melton has one of his flighty
+notions that the man is something wonderful."
+
+"But he wasn't queer or anything then!" protested Lydia. "He never
+talked to me any, of course, I was such a kid, but it was awfully
+interesting to hear him and Godfather go on about morals, and the
+universe, and the future of man, and such--I never heard such talk
+before or after--but it can't be that one!" Lydia broke off to marvel
+incredulously at the possibility. "He was--why, he was awfully nice!"
+she fell back on reiteration to help out her affirmation.
+
+"They say there's queer blood in the family, and I guess he's got his
+share," Judge Emery summed up and dismissed the case with a gesture of
+finality. He glanced up at a tall clock standing in the corner, compared
+its time with his watch, exclaimed impatiently, "Slow again!" and
+addressed himself with a householder's seriousness to setting it right.
+
+A new aspect of the matter they had been discussing struck Lydia. "But
+what does he--what do people do about him?" she asked.
+
+This misty inquiry was as intelligible to her mother as a cipher to the
+holders of a key. "Oh, he's very nice about that. He has dropped out of
+society completely and keeps out of everybody's way. Of course you see
+him when he comes to set up a piece of his furniture or to take an
+order, but that's all. And he used to be so popular!" The regret in the
+last clause was that of a thrifty person before waste of any kind. "I
+understand he still goes to Dr. Melton's a good deal, but that just
+counts him in as one of the doctor's collection of freaks; it doesn't
+mean anything. You know how your godfather goes on about--" She broke
+off to look out the window. "Oh, Lydia! your trunks are here. Quick!
+where are your keys? It seems as though I couldn't wait to see your
+dresses!" She hurried to the door and vanished.
+
+Lydia did not stir for a moment. She was looking down at the table,
+absorbed in watching the dim reflections of her pink finger-tips as she
+pressed them one after another upon the dark polished wood. Her father
+opened the door of the clock with a little click, but she did not heed
+it. She drew her hand away from the table and inspected her finger-tips
+intently, as though to detect some change in them. When her father
+closed the clock-door and turned away she started, as though she had
+forgotten his presence. Her gaze upon him gave him an odd feeling of
+wonder, which he took to be apologetic realization that he had spent a
+longer time oblivious of her than he had meant. His explanation had a
+little compunction in it. "I have a time with that pendulum always. I
+can't seem to get it the right length!"
+
+Lydia continued to look at him blankly for a moment. Then she drew a
+long breath and took an aimless step away from the table. "Well, if that
+isn't too queer for anything!" she exclaimed.
+
+Judge Emery stared. "Why, no; it's quite common in pendulum clocks," he
+told her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE DAWN
+
+
+The morning after her return from Europe, Lydia awoke with a start, as
+though in answer to a call. The confusion of the last days had been such
+that she had for a moment the not uncommon experience of an entire
+blankness as to her whereabouts and identity. Realization of where and
+who she was came back to her with much more than the usual neutral
+relief at slipping into one's own personality as into the first
+protection available against the vague horror of nihility. After an
+instant's uncomfortable wandering in chaos, Lydia found herself with a
+thrill of exultation. She was not negatively relieved that she was
+somebody; she rejoiced to find herself Lydia Emery. She pounced on her
+own personality with a positive joy which for a moment moved her to a
+devout thanksgiving.
+
+It all seemed, as she said to herself, too good to be true--certainly
+more than she deserved. Among her unmerited blessings she quaintly
+placed being herself, but this was the less naive in that she placed
+among her blessings nearly everything of which she was conscious in her
+world. Her world at this time was not a large one, and every element in
+it seemed to her ideal. Her loving, indulgent father, who always had a
+smile for her as he looked up over his newspaper at the table, and who,
+though she knew he was too good to be wealthy, always managed somehow to
+pay for dresses just a little prettier than other girls' clothes; her
+devoted, idolizing mother, whose one thought was for her daughter's
+pleasure; her rich big Brother George in Cleveland, whom she saw so
+seldom, but whose handsome presents testified to an affection that was
+to be numbered among the objects of her gratitude; good, sharp-tongued
+Sister Etta, who said such quick, bright things and ran her house so
+wonderfully; Aunt Julia, dear, dear Aunt Julia, whose warm heart was one
+of Lydia's happiest homes, and Aunt Julia's brother, Dr. Melton--ah, how
+could anyone be grateful enough for such an all-comprehending,
+quick-helping, ever-ready ally, teacher, mentor, playmate, friend and
+comrade as her godfather!
+
+As she lay in her soft white bed and looked about her pretty room with
+an ineffable sense of well-being, it seemed to her that everything that
+had happened to her was lovely and that the prospect of her future could
+contain only a crescendo of good-fortune. It was not that she imagined
+for herself a future remarkably different in detail from what was the
+past of the people about her. Even now at what she felt was the
+beginning of the first chapter, she knew the general events of the story
+before her; but this morning she was penetrated with the keenest sense
+of the unfathomable difference it made in those events in that they were
+about to happen to her. She had been passively watching the excited
+faces of people hurling themselves down-hill on toboggans, but now she
+was herself poised on the crest of the slope, tense with an excitement
+not only more real, but somehow more vital to the scheme of things, than
+that felt by other people who had made the thrilling trip before her.
+
+She lay still for a few moments, luxuriating in the innocent egotism of
+this view of her future, which was none the less absorbing for being so
+entirely unterrifying, and then sprang up, impatient to begin it. No one
+else in the house was awake. She saw with surprise that it was barely
+five o'clock. She wondered that she felt so little sleepy, since she had
+been up late the night before. All the family and connections had
+gathered, and she had talked with an eager breathlessness and had
+listened as eagerly to pick up all those details of home news which do
+not go into letters; those insignificant changes and events that make up
+the physiognomy of an existence, without which one cannot again become
+an integral part of a life once familiar. It had been a fatiguing,
+illuminating evening.
+
+A change of mood had come in the night. As she dressed she felt that, in
+some way, neither the fatigue nor the illumination had lasted on through
+the blankness of her sound young sleep. She felt restlessly fresh and
+vigorous, like a creature born anew with the morning light, and she did
+not feel herself as yet an integral part of the busy, absorbing life to
+which she had returned. The countless tendrils of Endbury feelings,
+standards, activities, brushed against her, but had not as yet laid hold
+on her. Europe had never been more real to her young-lady eyes than an
+immense World's Exposition, rather overwhelmingly full of objects to be
+inspected, and now, here in Ohio, even that impression was dim and
+remote. But so, also, was Endbury; she had left the one, she had not yet
+arrived at the other. She felt herself for the moment in a neutral
+territory that was scarcely terrestrial.
+
+The silent house was a kingdom of delight to be rediscovered. She
+wandered about it, enchanted with the impressions which her solitude
+gave her leisure to savor and digest. She threw open a window, and was
+struck with the sweet freshness of the morning air, as though it were a
+joy new in the history of the world. She looked out on the lawn, with
+its dew-studded cobwebs, and felt her heart contract with pleasure. When
+she stepped out on the veranda, the look of the trees, the breath of the
+light wind across her cheek, the odor of dawn, all the indefinable
+personality of that early hour was like an enchantment about her.
+
+She ran out to her favorite arbor and plucked one of the heavy clusters
+of purple grapes, finding their cool acidity an exquisite surprise. She
+raised her face to the sky with wonder. She had never, it seemed to her,
+seen so pure yet colorful a sky. The horizon was still faintly flushed
+with the promise of a dawn already fulfilled in the fresh splendor of
+the sunbeams slanting across the fresh splendor of her own youth.
+
+Never again did Lydia see the things she saw that morning. Never again
+did she have so unquestioningly the happy child's conception of the
+whole world as magically centered in indulgent kindness about herself.
+As she looked up the clean, empty street stretching away under the shade
+of its thrifty young trees, it seemed made only to lead her forward into
+the life for which she had been so long preparing herself. Endbury, with
+its shops, its bustle of factories so unmeaning to her, the great bulk
+of its inexplicable "business," existed only as the theater upon the
+stage of which she was to play the leading role in the drama of
+life--she almost consciously thought of it in those terms--which, after
+some exciting and pleasurable incidents and a few thrilling situations,
+was to have a happy ending, none the less actual to her mind because
+lost in so vague a golden shimmer. Her father's house, as familiar to
+her as her hand, took on a new and rich dignity as the background for
+the unfolding of that wonderful creature, herself; that unknown, future,
+grown-up self, which was to be all that everyone who loved her expected,
+and more than she in her inexperience knew how to expect.
+
+She was in a little heaven, made up of the most ingenuous aspirations,
+the innocence of which seemed to her a guarantee of their certain
+fulfillment. Her fervent desire to be good was equal to and of the same
+quality as her desire to be a successful debutante. It would make her
+family so happy to have her both. These somewhat widely diverging aims
+were all a part of the current of her life, the impulse to be what those
+she loved would like to have her. It was not that she was willing to
+give up her own individuality to gratify the impulse, but rather that
+she did not for an instant conceive of the necessity for such a
+sacrifice. It was part of her immense happiness that she had always
+loved to be what it pleased everyone to have her, and that, apparently,
+people wished to have her only what she wished to be. She was like a
+child guarded by her elders from any knowledge of forbidden food. All
+the goodies of which she had ever heard were hers for the asking. In
+such a carefully arranged nursery it would be perversity to doubt the
+everlasting quality of the coincidence between one's desires and one's
+obedience. It was no more remarkable a coincidence than that both dew
+and sunshine were good for the grass over which she now ran lightly to
+another corner of the grounds about her parents' house. Here, just
+outside the circle of deep shade cast by an exuberantly leaved maple,
+she stood for a moment, her hands full of grapes, her eyes wandering
+about the green, well-kept double acres called diversely in the family
+"the grounds" (Mrs. Emery's name) and "the yard." Lydia always clung to
+her father's name; she had very little inborn feeling for the finer
+shades of her mother's vocabulary. Mrs. Emery rejoiced in the careless
+unconsciousness of the importance of such details, but she felt that
+Lydia should be cautioned against going too far. It was one of the
+girl's odd ways to be fond of the few phrases left over in the Emery
+dictionary from their simpler earlier days. She always called the two
+servants "the girls" or "the help" instead of "the maids," spoke of the
+"washwoman" instead of the "laundress," and, as did her father, called
+the man who took care of the grounds, ran the furnace, and drove the
+Emery's comfortable surrey, the "hired man" instead of the "gardener" or
+the "coachman," or, in Mrs. Emery's elegantly indefinite phrase, "our
+man."
+
+Lydia explained this whimsical reaction rather incoherently by saying
+that those nice old words were so much more fun than the others, and in
+spite of remonstrance she clung to her fancy with so lightly laughing an
+obstinacy that neither she nor anyone suspected it of being a surface
+indication of a significant tendency.
+
+She had occasionally other droll little ways of differing from the
+family, which were called indulgently "Lydia's notions." Her mother
+would certainly have thus named this flight out into the early morning.
+She would have found extravagant, and a little disconcerting, the
+completeness of Lydia's content in so simple a thing as standing in the
+first sunshine of an early morning in September, and she would have
+been unquestionably disturbed, perhaps even a little alarmed, by the
+beatific expression of Lydia's face as she gazed fixedly up into the
+sky, the tempered radiance of which was as yet not too bright for her
+clear gaze.
+
+All the restless joy of a few minutes before, which had driven her about
+from one delight to another, fused under the sun's first warmth into a
+trance-like quiet. She stood still in the sunshine, a slow flush, like a
+reflection of dawn, rising to her cheeks, her lips parted, her eyes
+bright and vacant. An old person coming upon her at this moment would
+have been painfully moved by that tragic pity which age feels for the
+unreasoning joy of youth. She looked a child, open-eyed and breathless
+before the fleeting beauties of a bubble, most iridescent when about to
+disappear.
+
+It was a man by no means old who swung suddenly into sight around the
+corner, walking swiftly and noiselessly upon the close-cut grass, and
+the startled expression with which he found himself close to Lydia was
+by no means one of pity. He fell back a step, and in the instant before
+the girl was aware of his presence his gaze upon her was that of a man
+dazzled by an incredible vision.
+
+She brought her eyes down to him, and for the space of a breath the
+expression was hers as well. The sunlight glowing about them seemed the
+reflection of their faces. Then, for a moment longer, though mutual
+recognition flashed into their eyes, they did not speak, looking at each
+other long and seriously.
+
+Finally, with a nymph-like stir of all her slender body, Lydia roused
+herself. "Well, I can speak--can you?" she asked whimsically. "Don't you
+remember me?"
+
+The man drew a long breath and took off his cap, showing close-cropped
+auburn hair gleaming, like his beard, red in the sun. "You took my
+breath away!" he exclaimed.
+
+"What was the matter with me?" asked Lydia, prettily confident of a
+compliment to follow.
+
+It came in so much less direct a form than she had expected that before
+she recognized it she had returned it with naive impulsiveness.
+
+"I didn't think you could be real," said the man, "you looked so exactly
+the way this glorious morning made me feel."
+
+"Why, that's just how you looked to me!" she cried, and flushed at the
+significance of her words.
+
+Before her confusion the other turned away his quiet gray eyes, and said
+lightly, "Well, that's because we are the only people in all the world
+with sense enough to get up so early on a morning like this. I've been
+out tramping since dawn."
+
+Lydia explained herself also. "I just couldn't sleep, it seemed so
+lovely. It's my first morning home, you know."
+
+"Is it?" responded the man, with a vagueness he made no effort to
+conceal.
+
+It came over Lydia with a shock that he did not know she had been away.
+She felt hurt. It seemed ungracious for anyone in Endbury not to have
+missed her, not to share in the joyful excitement of her final return.
+"I've been in Europe for a year," she told him, with a dignity that was
+a reproach.
+
+"Oh, yes, yes; I remember now hearing Dr. Melton speak of it," he
+answered, with no shade of apology for his forgetfulness. He looked at
+her speculatively, as if wondering what note to strike for the
+continuation of their talk. Apparently he decided on the note of
+lightness. "Well, you're the most important person there is for me
+to-day," he told her unexpectedly.
+
+Lydia arched her dark eyebrows inquiringly. She was always sensitively
+responsive, and now had forgotten, like a sweet-tempered child, her
+momentary pique.
+
+He smiled suddenly, moved, as people often were, to an apparently
+irrelevant tenderness for her. His voice softened into a playfulness
+like that of a person speaking to an imaginative little girl. "Why,
+didn't you learn in school that all wise old nations have the belief
+that the first person you meet after you go out in the morning decides
+the fortune of the day for you? Now, what kind of a day are you going
+to give me?"
+
+Lydia laughed. "Oh, you must tell first! You forget you're the first
+person I've seen this morning. I'll see what I can do for you after I've
+seen what you are going to do for me." She added, with a solemnity only
+half jocular, "But it's ever so much more important in my case, for
+you're the first person I meet as I begin my life in Endbury. Think what
+a responsibility for you! You ought to give me something extra nice
+beside, for not remembering me any better and never noticing that I had
+been away." She broke into a sunny mitigation of her own severity, "But
+you can have some grapes, even if you are not very flattering."
+
+The man took the cluster she held out to him, but only eyed them as he
+answered, "Oh, I remember you very well. You're a niece of Mrs.
+Sandworth's, or of her husband's, and Mrs. Sandworth is Dr. Melton's
+sister. You're the big-eyed little girl who used to sit in a corner and
+sew while the doctor and I talked, and now," he brought it out rotundly,
+"you've been to Europe for a year, and you're grown-up."
+
+Lydia hung her head laughingly at his good-natured caricature. "Well,
+but I _have_, really and truly," she protested, "all of that. And I just
+guess you haven't had two such interesting things happen to you in such
+a short time as--" She stopped short, struck dumb by a sudden
+recollection. "Oh, I beg your pardon," she murmured; "I forgot about
+what they said you had--"
+
+Her expression was so altered, she looked at him with so curious a
+change from familiarity to strangeness, that his steady eyes wavered a
+moment in startled surprise. "What's that?" he asked sharply; "I didn't
+catch what you said."
+
+"Why, nothing--nothing--only they were telling me yesterday about how
+you--why, it just came over me that you _had_ had a great deal happen to
+you this last year, as well as I."
+
+He looked a relieved and slightly annoyed comprehension of the case.
+"Oh, that!" he summed it up for her with a grave brevity. "I have lost
+my father, and I have started life on a new footing during the past
+year."
+
+Lydia fumbled for words that would be applicable and not wounding. "I
+was so sorry to hear that--about your father, I mean. And about the
+other--it must be very--_interesting_, I'm sure."
+
+His silence and enigmatic gaze upon her moved her to a fluttered fear
+lest she seem ungracious. She added, with a droll little air of letting
+him see that she was not of the enemy, "I do hope some day you'll tell
+me all about it; it sounds so romantic."
+
+The young man gave an inarticulate sound, and stroked his ruddy beard to
+conceal a smile. "It's not," he said briefly. He put his cap back on his
+head and looked down the street as though his thoughts were already
+away.
+
+His lack of responsiveness came, Lydia thought, from her having wounded
+his feelings. "Oh, I'm sure you must have some good reason for doing
+such a _queer_ thing," she said hurriedly. Then, appalled by the words
+on which the haste of her good intentions had carried her, "Oh, I mean
+that it's very brave, heroic, of you to have the courage--perhaps
+something very sad happened to you, and to forget it you--"
+
+The other broke into the laugh he had been trying to suppress. His gray
+eyes lighted up brilliantly with his mirth. "You're very kind," he said,
+"you're very kind, but rather imaginative. It doesn't take any courage;
+quite the reverse. And it's not a picturesque way of doing a retreat
+from active life. I hope and pray that it's to be a way of getting into
+it."
+
+The girl's face of bewilderment at his tone moved him to add, a ripple
+of amusement still in his voice, "Ah, don't try to make me out. I don't
+belong in your world, you know; I'm real."
+
+Lydia continued to look at him blankly. The obscurity of his remarks was
+in no way lessened by this last addition, but he vouchsafed no further
+explanation. "You've given me my breakfast," he said, holding up the
+grapes; "I mustn't keep you any longer from yours."
+
+He waited for a moment for Lydia to respond to this speech, struck by a
+sudden realization that it might sound like an unceremonious hint to her
+to retire, rather than the dismissal of himself he intended. When she
+made no answer, he turned away with a somewhat awkward gesture of
+leave-taking. Lydia looked after him in silence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE DAY BEGINS
+
+
+She watched him until he was out of sight, and although the vigorous,
+rhythmic swing of his broad shoulders was like another manifestation of
+the morning's joyous, buoyant spirit, it did not move her to a
+responsive alertness. After he had turned a corner, she lowered her eyes
+to the cluster of grapes she still held; a moment after, without any
+change in expression, she relaxed her grasp on them and let them fall,
+turning away and walking soberly back to the house. The dew had already
+disappeared from the grass. There was now no hint of the dawn's
+coolness; the day had begun.
+
+Her father met her at the door with an exclamation about her early
+hours. He would really see something of her, he said, if she kept up
+this sort of thing. It would be too good to be true if he could
+breakfast with her every morning. Whereupon he rang for the coffee and
+unfolded his newspaper. Lydia did not notice his absorption in the news
+of the day, partly because she was trained from childhood up to consider
+reading the newspaper as the main occupation of a man at home, but more
+because on this occasion she was herself preoccupied. When Mrs. Mortimer
+came in on an errand and was prevailed upon to sit down for some
+breakfast with her father and sister, there was a little more
+conversation.
+
+Mrs. Emery had not come down stairs. A slight indisposition which she
+had felt for several days seemed to have been augmented by the
+excitement of Lydia's return. She had slept badly, and was quite
+uncomfortable, she told her husband, and thought she would stay in bed
+and send for Dr. Melton. It seemed foolish, she apologized, but now
+that Lydia was back, she wanted to be on the safe side and lose no time.
+After these facts had been communicated to her older daughter, Mrs.
+Mortimer asked, "How in the world does it happen that you're up at this
+hour?"
+
+Lydia answered that she had been inspecting the yard, which she had not
+seen the day before. She described quite elaborately her tour of
+investigation, without any mention of her encounter with her early
+caller, and only after a pause added carelessly, "Who do you suppose
+came along but that Mr. Rankin you were all talking about yesterday?"
+
+Judge Emery laid down his paper. "What under the sun was he prowling
+about for at that hour?"
+
+"He wasn't prowling," said Lydia. "He was fairly tearing along past the
+house so fast that he 'most ran over me before I saw him. I'd forgotten
+he is so handsome."
+
+"Handsome!" Mrs. Mortimer cried out at the idea. "With that beard!"
+
+"I like beards, sometimes," said Lydia.
+
+"It makes a man look like a barbarian. I'd as soon wear a nose-ring as
+have Ralph wear a beard."
+
+"Why, everybody who is anybody in Europe wears a beard, or a mustache,
+anyhow," opposed Lydia. "I got to liking to see them."
+
+"Oh, of course if they do it in Europe, we provincial stay-at-homes
+haven't a word to say." Mrs. Mortimer had invented a peculiar tone which
+she reserved for speeches like this, the neutrality of which gave a
+sharper edge to the words.
+
+"Now, Marietta, that's mean!" Lydia defended herself very energetically;
+"you know I didn't say it for that." There was a moment's pause, of
+which Marietta did not avail herself for a retraction, and then Lydia
+went on pensively, "Well, he may be handsome or not, but he's certainly
+not very polite."
+
+"He didn't say anything to you, did he?" asked her father in surprise,
+laying down the paper he had raised again during the passage between the
+sisters.
+
+Lydia hastily proffered an explanation. "He couldn't help speaking; he
+almost ran into me, you know. I was standing under the maple tree in the
+corner as he came around from Garfield Avenue. He just took off his cap
+and said good morning, and what a fine day it was, and a few words like
+that."
+
+"I don't see anything so impolite in that. Perhaps he wasn't European in
+his manners," suggested Mrs. Mortimer dryly. She had evidently arisen in
+the grasp of a mood, not uncommon with her, when an apparently causeless
+irritability drove her to say things for which she afterward suffered an
+honest but fruitless remorse. Dr. Melton had recently evolved for this
+characteristic of hers one of the explanations which the Emerys found so
+enigmatic. "Marietta," he said critically, "is in a perpetual state of
+nervous irritation from eye-strain. She has naturally excellent and
+normal eyesight, but she has always been trained to wear other people's
+spectacles. It puts her out of focus all the time, and that makes her
+snappy."
+
+She had answered explicitly to this vague diagnosis, "Nonsense! The
+thing that makes me snappy is the lack of an oriental rug in our
+parlor."
+
+"You're looking at that through Mrs. Gilbert's magnifying glasses,"
+suggested the doctor.
+
+"I'm not looking at it at all, and that's the trouble," Marietta had
+assured him.
+
+"Absence makes the heart--" the doctor had the last word.
+
+Lydia tried this morning at breakfast to obtain the same advantage over
+her sister. She flushed with a mixture of emotions and tried in a
+resentful silence to think of some definable cause for her accusation
+against Rankin's manners. Finally, "Well, I gave him a bunch of grapes,
+and he never so much as said thank you. He just took them and marched
+off."
+
+"Perhaps he doesn't like grapes," suggested Mrs. Mortimer, grim to the
+last.
+
+After breakfast, when Mrs. Mortimer and her father disappeared, Lydia
+found herself with a long morning before her. The doctor telephoned that
+he could not come before noon. Judge Emery, after his proprietary
+good-by kiss, advised her to be quiet and rest. She looked a little
+pale, he thought, and he was afraid that, after her cool ocean voyage,
+she would find the heat of an Ohio September rather trying. Indeed, as
+Lydia idled for a moment over the dismantled breakfast table she was by
+no means moved to activity. Dark shades were everywhere drawn down and
+the house was like a dimly-lighted cave, but through this attempt at
+protection the sun was making itself felt in a slowly rising,
+breathless, moist heat.
+
+Lydia climbed the stairs to her mother's room. She was looking forward
+to a long visit, but finding the invalid asleep she turned away from the
+door rather blankly. She was as yet too much a stranger in her own home
+to have at hand the universal trivial half-dozen unfinished tasks that
+save idle women from the perils of uninterrupted thought. The ribbons
+were all run in her pretty underwear; she owed no notes to anyone,
+because she had been at home too short a time to have received any
+letters; her hair had been washed the last day on the steamer, and her
+new dresses needed no mending. Her trunks had been unpacked the day
+before by her mother's competent hands, which had also arranged every
+detail of her tasteful room until to touch it would disturb the effect.
+
+Lydia began to experience that uneasy, unsettling discomfort that comes
+to modern people in ordinary modern life if some unusual circumstance
+throws them temporarily on their own resources. She lingered aimlessly
+for some time at the head of the stairs, and then, leaning heavily
+against the rail, began to descend slowly, one step at a time, to
+prolong the transit. Where the stairs turned she noticed a stain on the
+crisp sleeve of her white dress. It came, evidently, from one of the
+grapes she had eaten that morning under the maple tree. A current of
+cool air blew past her. It was the first relief from the stagnation of
+the sultry day and, sitting down on the landing, she lost herself in
+prolonged meditation.
+
+In the obscurity of the darkened hall she was scarcely visible save as a
+spot of light showing dimly through the balustrade, and she sat so still
+that the maid, stepping about below, did not see her. On her part, Lydia
+noticed but absently this slight stir of domestic activity, nor, after a
+time, louder but muffled noises from the dining-room. Even when the door
+to the dining-room opened and quick, light steps came to the foot of the
+stairs, she did not heed them. A confused, hushed sound of someone busy
+about various small operations did not rouse her, and it was not until
+the fall of a large object, clattering noisily on the floor, that she
+became conscious that someone beside the maid was in the hall. She
+leaned forward, and saw that the object which had fallen was the
+newel-post of the stairs. It had evidently been detached from its
+fastenings by the workman who, with his back to her, now knelt over a
+tool-box, fumbling among the tools with resultant little metallic clicks.
+
+Lydia ran down the stairs, finger on lip. "Hush! Don't make any more
+noise than you can help. Mother's still asleep." At his gaze of
+stupefaction she broke into her charming light laugh, "Why, I always
+seem to strike you speechless. What's the matter with me now?"
+
+The other emerged from his surprise with a ready, smiling acceptance of
+her tone, "I was wondering if I oughtn't to apologize to you--if I
+should ever see you again--for being so curt this morning. And then you
+spring up out of the ground before me. Well, so I will apologize. I do.
+I'm very sorry."
+
+They adopted, as in the first part of their earlier talk, the
+half-humorous familiarity of people surprised in an unconventional
+situation, but, in spite of this, the young man's apology was not
+without the accent of serious sincerity.
+
+Lydia responded heartily in kind. "Oh, it was I who was horrid.
+And--wasn't it funny--I was just thinking--wondering if I should ever
+have a chance to try to make you see that I didn't mean to be so--" she
+hesitated, and fell back on iteration again--"so horrid."
+
+The fashionable Endbury boarding-school had not provided its graduate
+with any embarrassment of riches in the way of expression for various
+shades of meaning. He answered, lowering his voice as she did, "Oh, you
+were all right, but I was most objectionable with my impertinent laugh.
+I'm sorry."
+
+She challenged his sincerity, "Are you really, really?"
+
+"Oh, really, really," he assured her.
+
+"And you want to do something nice to make it up to me?"
+
+"Anything," he promised, smiling at her as at a child.
+
+"You've promised! You've promised!" She indulged herself in a noiseless
+hand-clasp. "Well, then, the forfeit is to tell me all about it."
+
+"All about what?"
+
+"Goodness gracious! Don't you remember? That's what we were both horrid
+about. I asked you to tell me about it, and you--"
+
+He remembered, evidently with an amusement not entirely free from
+annoyance. "Oh, I'm safe. I'll never see you to tell you."
+
+She sat down on the bottom step and drew her white skirts about her.
+"What's the matter with right now?" she asked, smiling.
+
+"I've got to earn my living right now," he objected, beginning with a
+swift deftness to bore a tiny hole.
+
+She was diverted for an instant. "What are you doing to our nice old
+newel-post?" she asked. "I thought they said you were going to set up
+the new sideboard."
+
+"Oh, that's no job at all; it's done. Didn't you hear me pushing and
+banging things around? Now I've the job before me of fitting the very
+latest thing in newel-posts in place of your old one."
+
+The girl returned to her first attack. "Well, anyhow, if it's a long
+job, it's all the better. Go ahead and talk at the same time. You won't
+feel you're wasting time."
+
+Their low-toned talk and the glimmering light of the hall made them seem
+oddly intimate. Lydia expressed this feeling while Rankin stood looking
+doubtfully at her, a little daunted by the pretty relentlessness of her
+insistence. "You see, you're not nearly so much a stranger to me as I am
+to you. Remember how I sewed and listened. I'm a grown-up little
+pitcher, and my ears are still large. I was remembering just now, before
+you came in, how strangely you used to talk to Dr. Melton, and I thought
+it wasn't so surprising, after all, your doing 'most anything queer."
+
+Rankin laughed as he bent over his tools. "Little pitchers have tongues,
+too, I see."
+
+Either Lydia felt herself more familiar with her interlocutor than
+before, or one result of her meditation had been the loss of her
+excessive fear of wounding his feelings. She spoke now quite
+confidently, "But, honestly, what in the world did you do it for?"
+
+"It?" He made her define herself.
+
+"Oh, you know! Give up everything--lose your chance in society, and poke
+off into the woods to be a common--" In spite of her new boldness she
+faltered here.
+
+He supplied the word, with a flash of mirth. "Don't be afraid to say it
+right out--even such an awful term as workman, or carpenter. I can bear
+it."
+
+"I knew it!" Lydia exclaimed. "As I was thinking it over on the stairs
+just now, I said to myself that probably you weren't a bit apologetic
+about it; probably you had some queer reason for being proud of yourself
+for doing it."
+
+He cast a startled look at her. "You're the only person in Endbury with
+imagination enough to guess that."
+
+"But why? why? why?" she urged him, her flexible eyebrows raised in the
+eagerness of her inquiry. "I feel just as though I were going to hear
+the answer to a perfectly maddeningly unanswerable riddle."
+
+He had another turn in his attempt at evasion. "It wouldn't be polite to
+tell you the answer, for what I'm trying to do is to get out of being
+what everybody you know thinks is the only way to be--except Dr. Melton,
+of course."
+
+"What's the matter with 'all the people I know,'" she challenged him
+explicitly.
+
+He laughed and shook his head. "Oh, I've nothing new to say about them.
+Everybody has said it, from Ecclesiastes to Tolstoi."
+
+"They never say anything about just ordinary folks in Endbury that I
+know."
+
+Rankin looked at her whimsically. "Oh, _don't_ they?"
+
+"_Do_ they?" Lydia wondered at the possibility. Presently she brought
+out, as a patently absurd supposition, "You don't mean to say that
+Endbury people are wicked?"
+
+"Do you think that none but wicked people are written about in serious
+books? No; Lord, no! I don't think they are wicked--just mistaken."
+
+"What about? Now we're getting warm. I'll guess in a minute."
+
+He looked a little sadly down at her bright, eager face. "I'm afraid you
+would never guess. It's all gone into your blood. You breathe it in and
+out as you live, every minute."
+
+"What? what? what? You can't say it, you see, when it comes right down
+to the matter."
+
+"Oh, yes, I can; I can ask you if it wouldn't be a tragedy if they
+should all be killing themselves to get what they really don't want and
+don't need, and starving for things they could easily have by just
+putting out their hands."
+
+Lydia's blankness was immense.
+
+He said, with ironic triumph: "You see, when I do say it you can't make
+anything out of it." After this he turned for a time all his attention
+to his work.
+
+He had evidently reached a critical point in his undertaking. Lydia
+watched in silence the deft manipulations of his strong, brown fingers,
+wondering at the eager, almost sparkling, alertness with which he went
+from one step to another of the process that seemed unaccountably
+complicated to her. After he had finally lifted the heavy piece of wood
+into place, handling its great weight with assurance, and had submitted
+the joint to the closest inspection, he gave a low whistle of
+satisfaction with himself, and stepped back to get the general effect.
+As he did so he happened to glance at the girl, drooping rather
+listlessly on the stair. He paused instantly, with an exclamation of
+dismay.
+
+"No; I'm not going to cry," Lydia told him with a very small smile, "but
+it would serve you right if I did."
+
+The workman wiped his forehead and surveyed her in perplexity. "What,
+can I do for you?" he asked.
+
+"If you're really serious in asking that," said Lydia with dignity,
+"I'll tell you. You can take for granted that I am not an idiot or a
+child and talk to me sensibly. Dr. Melton does. And you can tell me what
+you started out to--the real reason why you are a common carpenter
+instead of in the insurance business. Of course if you think it is none
+of my concern, that's another matter. But you said you would."
+
+Rankin looked a little abashed by the grave seriousness of this appeal,
+although he smiled at its form. "You speak as though I had my reason
+tied up in a package about me, ready to hand, out."
+
+Lydia said nothing, but did not drop her earnest eyes.
+
+He thrust his hands into his pockets and returned this intent gaze, a
+new expression on his face. Then picking up a tool, and drawing a long
+breath, he said, with the accent of a man who takes an unexpected
+resolution: "Well, I _will_ tell you."
+
+He returned to his work, tightening various small screws under the
+railing, speaking, as he did so, in a reasonable, quiet tone, with none
+of the touch of badinage which had thus far underlain his manner to the
+girl. "It's very simple--nothing romantic or sudden about it all. I did
+not like the insurance business as I saw it from the inside, and the
+more I saw of it, the less I liked it. I couldn't see how I could earn
+my living at it and arrive at the age of forty with an honest scruple
+left. Not that the insurance business is, probably, any worse than any
+other--only I knew about it from the inside. So far as I could guess
+the businesses my friends were in weren't very different. At least, I
+didn't think I could improve things by changing to them. Also, it was
+going to grow more and more absorbing--or, at least, that was the way it
+affected the older men I knew--so that at forty I shouldn't have any
+other interests than getting ahead of other people in the line of
+insurance.
+
+"Now, what was I to do about it? I can't make speeches, and nobody but
+crack-brained soreheads like me would listen to them if I did. I'm not a
+great philosopher, with a cure for things. But I didn't want to fight so
+hard to get unnecessary things for myself that I kept other people from
+having the necessaries, and didn't give myself time to enjoy things that
+are best worth enjoying. What could I do? I bothered the life out of Dr.
+Melton and myself for ages before it occurred to me that the thing to
+do, if I didn't like the life I was in, was to get out of it and do
+something harmless, at least, if I didn't have gumption enough to think
+of something worth while, that might make things better.
+
+"I like the cabinet-maker's trade, and I couldn't see that practicing it
+would interfere with my growing all the honest scruples that were in me.
+Oh, I know that it's the easiest thing in the world for a carpenter to
+turn out bad work for the sake of making a little more money every day;
+I haven't any illusions about the sanctity of the hand-crafts. But,
+anyhow, I saw that as a maverick cabinet-maker I could be pretty much my
+own master. If I had strength of mind enough I could be honest without
+endless friction with partners, employers, banks, creditors, employes,
+and all the rest of the spider web of business life. At any rate, it
+looked as though there were a chance for me to lead the life I wanted,
+and I had an idea that if I started myself in square and straight, maybe
+after a little while I could see clearer about how to help other people
+to occupations that would let them live a little as well as make money,
+and let them grow a few scruples into the bargain.
+
+"You see, there's nothing mysterious about it--nor interesting. Just
+ordinary. I'm living the way I do because I'm not smart enough to think
+of a better way. But one advantage of it is that I have a good deal of
+time to think about things. Maybe I'll think of a way to help, later.
+And, anyway, just to look at me is proof that you don't _have_ to get
+ground up in the hopper like everybody else or shut the door of the
+industrial squirrel-cage on yourself in order not to starve. Perhaps
+that'll give some cleverer person the courage to start out on his own
+tangent."
+
+Lydia drew a long breath at the conclusion of this statement. "Well--"
+she said, inconclusively; "_well!_" After a pause she advanced, "My
+sister's husband is in the insurance business."
+
+"You see," said the workman, drilling a hole with great rapidity, "you
+see I ought not to talk to you. I can't without being impolite."
+
+Lydia seemed in no haste to assure him that he had not been. She pulled
+absently a loose lock of hair--a little-girl trick that came back to her
+in moments of abstraction--and looked down at her feet. When she looked
+up, it was to say with a bewildered air, "But a man has to earn his
+living."
+
+Rankin made a gesture of impatience, and stopped working to answer this
+remark. "A living isn't hard to earn. Any healthy man can do that. It's
+earning food for his vanity, or his wife's, that kills the average man.
+It's coddling his moral cowardice that takes the heart out of him. Don't
+you remember what Emerson says--Melton's always quoting it--'Most of our
+expense is for conformity to other men's ideas? It's for cake that the
+average man runs in debt.' He must have everything that anyone else has,
+whether he wants it or not. A house ever so much bigger and finer than
+he needs, with ever so many more things in it than belong there. He must
+keep his wife idle and card-playing because other men's wives are. He
+must have his children do what everyone else's children do, whether it's
+bad for their characters or not. Ah! the children! That's the worst of
+it all! To bring them up so that these futile complications will be
+essentials of life to them! To teach them that health and peace of mind
+are not too high a price for a woman to pay for what is called social
+distinction, and that a man must--if he can get it in no other way--pay
+his self-respect and the life of his individuality for what is called
+success--"
+
+Lydia broke in with a sophisticated amusement at his heat. "Why, you're
+talking about Newport, or the Four Hundred of New York--if there is any
+such thing! The rest of America--why, any European would say we're as
+primitive as Aztecs! They do say so! Endbury's not complicated. Good
+gracious! A little, plain, middle-western town, where everybody that is
+anybody knows everybody else!"
+
+"No; it's not complicated compared with European standards, but it's
+more so than it was. Why, in Heaven's name, should it strain every nerve
+to make itself as complicated as possible as fast as it can? We're free
+yet--we're not Europeans so shaken down into a social rut that only a
+red revolution can get us out of it. Why can't we decide on a
+rational--" He broke off to say, gloomily: "The devil of it is that we
+don't decide anything. We just slide along thinking of something else.
+If people would only give, just once in their lives, the same amount of
+serious reflection to what they want to get out of life that they give
+to the question of what they want to get out of a two-weeks' vacation,
+there aren't many folks--yes, even here in Endbury that seems so
+harmless to you because it's so familiar--who wouldn't be horrified at
+the aimless procession of their busy days and the trivial false
+standards they subscribe to with their blood and sweat."
+
+"My goodness!" broke in Lydia.
+
+The exclamation came from her extreme surprise, not only at the
+extraordinary doctrine enunciated, but at the experience, new to her, of
+hearing convictions spoken of in ordinary conversation. The workman took
+it, however, for a mocking comment on his sudden fluency. He gave a
+whimsical grimace, and said, as he began picking up his tools, "Ah, I
+shouldn't have given in to you. When I get started I never can stop."
+His expression altered darkly. "But I hate all that sort of thing so! I
+_hate_ it!"
+
+Lydia shrank back from him, startled, but aroused. "Well, I hate hate!"
+she cried with energy. "It's horrid to hate anything at all, but most of
+all what's wrong and doesn't know it's wrong. That needs help, not
+hate."
+
+He had slung his tool-box on his shoulder before she began speaking, and
+now stood, ready for departure, looking at her intently. Even in the dim
+light of the hall she was aware of a wonderful change in his face. She
+was startled and thrilled by the expression of his eyes in the moment of
+silence that followed.
+
+Finally, "You've given me something to remember," he said, his voice
+vibrating, and turned away.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+LYDIA'S GODFATHER
+
+
+Lydia stood where he left her, listening to the sound of his footsteps
+die down the walk outside. She was still standing there when, some time
+later, the door to the dining-room behind her opened and a tiny elderly
+man trotted across the hall to the stairs. Lydia recognized him before
+he saw that she was there, so that he exclaimed in surprise and pleasure
+as she came running toward him, her face quivering like a child's about
+to weep.
+
+"Oh, dear Godfather!" she cried, as she flung herself on him; "I'm so
+glad you've come! I never wanted so much to see you!"
+
+He was startled to feel that she was trembling and that her cheek
+against his forehead, for she was taller than he, was burning hot. "Good
+gracious, my dear!" he said, in the shrill voice his size indicated,
+"anybody'd think you were the patient I came to see."
+
+His voice, though high, was very sweet--a quality that made it always
+sound odd, almost foreign, in the midst of the neutral, colorless
+middle-western tones about him. He spoke with a Southern accent,
+dropping his _r's_, clipping some vowels and broadening others, but
+there was no Southern drawl in the clicking, telegraphic speed of his
+speech. He now looked up at his tall godchild and said without a smile:
+"If you'll kindly come down here where I can get at you, I'll shake you
+for being so foolish. You needn't be alarmed about your mother."
+
+Lydia recoiled from the little man as impulsively as she had rushed upon
+him. "Why, how _awful_!" she accused herself, horrified. "I'd
+_forgotten_ Mother!"
+
+Dr. Melton took off his hat and laid it on the hall shelf. "I will
+climb up on a chair to shake you," he continued cheerfully, "if already,
+in less than twenty-four hours, you're indulging in nerves, as these
+broken and meaningless ejaculations seem to indicate."
+
+He picked up a palm-leaf fan, lost himself in a big hall-chair, and
+began to fan himself vigorously. He looked very hot and breathless, but
+he flowed steadily on.
+
+"I can't diagnose you yet, you know, without looking at you, the way I
+do your mother, so you'll have to give me some notion of what's the
+occasion of these alternate seizures and releases of a defenseless
+Lilliputian godfather." He made a confident gesture toward the upper
+part of the house with his fan. "About your mother--I know without going
+upstairs that she is floored with one or another manifestation of the
+great disease of social-ambitionitis. But calm yourself. It's not so bad
+as it seems when you've got the right doctor. I've practiced for thirty
+years among Endbury ladies. They can't spring anything new on me. I've
+taken your mother through doily fever induced by the change from
+table-cloths to bare tops, through portiere inflammation, through
+afternoon tea distemper, through _art-nouveau_ prostration and mission
+furniture palsy, not to speak of a horrible attack of acute insanity
+over the necessity for having her maids wear caps. I think you can trust
+me, whatever dodge the old malady is working on her."
+
+He had run on volubly, to give Lydia time to recover herself, his keen
+blue eyes fixing her, and now, as she wavered into something like a
+smile at his chatter, he shot a question at her with a complete change
+of manner: "But what's the matter with _you_?"
+
+Lydia started as though he had suddenly clapped her on the shoulder.
+"I--why, I--just--" she hesitated, "why, I don't know what _is_ the
+matter with me." She brought it out with the most honest surprise in the
+world.
+
+Dr. Melton's approval of this answer was immense. "Why, Lydia, I'm proud
+of you! You're one in a thousand. You'll break the hearts of everyone
+who knows you by turning out a sensible woman if you don't look out. I
+don't believe there's another girl in Endbury who would have had the
+nerve to tell the truth and not fake up a headache, or a broken heart,
+or _Weltschmerz_, or some such trifle, for a reason." He pulled himself
+up to his feet. "Of course, you don't know what's the matter with you,
+my dear. _I_ do. _I_ know everything, and can't do a thing. That's me!
+Physically, you're upset by Endbury heat after an ocean voyage, and
+mentally it's the reaction caused by your subsidence into private life
+after being the central figure of the returned traveler. Last evening,
+now, with that mob of friends and the family pawing at you and trying to
+cram-jam you back into the Endbury box and shut the lid down--_that_ was
+enough to kill anybody with a nerve in her body. What's the history of
+the morning? I hope you slept late."
+
+Lydia shook her head. "No; I was up ever so early.--Marietta came over
+to borrow the frames for drying curtains, and stayed to breakfast."
+
+Something about her accent struck oddly on the trained sensitiveness of
+the physician's ear. Her tone rang empty, as with something kept back.
+
+"Marietta's been snapping at you," he diagnosed rapidly.
+
+"Well, a little," Lydia admitted.
+
+The doctor laid the palm-leaf fan aside and took Lydia's slim fingers in
+both his firm, sinewy hands. "My dear, I'm going to do as I have always
+done with you, and talk with you as though you were a grown-up person
+and could take your share in understanding and bearing family problems.
+Your sister Marietta is not a very happy woman. She has too many of your
+father's brains for the life she's been shunted into. She might be
+damming up a big river with a finely constructed concrete dam, and what
+she is giving all her strength to is trying to hold back a muddy little
+trickle with her bare hands. The achievement of her life is to give on a
+two-thousand-a-year income the appearance of having five thousand like
+your father. She does it; she's a remarkably forceful woman, but it
+frets her. She ought to be in better business, and she knows it, though
+she won't admit it. So, don't you mind if she's sharp-tongued once in a
+while. It's when she feels the muddy water oozing through her fingers."
+
+He fancied that Lydia's eyes on his were a little blank, perhaps absent,
+and broke off with a short laugh. He was quite hardened to the fact that
+people never understood his fanciful metaphors, but Lydia, as a child,
+had used to have a curious intuitive divination of his meaning. After
+his laugh he sighed and turned the talk.
+
+"Well, and has Flora Burgess been after you to get your impression of
+Endbury as compared with Europe? Your mother said she wanted an
+interview with you for next Sunday's _Society Notes_."
+
+Lydia smiled. The subject was an old joke with them. "No; she hasn't
+appeared yet. I haven't seen her--not since my birthday a year ago, the
+time she described the supper-table as a 'glittering, scintillating mass
+of cut-glass and silver, and yet without what could really be called
+ostentation.' Isn't she delicious! How is the little old thing, anyway?"
+
+"Still trotting industriously about Endbury back yards sowing the
+dragon's teeth of her idiotic ideas and standards."
+
+"Oh, I remember, you don't like her," said Lydia. "She always seems just
+funny to me--funny and pathetic. She's so dowdy, and reverential to
+folks with money, and enjoys other people's good times so terrifically."
+
+"She's like some political bosses--admirable in private life, but a
+menace to the community just the same."
+
+Lydia laughed involuntarily, in spite of her preoccupation. "Flora
+Burgess a menace to the community!"
+
+The doctor turned away and began to mount the stairs. "Me and
+Cassandra!" he called over his shoulder in his high, sweet treble. "Just
+you wait and see!"
+
+He disappeared down the upper hall, finding his way about the darkened
+house with a familiarity that betokened long practice.
+
+Lydia sat down on the bottom step to wait for his return. The clock in
+the dining-room struck twelve. It came over her with a clap that but
+half a day had passed since she had run out into the dawn. For an
+instant she had the naive, melodramatic instinct of youth to deck out
+its little events in the guise of crises. She began to tell herself with
+gusto that she had passed some important turning-point in her life;
+when, as was not infrequent with her, she lost the thread of her thought
+in a sudden mental confusion which, like a curtain of fog, shut her off
+from definite reflection. Complicated things that moved rapidly always
+tired Lydia. She had an enormous capacity for quiet and tranquillity.
+To-day she felt that more complicated things were moving rapidly inside
+her head than ever before--as though she had tried to keep track of the
+revolutions of a wheel and had lost her count and could now only stare
+stupidly at the spokes, whirling till they blended into one blur. What
+was this Endbury life she had come back to? What in the world had that
+man been talking about? What a strange person he was! How very bright
+his eyes were when he looked at you--as though he were, somehow, seeing
+you more than most people did. What did the doctor mean by all that
+about Marietta? It had never occurred to her that the life of anyone
+about her might have been different from what it was. What else was
+there for people to do but what everybody else did? It was all very
+unsettling and, in this heat and loneliness, daunting.
+
+Through this vague discomfort there presently pierced a positive
+apprehension of definite unpleasantness. She would have to tell her
+mother that she had spent the whole morning talking to Mr. Rankin, and
+her mother would be cross, and would say such--Lydia remembered as in a
+distant dream her supreme content with life of only a few hours earlier.
+It seemed a very bewildering matter to her now.
+
+Ought she so certainly to tell her mother? She lingered for a moment
+over this possibility. Then, "Oh, of course!" she said aloud, flushing
+with an angry shame at her moment's parley with deceit.
+
+She heard her mother's door open and turned to see the doctor running
+down the stairs, his wrinkled little face very grave. "You were right,
+Lydia, to be anxious about your mother, and I am an old fool! There is
+no fool like a fluent fool! I'm afraid she's in for quite a siege.
+There's no danger, thank Heaven! but I don't believe she can be about
+for a month or more. I'm going to 'phone for a trained nurse. Just see
+that nobody disturbs her, will you?"
+
+He darted away, leaving Lydia leaning against the newel-post, gasping.
+The clock in the dining-room chimed the quarter-hour. She cried out to
+herself, as she climbed the stairs heavily, that she could not stand it
+to have things happen to her so fast. If all Endbury days were going to
+be like this one--
+
+She was for a moment brought to a standstill by a realization of depths
+within herself that she had not dreamed of. She realized, horrified,
+that on hearing the doctor's verdict her first thought--gone before it
+was formulated, but still her first thought--had been one of relief that
+now she need not tell her mother.
+
+It had not occurred to her at all, nor did it now, that she either
+should or should not tell her father.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+OUTSIDE THE LABYRINTH
+
+
+The Black Rock woods lay glowing under the cloudy autumn sky like a heap
+of live coals, the maples still quivering in scarlet, the chestnuts sunk
+into a clear yellow flame, the oaks, parched by the September heat,
+burnt out into rusty browns. Above them, the opalescent haze of October
+rose like a faint blue smoke, but within the woods the subdued light was
+richly colored, like that which passes through the stained glass of a
+great cathedral. The first of the fallen leaves lay in pools of gold in
+the hollows of the brown earth, where the light breezes had drifted
+them.
+
+It was, for the moment, singularly quiet, so, that, as Lydia walked
+quickly along the footpath, the pleasant rustle of her progress was the
+only sound she heard. Under a large chestnut she paused, gathering her
+amber-colored draperies about her and glancing uncertainly ahead to
+where the path forked. She looked a yellow leaf blown by some current of
+the air unfelt by the rest of the forest and caught against the rough
+bark of the tree. After hesitating for a moment, she drifted slowly
+along the right-hand path, looking about her with dreamy, dazzled eyes.
+From time to time, she stopped and lifted her face to the light and
+color above her, and once she stood a long time leaning against a tree,
+stirring with the tip of her parasol a heap of burning maple leaves.
+Under her drooping hat her face was almost vacant in a wide beatitude of
+harmony with the spirit of day. When she walked on again it was with a
+lighter and lighter step, as though the silence had come to have a
+lovely meaning for her which she feared to disturb.
+
+The path turned sharply after passing through a thicket of ruddy
+brambles, and she found herself in a little clearing which the haze of
+the upper air descended to fill. The yellow chestnuts stood in a ring
+about the sunburnt grass. It was like a golden cup filled with some
+magic, impalpable draught.
+
+Through this she now saw a rough little house, brown as an oak leaf,
+with a wide veranda, under which, before a work-bench, sat Daniel
+Rankin. His tanned arms moved rhythmically backward and forward, but his
+ruddy head was high, and his eyes, roving about the leafy walls of the
+clearing, caught sight of Lydia as soon as she had turned the corner.
+She stopped short, with a startled gesture, on the edge of the woods,
+but remained standing quietly while Rankin sprang up from his seat and
+walked toward her smiling.
+
+"Oh, Miss Emery," he called welcomingly. "I didn't recognize you for a
+minute. Every once in a while a young lady or a child loses her way from
+a picnic in the woods and stumbles into my settlement. I always have to
+hurry to show them there's no danger of the wild man who lives in that
+house eating them up." He came up to her now, and put out his hand with
+a frank pleasure.
+
+"I wasn't afraid," said Lydia; "I was startled for a minute, but I knew
+right away it must be your house. You described it to me, you know."
+
+"It's very much flattered that you remember its portrait," said the
+owner. "Won't you honor it some more by sitting down in its veranda for
+a while? Or must I take you back to your picnic party at once?"
+
+Lydia moved on, looking about her at the piles of boards, half hidden by
+vines, at the pool of clear water welling up through white sand in front
+of the house, and at the low rough building, partly covered with
+woodbine ruby-red against the weather-beaten wood.
+
+"My picnic party's gone home," she explained. "It was only Marietta and
+her little boy, anyhow. My sister thought it was going to rain, and took
+the quickest way home. I told Marietta I'd walk across and take the
+Garfield Avenue trolley line. I must have taken a wrong turn in the
+path."
+
+They had reached the veranda now, and Lydia sank into the chair which
+Rankin offered her. She smiled her thanks silently, her face still
+steeped in quiet ecstasy, and for a long time she said nothing. The
+quick responsiveness that was at all times her most marked
+characteristic answered this rare mood of Nature with an intensity
+almost frightening in its visible joy.
+
+Rankin also said nothing, looking at her reflectively and stroking his
+close-clipped red beard. Above the faded brown of his work-shirt, his
+face glowed with color. In the silent interval of the girl's slow
+emergence from her reverie, his gaze upon her was so steady that when
+Lydia finally glanced up at him he could not for a moment look away. The
+limpid unconsciousness of her eyes changed into a startled look of
+inquiry, as though he had spoken and she had not understood. Then a
+flush rose to her cheeks, she looked down and away in a momentary
+confusion, moved in her chair, and began to talk at random.
+
+"So this is where you live. It's lovely. It looks like a fairy
+story--the little house in the wood, you know--nothing seems real
+to-day--the woods--it makes me want to cry, they are so beautiful. I've
+been wondering and wondering what outdoors was looking like. You know
+poor Mother is sick, and though she's not so awfully sick, and of course
+we've a trained nurse for her, still I've had to be housekeeper and I
+haven't had time to breathe. The second girl left right off because of
+the extra work she thought sickness would make, but it seems to me we've
+had a million new second girls in the three weeks. It's been awful! I
+haven't had time to get out at all or to see anybody."
+
+She was quite herself now, and confided her troubles with a naive
+astonishment, as though they were new to humanity.
+
+"Yes; I've heard ladies say before that it's quite awful," agreed her
+companion gravely. He swung himself up to sit on his work-bench, his
+long legs stretched before him, just reaching the ground. "Envy me," he
+went on, smiling; "I don't have to have a second girl, or a first one,
+either."
+
+"What _do_ you do?" asked Lydia, not waiting, however, for an answer,
+but continuing her relieved outpouring of her own perplexities. "It's
+perfectly desperate at home. I haven't had a minute's peace. This
+afternoon I just got wild, and said I _would_ get away from it for a
+minute, and just ran away. Father's nice about it, but he does look
+something fierce when he comes home and finds another one left. He says
+that Mother doesn't have to change more than two or three times a year!"
+She presented this as the superlative of stability.
+
+Rankin laughed again. Lydia felt more and more at her ease. He was
+evidently thinking of her pretty looks and ways rather than of what she
+was saying, and, like all of her sisterhood, this was treatment which
+she thoroughly understood. For the moment she forgot that he was the man
+who had startled and almost shocked her by his unabashed presentation,
+in a conversation with a young lady, of ideas and convictions. She
+leaned back in her chair and put on some of the gracefully imperious
+airs of regnant American young-ladyhood. "You must show me all about how
+you live, and everything," she commanded prettily. "I've been so curious
+about it--and now here I am."
+
+She was enchantingly unconscious of the possibility of her having seemed
+to seek him out. "What a perfectly beautiful piece of wood you have in
+that chair-back." She laid her ungloved, rosy finger-tips on a dark
+piece of oak. "And so this is where you work?"
+
+"I work everywhere," he told her. "I do all that's done, you see."
+
+"You must have to walk quite a ways to get your meals, don't you?" Lydia
+turned her white neck to glance inside the house.
+
+Rankin's mouth twitched humorously. "You'll never understand me," he
+said lightly. "I get my meals myself, here."
+
+Lydia turned on him sharply. "You don't _cook_!" she cried out.
+
+"And wash dishes, and make my bed, and sweep my floor, and, once in a
+great while, dust."
+
+The romantic curiosity died out of the girl's eyes into a shocked
+wonder. She glanced at his large brown hands, and seemed about to speak.
+Nothing came from her lips finally, however, beyond the pregnant "Well!"
+which seemed the only expression in her vocabulary for extreme surprise.
+Rankin threw back his head, showing a triangle of very white throat
+above his loose collar, and laughed aloud. The sound of his mirth was so
+infectious that Lydia laughed with him, though half uneasily.
+
+"It's so funny," he explained, "to see the picture of myself I gather
+from your shocked and candid eyes. I'm so used to my queer ideas
+nowadays that I forget that what seems perfectly natural to me still
+seems perfectly crazy to others."
+
+"Well, not _crazy_." Lydia proffered this negation in so halting an
+accent that Rankin burst into another peal of laughter. "But it must be
+horrid for you to wash dishes and cook!" protested Lydia, feeling
+resentful that her inculcated horror of a man's "lowering himself" to
+woman's work should be taken with so little seriousness. She tried to
+rearrange a mental picture which the other was continually destroying.
+"But I suppose it's very picturesque. You cook over an open fire, I
+imagine."
+
+There was a humorous glint in his eye, "I cook over the best brand of
+oil-stove that money can buy," he told her, relentlessly, watching her
+wince from the sordid image. "I have all the conveniences I can think
+of. All I'm trying to do is to get myself fed with the least expenditure
+of gray matter and time on my part, and as things are now arranged in
+this particular corner of the country I find I can do it best this way.
+It's more work trying to persuade somebody who doesn't want to wait on
+me than to jump up and do it myself. Also, having brains, I can
+certainly cook like a house afire."
+
+At this, Lydia was overcome by that openness to conviction from
+unexpected sources which gave her mother one of her great anxieties for
+her. "Well, honestly, do you know," she said unexpectedly, "there is a
+lot in that. I've thought ever so many times in the last two weeks that
+if Father would let me wait on the table, for instance, I could get on
+ever so much easier."
+
+"And I'll just warrant," the man went on, "that I've had more time to
+myself lately than you have, for all I've my living to earn as well as
+the housework."
+
+"My goodness!" cried Lydia, repudiating the comparison. "That needn't be
+saying much for you, for I haven't had a minute--not even to sit with
+Mother as much as I ought."
+
+"What did you have to do that kept you from that?"
+
+"Oh, you're no housekeeper, that's evident, or you wouldn't ask. A man
+_never_ has any idea about the amount of work there is to do in a house.
+Why, set the table, and sweep the parlors, and change the flower vases,
+and dust, and pick up, and dust--I don't know what makes things get so
+dusty. We've got an awfully big house, you know, and of course I want to
+keep everything as nice as if Mother were up. Everybody expects me to do
+that!"
+
+"I had a great-aunt," began Rankin with willful irrelevancy, "a very
+wonderful old woman who taught me most of what I value. She was
+considered cracked, so maybe that's why I am a freak, and she was as
+wise as wise! And she had stories that fitted every occasion. One that
+she used to tell was about a farmer cousin of hers, who had a team of
+spirited young horses that he was breaking. Everybody warned him that if
+they ever ran away they'd be spoiled for life, and he got carefuller and
+carefuller of them. One day he and his father were haying beside a
+river, and the father, who couldn't swim a stroke, fell in. The horses
+were frightened by the splash and began to prance, and the son ran to
+their heads, beside himself with fear. The old man came to the top and
+screamed, 'Help! help!' and the son answered, fairly jumping up and down
+in his anguish of mind over his poor old father's fate, 'Oh, help,
+somebody! Somebody come and help! I can't leave my horses!'"
+
+He stopped. Lydia slid helplessly into the naive question, "Well, did
+his father drown?" before the meaning of the little parable struck her.
+She began to laugh, with her gay, sweet inability to resent a joke made
+at her own expense. "Don't you think you are a good hand at
+sermon-making!" she mocked him. "It's all very well to preach, but just
+you tell me what you would have done in my place."
+
+"I should have left those big rooms, filled with things to dust, and let
+the dust lie on them--even such an awful thing as that!"
+
+Lydia considered this with honest surprise. "Why, do you know, it never
+occurred to me I could do that!"
+
+Rankin nodded. "It's a common hallucination," he explained. "I've had
+it. I have to struggle against it still."
+
+"Hallucination?"
+
+"The notion that you belong to the things that belong to you."
+
+Lydia looked at him sidewise out of her clear dark eyes. She was
+beginning to feel more at home in his odd repertory of ideas. "I
+wonder," she mused, "if that's why I always feel so much freer and
+happier in old clothes--that I don't forget that they're for me and I'm
+not for them. But really, you know, dressmakers and mothers and folks
+get you to thinking that you are for clothes--you're made to show them
+off." Rankin vouchsafed no opinion as to this problem of young-ladyhood.
+"Here's your sister's rain," he said instead, pointing across the
+clearing, where against the dark tree-trunks fine, clear lines slanted
+down to the dry grass. Lydia rose in some agitation. "Why, I didn't
+really think it would rain! I thought it was just Marietta's--" She
+glanced down in dismay at her thin low shoes and the amber-colored silk
+of her ruffled skirt.
+
+Rankin stood up eagerly. "Ah, I've a chance to do you a service. Just
+step in, won't you, a moment and let me skirmish around and see what a
+bachelor's establishment can offer to a beautiful young lady who mustn't
+get wet."
+
+Lydia moved into the wide, low room, saying deprecatingly, "It wouldn't
+hurt _me_ to get wet, you know. But this dress just came from Paris, and
+I haven't had a chance to show it to anybody yet."
+
+Rankin laughed, hastening to draw up a chair before the hearth, where a
+few embers still glowed, their presence explained by the autumnal chill
+which now struck sharply across the room from the open door as the rain
+began to patter on the roof. The girl looked about her in silence,
+apparently with surprise.
+
+"Well, how do you like it?" asked the master of the house, throwing some
+dry twigs on the fire so that the flame, leaping up, lighted the
+corners, already dusky with the approach of evening. "It's not very
+tidy, is it?" He began rummaging in a recess in the wall, tumbling out
+coats and shoes and hats in his haste. Finally, "There!" he cried in
+triumph, shaking out a rain-coat, "That will keep your pretty French
+finery dry."
+
+He turned back to the girl, who was sitting very straight in her chair,
+peering about her with wide eyes and a strange expression on her face.
+"Why, what's the matter?" he asked.
+
+[Illustration: "You say beautiful things!" he replied quietly. "My
+rough quarters are glorified for me."]
+
+Lydia stood up, with a quick indrawn breath. "I don't know," she said,
+"what it is. It seems as though I'd been here before. It looks so
+familiar to me--so good--" She went closer to where, still holding out
+the rain-coat, he stood on the other side of a table strewn with papers.
+She leaned on this, fingering a pen and looking at him with a shy
+eagerness. She was struggling, as so often, with an indefinable feeling
+which she had no words to express. "Don't you know," she went on, "every
+once in a while you see somebody--an old man or woman, perhaps, on the
+street cars, in the street--and somehow the face goes home to you. It
+seems as though you'd been waiting to see that face again. Well, it's
+just so with this room. It has a face. I like it very--" She broke off,
+helplessly inarticulate before the confusion of her thoughts, and looked
+timidly at the man. She was used to kindly, amused laughter when she
+tried, stumblingly, to phrase some of the quickly varying impressions
+which made her life so full of invisible incidents.
+
+But Rankin did not laugh, even kindly. His clear eyes were more than
+serious. They seemed to show him moved to an answering emotion. "You say
+beautiful things!" he replied quietly. "My rough quarters are glorified
+for me. I've been fond of them before--they're the background to a good
+many inward struggles and a considerable amount of inward peace, but
+now--" He looked about him with new eyes, noting the dull gleam of gold
+with which the chestnut ceiling answered the searching flicker of the
+fire, the brighter sparkles which were struck out from the gilded
+lettering on the books which lined the walls, and the diamond-like
+flashes from the polished steel of the tools on the work-bench at the
+other end of the room. There was a pause in which the silence within the
+house brought out the different themes composing the rich harmony of the
+rain, the steady, resonant downpour on the roof, the sweet whispers of
+the dried grass under the torrent, the muted thuddings of the big drops
+on the beaten earth of the veranda floor, and the hurried liquid
+overflow of the eaves. It was still light enough to see the fine color
+of the leather that covered the armchairs, and the glossy black of a
+piano, heaped with a litter of music. Near the piano, leaning against
+the wall, a violoncello curved its brown crook-neck over the shapeless
+bag that sheltered it.
+
+Lydia pointed to it. "You're musical!" she said, as if she had made an
+important discovery.
+
+Rankin roused himself, followed the direction of her gaze, and shook
+his head. "No; I can't play a note," he said cheerfully, laying the
+rain-coat down and going to look over the pile of overshoes in a box;
+"but I like it. My queer old great-aunt left me that 'cello. It had
+belonged to her grandfather. I believe being so old makes it quite
+valuable. The piano belongs to an old German friend of mine who has seen
+better days and has now no place to keep it. Two or three times a week
+he comes out here with an old crony who plays the 'cello, and they make
+music till they get to crying on each other's necks."
+
+"Do you cry, too?" Lydia smiled at the picture.
+
+Rankin came back to the fire with a pair of rubbers in his hand. "No;
+I'm an American. I only blow my nose hard," he said gravely.
+
+"Well, it must be lovely!" She sighed this out ardently, sinking back in
+her chair. "I love music so it 'most kills me, but I don't get very much
+of it. I took piano lessons when I was little, but there were always so
+many other things to do I never got time to practice as much as I wanted
+to, and so I didn't get very far. Anyhow, after I heard a good orchestra
+play, my little tinklings were worse than nothing. I wish I could hear
+more. But perhaps it's just as well, Mother says. It always gets me so
+excited. I'm sure I should cry, along with the Germans."
+
+"They would like that," observed her host, "above everything."
+
+"Father keeps talking about getting one of those player-pianos, but
+Mother says they are so new you can't tell what they are going to be.
+She says they may get to be too common."
+
+Rankin looked at her hard. "Would you like one?" He asked this trivial
+question with a singular emphasis.
+
+"Why, I haven't really thought," said Lydia, considering the matter.
+
+The man looked oddly anxious for her answer.
+
+Finally, "Why, it depends on how much music you can make with them. If
+they are really good, I should want one, of course."
+
+Rankin smiled, drew a long breath, and fell sober again as if at a
+sudden thought.
+
+"I don't see any oil-stove," said the girl, skeptically, looking about
+her.
+
+"Oh, I have a regular kitchen. It's there," he nodded back of him; "and
+two rooms beside for me and for Dr. Melton or my Germans, or some of my
+other freak friends when they stay too long and miss the last trolley in
+to town. Oh, I have lots of room."
+
+"It looks really rather nice, now I'm here and all," Lydia vaguely
+approved; "though I don't see why you couldn't have gone on more like
+other folks and just changed some things--not been so _awfully_ queer!"
+
+Rankin was kneeling before her, holding out a pair of rubbers. At this
+remark he sat back on his heels, and began: "My great-aunt said that
+there was a man in her town who had such a terrible temper that his wife
+was in perfect terror of him, and finally actually died of fear.
+Everybody was paralyzed with astonishment when, two or three years
+after, one of the nicest girls in town married him. People told her she
+was crazy, but she just smiled and said she guessed she could get along
+with him all right. Everything went well for a week or two, and then one
+day he said the tea was cold and not fit for a pig to drink, and threw
+the cup on the floor. She threw hers down and broke it all to smash. He
+stared and glared, and threw his plate down. She set her lips and banged
+her own plate on the hearth. He threw his knife and fork through the
+window. She threw hers after, and added the water-pitcher for good
+measure."
+
+Lydia's astonishment at this point was so heartfelt that the raconteur
+broke off, laughed, and ended hastily, "I spare you the rest of the
+dinner-service. The upshot of it was that every dish in the house was
+smashed and not a word spoken. Then the man called for his carriage (he
+was a rich man--that sort usually is), drove to the nearest china-store,
+bought a new set, better than the old, took it back, and lived in peace
+and harmony with his wife ever after. And here is the smallest pair of
+rubbers I can find, and I shall have to tie these on!"
+
+Lydia watched the operation in silence. As he finished it and rose to
+his feet again, "What was that all about?" she inquired simply.
+
+"Compromise," he answered. "There are occasions when it doesn't do any
+good."
+
+"Does it do such a lot of good to go off in the woods by yourself and do
+your own cooking?" asked Lydia with something of her father's shrewd
+home-thrusting accent. "What would happen if everybody did that?"
+
+Rankin laughed. "Everybody'd have a good time, for one thing," he
+answered, adding, more seriously, "The house of Rimmon may be all right
+for some people, but _my_ head isn't clear enough."
+
+Lydia looked frankly at a loss. She did not belong to the alert, quickly
+"bluffing" type of young lady. "Rimmon?" she asked.
+
+"He's in the Bible."
+
+"That's a good reason why I've never heard of him," she said ruefully.
+
+"All I meant by him was that people who conform outwardly to a standard
+they don't really believe in, are in danger of getting most awfully
+mixed up. And certainly they don't stand any chance of convincing
+anybody else that there's anything the matter with the standard. What's
+needed isn't to upset everything in a heap, but to call people's
+attention to the fact that things could be a lot better than they are.
+And that's hard to do. And who ever called more people's attention to
+that fact than an impractical, unbalanced nobleman who took to cobbling
+shoes for the peace of his soul? There wasn't a particle of sense to
+what Tolstoi _did_, but--" He stopped, hesitating in an uncertainty that
+Lydia understood with a touching humility.
+
+"Oh, you needn't explain who Tolstoi is. I've heard of him."
+
+"Well, you mustn't imagine I'm anything like Tolstoi!" cried the young
+man, laughing aloud at the idea, "for I don't take a bit of stock in
+his deification of working with your muscles. That was an exaggeration
+he fell into in his old age because he'd been denied his fair share of
+manual work when he was young. If he'd had to split kindlings and tote
+ashes and hoe corn when he was a boy, I bet he wouldn't have thought
+there was anything so sanctifying about callouses on your hands!"
+
+"Oh, dear! You're awfully confusing to me," complained Lydia. "You
+always seem to be making fun of something I thought just the minute
+before you believed in."
+
+Rankin looked intensely serious. "There isn't an impression I'd be
+sorrier to give you," he said earnestly. "Perhaps the trouble is that
+you don't as yet know much about the life I've got out of."
+
+"I've lived in Endbury all my life," protested Lydia.
+
+"There may still be something for you to learn about the lives of its
+men," suggested her companion.
+
+"If you think it's so wrong, why don't you reform it?" Lydia launched
+this challenge suddenly at him with the directness characteristic of her
+nation.
+
+"I have to begin with reforming myself," he said, "and that's job enough
+to last me a long while. I have to learn not to care about being
+considered a failure by all the men of my own age who are passing me by;
+and I don't mind confessing to you that that is not always easy--though
+you mustn't tell Dr. Melton I'm so weak. I have to train myself to see
+that they are not really getting _up_ so fast, but only _scrambling_
+fast over slipping, sliding stones; and then I have to try to find some
+firm ground where I can make a path of my own, up which I can plod in my
+own way."
+
+The tone of the young people, as they talked with their innocent
+grandiloquence of these high matters, might have been taken for that of
+a couple deep in some intimate discussion, so honestly serious and moved
+was it. There was a silence now, also like the pause in a profoundly
+personal talk, in which they looked long into each other's eyes.
+
+The clock struck five. Lydia sprang to her feet. "Oh, I must hurry on!
+I told Marietta to telephone home that I'd be there at six."
+
+She still preserved her charming unconsciousness of the
+unconventionality of her situation. A European girl, brought up in the
+strictest ignorance of the world, would still have had intuitions to
+make her either painfully embarrassed or secretly delighted with this
+impromptu visit to a young bachelor; but Lydia, who had been allowed to
+read "everything" and the only compromise to whose youth had been fitful
+attempts of the family to remember "not to talk too much about things
+before Lydia," was clad in that unearthly innocence which the advancing
+tide of sophistication has still left in some parts of the United
+States--that sweet, proud, pathetic conviction of the American girl that
+evil is not a vital force in any world that she knows. The young man
+before her smiled at her in as artless an unconsciousness as her own.
+They might have been a pair of children.
+
+"You've plenty of time," he assured her. "Though I live so far out of
+the world, the Garfield Avenue trolley line is only five minutes' walk
+away. Oh, I'm prosaic and commonplace, with my oil-stove and trolley
+cars. There's nothing of the romantic reactionary about me, I'm afraid."
+He wrapped the rain-coat about her and took an umbrella.
+
+"Don't you lock up your house when you go away?" asked Lydia.
+
+"The poor man laughs in the presence of thieves," quoted Rankin.
+
+They stood on the veranda now, looking out into the blue twilight. The
+rain drummed noisily on the roof and the soft swish of its descent into
+the grass rose to a clear, sibilant note. The wind had died down
+completely, and the raindrops fell in long, straight lines like an
+opaque, glistening wall, which shut them off from the rest of the world.
+Back of them, the fire lighted up the empty chair that Lydia had left.
+She glanced in, and, moved by one of her sudden impulses, ran back for
+a moment to cast a rapid glance about the quiet room.
+
+When she returned to take Rankin's arm as he held the open umbrella, she
+looked up at him with shining eyes. "I have made friends with it--your
+living-room," she said.
+
+As they made their way along the footpath, she went on, "When I get into
+the trolley car I shall think I have dreamed it--the little house in the
+clearing--so peaceful, so--just look at it now. It looks like a little
+house in a child's fairy-tale." They paused on the edge of the clearing
+and looked back at the pleasant glow shimmering through the windows,
+then plunged into the strip of forest that separated the clearing from
+the open farming country and the main road to Endbury.
+
+Neither of them spoke during this walk. The rain pattered swiftly,
+varying its monotonous refrain as it struck the umbrella, the leaves,
+the little brook that ran beside them, or the stony path. Lydia clung to
+Rankin's arm, peering about her into the dim caves of twilight with a
+happy, secure excitement. After her confinement to the house for the
+last fortnight, merely to be out of doors was an intoxication for her,
+and ever since she had left her sister and begun her wanderings in the
+painted woods she had felt the heroine of an impalpable adventure. The
+silent flight through the dripping trees was a fitting end. Except for
+breaking in upon the music of the rain, she would have liked to sing
+aloud.
+
+She thought, flittingly, how Marietta would laugh at her manufacturing
+anything romantic out of the commonplace facts of the insignificant
+episode, but even as she turned away from her sister's imagined mocking
+smile, she felt an odd certainty that to Rankin there was also a glamour
+about their doings. It was as though the occasional contact of their
+bodies as they moved along the narrow path were a wordless
+communication.
+
+He said nothing, but as they emerged upon the long treeless road,
+stretching away over the flat country to where the lights of Endbury
+glowed tremulously through the rain, he looked at his companion with a
+quick intensity, as though it were the first time he had really seen
+her.
+
+It was that man's look which makes a woman's heart beat faster, even if
+she is as inexperienced as Lydia. She was already tingling with an
+undefined emotion, and the shock of their meeting eyes made her face
+glow. It shone through the half-light as though a lamp had been lighted
+within.
+
+They stood silently waiting for the car which flashed a headlight toward
+them far down the track. As it drew near, bounding over the rails,
+humming like a great insect, and bringing visibly nearer and nearer the
+end of their time together, Lydia was aware that Rankin was in the grasp
+of an emotion that threatened to become articulate. The steady advance
+of the car was forcing him to a speech against which he struggled in
+vain. Lydia began to quiver. She felt an expectancy of something lovely,
+moving, new to her, which grew tenser and tenser, as though her nerves
+were the strings of an instrument being pulled into tune for a melody.
+Standing there in the cold, rainy twilight, she had a moment of the
+exultation she had thought was to be so common in her Endbury career.
+She felt warmed through with the consciousness of being lovely, admired,
+secure, supremely fortunate, just as she had thought she would feel; but
+she had not been able to imagine the extraordinary happiness that this,
+or some unrecognized element of the moment, gave to her.
+
+The car was almost upon them; the blinding glare of the headlight showed
+their faces with startling suddenness. She saw in Rankin's eyes a
+tenderness that went to her heart. She leaned to him from the steps of
+the car to which he swung her--she leaned to him with a sweet,
+unconscious eagerness. In the instant before the car moved forward, as
+he stood gazing up at her, he spoke at last.
+
+The words hummed meaningless in Lydia's ears, and it was not until some
+time after, in the garish white brilliance of the car, that she
+convinced herself that she had heard aright. Even then, though she still
+saw his face raised to hers, the raindrops glistening on his hair and
+beard, even though she still heard the fervor of his voice, she remained
+incredulous before the enigma of his totally unexpected words. He had
+said, with a solemn note of pity in his voice: "Ah, my poor child, I am
+so horribly, horribly sorry for you!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE SHADOW OF THE COMING EVENT
+
+
+Judge Emery looked tired and old as he sat down heavily at his
+dinner-table opposite his pretty daughter. The discomfort and
+irregularity of the household for the last two weeks had worn on the
+nerves of a very busy man who needed all of his strength for his work.
+It seemed an evil fate of his, he reflected as he took his napkin out of
+its ring, that whenever he was particularly hard-pressed in his
+profession, domestic turmoil was sure to set in. He was now presiding
+over a suit between the city and the electric railway company, involving
+many intricate details of electrical engineering and accounting methods.
+Until that suit was settled, he felt that it was unreasonable for his
+family to expect him to give time or attention to anything else.
+
+In the absence of other vital interests in his life, he had come to
+focus all his faculties on his profession. On the adroitness of clever
+attorneys he expended the capacity for admiration which, as his life was
+arranged, found no other outlet; and, belonging to the generation before
+golf and bridge and tennis had brought games within the range of
+serious-minded adults, he had the same intent curiosity about the
+outcome of a legal contest that another man might have felt in the
+outcome of a Newport tournament. His wife had long ago learned, so she
+said, that any attempt to catch his mental eye while an interesting
+trial was in progress was as unavailing as to try to call a street gamin
+away from a knot-hole in a fence around a baseball field.
+
+She knew him and all his capabilities very well, his wife told herself,
+and so used was she to the crystallized form in which she had for so
+many years beheld him, that she dismissed, as typically chimerical
+"notions," the speculations of her doctor--also a lifelong friend of
+her husband's--as to what Judge Emery might have become if--the doctor
+spoke in his usual highly figurative and fantastic jargon--"he had not
+had to hurry so with that wheel in his cage." "When I first knew Nat
+Emery," he once said, "he was sitting up till all hours reading _Les
+Miserables_, and would knock you down if you didn't bow your head at the
+mention of Thackeray. He might have liked music, too. An American isn't
+inherently incapable of that, I suppose." At which he had turned on
+sixteen-year-old Lydia with, "Which would you rather have, Lyddy; a
+husband with a taste for Beethoven or one that'd make you five thousand
+a year?" Lydia had shudderingly made the answer of sixteen years, that
+she never intended to have a husband of any kind whatever, and Mrs.
+Emery had rebuked the doctor later for "putting ideas in girls' heads."
+It was an objection at which he had laughed long and loud.
+
+Mrs. Emery liked her doctor in spite of not understanding him; but she
+loved her husband because she knew him through and through. In his turn,
+Judge Emery bestowed on his wife an esteem the warmth of which was not
+tempered by his occasional amusement at her--an amusement which Mrs.
+Emery was far from suspecting. He did heartily and unreservedly admire
+her competence; though he never did justice to her single-handed battle
+against the forces of ignorance and irresponsibility in the kitchen
+until an illness of hers showed that the combat must be continuous,
+though his wisdom in selecting an ambitious wife had shielded him, as a
+rule, from the uproar of the engagement.
+
+This evening, as he looked across the white table-cloth at his daughter,
+he had a sudden qualm of doubt, not unusual in parents, as to the
+capacity of the younger generation to carry on the work begun by the
+older. Of course, he reassured himself, this had scarcely been a fair
+trial. The child had been plunged into the business the day after her
+return, with the added complication of her mother's illness; but, even
+making all allowances, he had been dismayed by the thorough-going
+domestic anarchy that had ensued. He was partly aware that what alarmed
+him most was Lydia's lack of zest in the battle, an unwillingness to
+recognize its inevitability and face it; a strange, apparently willful,
+blindness to the value of victory. Her father was disturbed by this
+failure to acquiesce in the normal, usual standard of values. He
+recalled with apprehension the revolutionary sayings and doings of his
+second son, which had been the more disconcerting because they flowed
+from the young reactionary in such a gay flood of high spirits. Harry
+had no more shared the reverent attitude of his family toward household
+aesthetics than toward social values. A house was a place to keep the
+weather from you, he had said laughingly. If you could have it pretty
+and well-ordered without too much bother, well and good; but might the
+Lord protect him from everlastingly making omelets to look at and not to
+eat.
+
+Lydia, to be sure, had ventured no irreverent jokes, and, so far as her
+father could see, had never conceived them; but a few days before she
+had suggested seriously, "Why can't we shut up all of the house we don't
+really use, and not have to take care of those big parlors and the
+library when you and I are always in the dining-room or upstairs with
+Mother, now she's sick?"
+
+Judge Emery had thought of the grade of society which keeps its "best
+room" darkened and closed, of the struggles with which his wife had
+dragged the family up out of that grade, and was appalled at Lydia's
+unconscious reversion to type. "Your mother would feel dreadfully to
+have you do that; you know she thinks it very bad form--very green."
+
+Lydia had not insisted; it ran counter to every instinct in Lydia to
+insist on anything. She had succumbed at the first of his shocked tones
+of surprise; but the suggestion had shown him a glimpse of workings in
+her mind which made him uneasy.
+
+However, to-night there were several cheering circumstances. The doctor
+had left word that, in all probability, Mrs. Emery would be quite
+herself in ten days--a shorter time than he had feared. Lydia was really
+charming in a rose-colored dress that matched the dewy flush in her
+cheeks; the roast looked cooked as he liked it, and he had heard some
+warm words that day about the brilliancy of young Paul Hollister's
+prospects. He took a drink of ice-water, tucked his napkin in the top of
+his vest--a compromise allowed him by his wife at family dinners, and
+smiled at his daughter. "Your mother tells me that you've had a letter
+from Paul, saying that he'll be back shortly," he said with a jocosely
+significant emphasis. "I suppose we shall hardly be able to get a
+glimpse of you after he's in town again."
+
+At this point, beginning to carve the roast, he had a sinking
+premonition that it was going to be very tough, and though he heroically
+resisted the ejaculation of embittered protest that rose to his lips,
+this magnanimity cost him so dear that he did not think of Lydia again
+till after he had served her automatically, dashing the mashed potato on
+her plate with the gesture of an angry mason slapping down a trowelful
+of mortar. It seemed to him at the moment that the past three weeks had
+been one succession of tough roasts. He took another drink of ice-water
+before he gloomily began on his first mouthful. It was worse than he
+feared, and he was in no mood to be either very imaginative or very
+indulgent to a girl's whims when Lydia said, suddenly and stiffly, "I
+wish you wouldn't speak so about Paul. I don't know what makes everybody
+tease me so about him!"
+
+Her father was chewing grimly. "I don't know why they shouldn't, I'm
+sure," he said. "Young folks can't expect everybody to keep their eyes
+shut and draw no conclusions. Of course I understand Paul's not saying
+anything definite till now, on account of your being so young."
+
+Something of Marietta's unsparing presentation of facts was inherited
+from her father, though, under his wife's tutelage, he usually spared
+Lydia when he thought of it. At this time he was speaking almost
+absently, his attention divided between the exceptions to his rulings
+taken by the corporation counsel and the quality of his dinner; both
+disturbing to his quiet. He finally gave up the attempt at mastication
+and swallowed the morsel bodily, with a visible gulp. As he felt the
+consequent dull lump of discomfort, he allowed himself his first
+articulate protest. "Good Heavens! What meat!"
+
+Lydia had grown quite pale. She pushed back her plate and looked at her
+father with horrified eyes. "Father! What a thing to say!" she finally
+cried out. "You make me ashamed to look him--to look anybody in the
+face. Why, I never dreamed of such a thing! I never--"
+
+Judge Emery was very fond of his pretty daughter, and at this appeal
+from what he felt to be a very mild expression of justified discontent,
+he melted at once. "Now, never mind, Lydia, it won't kill me. Only as
+soon as your mother gets about again, for the Lord's sake have her take
+you to a butcher shop and learn to select meats."
+
+Lydia looked at him blankly. She had the feeling that her father was so
+remote from her that she could hardly see him. She opened her lips to
+speak, but at that moment the maid--the latest acquisition from the
+employment agency, a slatternly Irish girl--went through the dining-room
+on her way to answer the door-bell, and her father's amused comment cut
+her short. "Lydia, you'll have your guests thinking they're at a lunch
+counter if you let that girl go on wearing that agglomeration of hair."
+
+The maid reappeared, sidling into the room, half carrying, half dragging
+a narrow, tall green pasteboard box, higher than herself but still not
+long enough for its contents, which protruded in leafy confusion from
+one end. "It's for you," she said bluntly, depositing it beside Lydia
+and retreating into the kitchen.
+
+Lydia looked at it in wonder, turning to crimson confusion when her
+father said: "From Paul, I suppose. Very nice, I'm sure. Ring the bell
+for dessert before you open it. Of course you're in a hurry to read the
+card." He smiled with a tender amusement at the girl, who met his eyes
+with a look of fright. She opened the box, from which arose a column of
+strong, spicy odor, almost like something visible, and naively read the
+card aloud: "To the little girl grown up at last--to the young lady I've
+waited so long to see."
+
+She laid the card down beside her plate and kept her eyes upon it,
+hanging her head in silence. Her father began to consume his dessert
+rapidly. The cream in it was delicious, and he ate with appreciation. To
+him, as to many middle-aged Americans, the two vital parts of a meal
+were the meat and the dessert. The added pleasures or comforting
+consolations of soup, salads, vegetables, entrees, made dishes, were not
+for him. He ate them, but with a robust indifference. "Meat's business,"
+he was wont to say, "and dessert's fun. The rest of one's victuals is
+society and art and literature and such--things to leave to the women."
+
+He now stopped his consumption of his dessert and recalled himself with
+an effort to his daughter's impalpable difficulties. She was murmuring,
+"But, Father--you must be mistaken-- Why, nobody so much as hinted at
+such a--"
+
+"That's your mother's doings. She'd be furious now if she knew I'd
+spoken right out. But you don't want to be treated like a little girl
+all your life, do you?" He laughed at her speechless embarrassment with
+a kind obtuseness to the horror of youth at seeing its shy fastnesses of
+reserve laid open to indifferent feet. Divining, however, through his
+affection for her, that she was really more than pleasantly startled by
+his bluntness, he began to make everything smooth by saying: "There
+aren't many girls in Endbury who don't envy my little Lydia, I guess.
+Paul is considered--"
+
+At this point Lydia rose hurriedly and actually ran away from the sound
+of his voice. She fled upstairs so rapidly that he heard the click of
+her heel on the top step before he could draw his breath. He laughed
+uneasily, finished his dessert in one or two huge mouthfuls, and
+followed her. He was recalled by the ringing of the telephone bell, and
+when he went upstairs again he was smiling broadly. With his lawyer's
+caution, he waited a moment outside his wife's room, where he heard
+Lydia's voice, to see if her mother had hit upon some happy inspiration
+to quiet the girl's exaggerated maidenly shyness. He had the tenderest
+indulgence to his daughter's confusion, but he was not without a
+humorous, middle-aged realization of the extremely transitory nature of
+this phase of youth. He had lived long enough to see so many blushing
+girls transformed into matter-of-fact matrons that the inevitable end of
+the business was already present to his mind. He was vastly relieved
+that Lydia had a mother to understand her fancies, and upon his wife,
+whom he would not have trusted to undertake the smallest business
+transaction without his advice, he transferred, with a sigh of content,
+the entire responsibility of wisely counseling their daughter. "Thank
+the Lord, that's not my job!" he had often said about some knotty point
+in the up-bringing of the children. Mrs. Emery had always answered that
+she could not be too thankful for a "husband who was not a meddler."
+
+The Judge now listened at the door to the conversation between the two
+women with a grin of satisfaction.
+
+"Why, my dear, what is there so terrible in having the handsomest and
+most promising young man in Endbury devoted to you? You don't need to
+marry him for years and years if you don't want to--or never, if you
+don't like him enough." She laughed a little, teasingly, "Perhaps it's
+all just our nonsense, and he never has thought of you in that way.
+Maybe when he comes to see you he'll tell you about a beautiful girl in
+Urbana or Cincinnati that he's engaged to--and _then_ what would your
+silly father say?"
+
+"Oh, if I could only think that," breathed Lydia, as though she had been
+reprieved from a death sentence. "Of course! Father was just joking. But
+he startled me so!"
+
+"He was probably thinking of his horrid law business, darling. When a
+big trial is on he wouldn't know me from Eve. He says _anything_ at such
+times."
+
+Judge Emery laughed noiselessly, and quite without resentment at this
+wifely characterization.
+
+Lydia went on: "It wasn't so much what he said, you know--as--oh, the
+way he took it for granted--"
+
+"Well, don't think about it any more, dear; just be your sweet natural
+self when Paul comes to see you the first time--and don't let's talk any
+more now. Mother gets tired so easily."
+
+Lydia's remorseful outcry over having fatigued her mother seemed a good
+occasion for Judge Emery's entrance into the room and for his
+announcement. He felt that she would make an effort to control any
+agitation she might feel, and indeed, beyond a startled gasp, she made
+no comment on his news. Mrs. Emery herself was more obviously stirred to
+emotion. "To-night? Why, I didn't think he'd be in town for several days
+yet."
+
+"He only got in at five o'clock this afternoon, he said."
+
+The two parents exchanged meaning glances over this chronology, and Mrs.
+Emery flushed and smiled. "Now, Lydia," she said, "it's a perfect shame
+I'm not well enough to be there when he comes. It would make it easier
+for you. But I wish you'd say honestly whether you'd rather have your
+father there or see Paul alone."
+
+Judge Emery's face took on an aggrieved look of alarm. "Good gracious,
+my dear! What good would I be? You know I can't be tactful. Besides,
+I've got an appointment with Melton."
+
+Lydia rose from where she knelt by the bed. Her chin was quivering.
+"Why, you make me feel so--so queer! Both of you!--As though it were
+anything--to see Paul--when I've known him always."
+
+Her mother seized on the role opened to them by this speech, and said
+quickly: "Why, of course! Aren't we silly! I don't know what possesses
+us. When he comes you just run along and see him, and say your father
+and I are sorry not to be there."
+
+During the next half-hour she made every effort, heroically though
+obviously seconded by her husband, to keep the conversation in a light
+and casual vein, but when the door-bell rang, they all three heard it
+with a start. Mrs. Emery said, very carelessly, "There he is, dear. Run
+along and remember me to him." But she pulled Lydia down to her,
+straightened a bow on her waist with a twitch, loosened a lock of the
+girl's shining dark hair, and kissed her with a sudden yearning fervor.
+
+After they were alone, Judge Emery laughed aloud. "You're just as bad as
+I am, Sarah. You don't _say_ anything, but--"
+
+"Oh, I know," his wife said; "I can't help it!" She deliberated
+unresignedly over the situation for a moment, and then, "It seems as
+though I couldn't have it so, to be sick just now, when I'm needed so
+much. This first month is so important! And Lydia's getting such a
+different idea of things from what I meant, having this awful time with
+servants, and all. I have a sort of feeling once in a while that she's
+getting notions!" She pronounced the word darkly.
+
+"Notions?" Judge Emery asked. He had never learned to interpret his
+wife's obscurities when the mantle of intuitions fell on her.
+
+"Oh, don't ask me what kind! I don't know. If I knew I could do
+something about it. But she speaks queerly once in a while, and the
+evening of the day she was out with Marietta in the Black Rock woods she
+was-- Do you know, I think it's not good for Lydia to be outdoors too
+much. It seems to go to her head so. She gets to looking like
+Harry--almost reckless, and like some little scampering wild animal."
+
+Judge Emery rose and buttoned his coat about his spare figure. "Maybe
+she takes a back track, after some of my folks. You know there's one
+line in my mother's family that was always crazy about the woods. My
+grandfather on my mother's side used to go off just as regular as the
+month of May came around, and--"
+
+Mrs. Emery interrupted him with the ruthless and justifiable impatience
+of people at the family history of their relations by marriage. "Oh, go
+along! And stop and speak to Paul on your way out. Just drop in as you
+pass the door. We don't want to really chaperone her. Nobody does that
+yet--but--the Hollisters are so formal about their girls--well, you stop
+in, anyhow. It's borne in on me that that'll look better, after all."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+FATHER AND DAUGHTER
+
+
+In the midst of his conference with Dr. Melton, an hour later, it came
+upon Judge Emery with a clap that he had forgotten this behest of his
+wife's, plunged deep in legal speculations as he had been, the instant
+he turned from her door. He brought his hand down on the table.
+
+"What's the matter?" asked the little doctor, peering up at him.
+
+"Oh, nothing important--women's cobwebs. I'm afraid I'll have to go,
+though. We can take this up again to-morrow, can't we?"
+
+"At your service," said the doctor; but he pulled with some exasperation
+at a big pile of pamphlets still to be examined.
+
+"It's something about Lydia's receiving a call from Paul Hollister, and
+her mother wanting me to stop in as I left the house and say
+good-evening--sort of represent the family--do the proper thing. Don't
+it tickle you to see women who used to sleigh-ride from seven to eleven
+every evening in a little cutter just big enough for one and a half,
+begin to wonder if they hadn't better chaperone their girls when they
+have callers in the next room?"
+
+He stirred up the pamphlets with a discontented look. "Confound it, I
+wish I could stay! Which one of those has the statistics about the
+accidents when the men aren't allowed one day in seven?"
+
+"See here, Emery!" In spite of his evident wish to exhort, the doctor
+continued sitting as he spoke. He was so short that to rise could have
+given him no perceptible advantage over the tall lawyer. "See here; do
+you know that you have a most unusual girl for a daughter?"
+
+"I have heard people say that I have a glimmering notion of her merits,"
+said the other with a humorous gravity.
+
+"Oh, I don't mean pretty, and appealing, and with a good complexion, and
+all that--and I don't mean you don't spoil her most outrageously. I mean
+she's got the oddest make-up for a modern American girl--she's simple."
+
+"I don't see anything odd about her--or simple!" Her father resented the
+adjectives with some warmth.
+
+Dr. Melton answered with his usual free-handed use of language: "Well,
+it's because, like everybody else old and spoiled and stodgy and
+settled, you've no eyes in your head when it comes to something
+important, like young people. Because they're all smooth and rosy you
+think they're all alike." He rushed on, delivering himself as always
+with restless vivacity of gesture, "I tell you youth is one of the most
+wastefully ignored forces in the world! Talk about our neglecting to get
+the good out of our water-power! The way we shut off the capacity of
+youth to see things as they are, before it gets purblind with our own
+cowardly unreason--why, it's as if we tried to make water run uphill
+instead of turning our mill-wheels with its natural energy."
+
+Judge Emery had listened to a word or two of this harangue and then had
+looked for and found his hat and coat, with which he had invested
+himself, and now stood ready for the street, one hand on the knob of the
+door. "Well, good-night to you," he said pleasantly, as though the
+doctor were not speaking; "I'll try to see you to-morrow."
+
+Dr. Melton jumped to his feet, laughing, ran across the room and caught
+at the other's arm. "Don't blame me. Much preaching of true gospel to
+deaf ears has made me yell all the time. You know you don't really hear
+me, any more than anyone else."
+
+"There's no doubt about that, I don't!" acquiesced the Judge frankly.
+
+"I will run on, though I know it never does any good. How'd I begin
+this time? What started me off? What was I saying?"
+
+"You were saying that Lydia was queer and half-witted," said the Judge
+moderately.
+
+"I said she was simple--and by that I mean she's so wise you'd better
+look out or she'll find you out. She's as dangerous as a bomb. She has a
+scent for essentials. She can tell 'em from all our flummery. I'm afraid
+of her, and I'm afraid _for_ her! Remember the fate of the father in the
+_Erl-King_! He thought, I dare say, that he was doing a fine thing for
+his child, to hurry it along to a nice, warm, dry, safe place!"
+
+Judge Emery broke in, impatient of this fantastic word-bandying. "Oh,
+come, Melton, I can't stand here while you spin your paradoxes. I've got
+to get home before young Hollister leaves or my wife won't like it."
+
+"I'll go with you, then," cried the little doctor, clapping on his hat.
+"You sha'n't escape me that way. I'm in full cry after the best figure
+of speech I've hit on in months."
+
+"Good Lord!" The lawyer looked down laughingly at his friend as the two
+set off, a stork beside a sparrow. "You and your figures!"
+
+"It came over me with a bang the other day that in Lydia we have in our
+midst that society-destroying child in _The Kaiser's New Clothes_."
+
+"Eh?" said Lydia's father blankly.
+
+"You remember the last scene in that inimitable tale? Where the Kaiser
+walks abroad with all the people shouting and hurrahing for the new
+clothes, and not daring to trust their own eyes, and suddenly a little
+child's voice is heard, 'But the Kaiser has nothing on!'"
+
+"I don't know what you're talking about," said the Judge with a patient
+indifference.
+
+"Well, you will know when you hear Lydia say that some day. She
+knows--she'll know! Perhaps you've done well to send her to that idiotic
+finishing school."
+
+"Don't lay it to me!" cried the Judge, laughing; "_I_ didn't send
+her--or not send her. If you were married you'd know that fathers never
+have anything to say about what their daughters do."
+
+"More fools they!" rejoined the doctor pointedly. "But in this case
+maybe it's all right. She's as ignorant as a Hottentot, of course, but
+perhaps any real education might have spoiled her innate capacity to--"
+
+"Oh, pshaw!" The Judge was vaguely uneasy. "You let Lydia alone. Talk
+your nonsense about something else. There's nothing queer about Lydia,
+thank heavens! She's just like all young ladies."
+
+"That's a horrible thing to say about one's own daughter!" cried the
+doctor, falling immediately into the lightly mournful, satirical vein
+that was the alternative to his usual racing talk. "There won't be
+anything queer about her long, that's fact. In real life the child is
+never really allowed to complete that sentence. A hundred hands are
+clapped over its mouth, and it's hustled, and shaken, and frightened,
+and scolded, till it thinks there's something the matter with its
+eyesight. And Lydia's a sweet, gentle child, who'll want to say whatever
+pleases people she loves--that'll be another bandage over her eyes. And
+she's not dowered with an innate fondness for shrieking out
+contradictions at the top of her voice, and unless you've a real passion
+for that you get silenced early in life."
+
+The lawyer laughed with the good-natured contempt of a large, silent man
+for a small, voluble one. "That's a tragedy you can't know much about
+from experience, Melton. No cruel force ever silenced you."
+
+He paused at the walk leading to his house. A big street light glowed
+and sputtered over their heads. "Come in, won't you, and see Lydia?"
+
+"No; no cruel force has ever _silenced_ me," the doctor mused, putting
+his hands slowly into his pockets, "but it has bound me hand and foot. I
+talk, and I talk, but do you ever see me doing anything different from
+the worst fools of us all?"
+
+"Are you coming in?" The Judge spoke with his absent tolerance of his
+doctor's fancies.
+
+"No, thank you, as the farmer said to the steeple-climber. I'm going
+home to my lonely office to give thanks to Providence that I'm not
+responsible for a daughter."
+
+The Judge frowned. "Nonsense! Look at Marietta."
+
+"I do," said the doctor.
+
+"Well--?" The lawyer was challenging. In the long run the doctor rubbed
+him the wrong way.
+
+"I hope you make a better job of bandaging Lydia's eyes than you did
+hers."
+
+The Judge had turned toward the house. At this he stopped and made an
+irritated gesture. "Melton, you are enough to give a logical man brain
+fever. You're always proclaiming that parents have no real influence
+over their children's lives--that it's fate, or destiny, or
+temperament--and now--you blame me because Marietta's discontented over
+her husband's small income."
+
+The doctor looked up quickly, his face twitching. "You think that's the
+cause of Marietta's discontent? By Heaven, I wish Lydia could go into a
+convent."
+
+Suddenly his many-wrinkled little face set like a mask of tragedy. "Oh,
+Nat, you know what Lydia's always been to me--like my own--as
+precious--Oh, take care of her! take care of her! See, Lydia can't
+fight. She can't, even if she knew what was going on to fight against--"
+His voice broke. He looked up at his tall friend and shivered.
+
+Judge Emery clapped him on the shoulder with a rough friendliness. "No
+wonder you do miracles in curing women, Marius. You must know their
+insides. You talk like a mother in a fit of the nerves over a sick
+child. In the Lord's name, what has Lydia to fight against? If there was
+ever a creature with a happy, successful life before her-- Besides,
+don't we all stand ready to do her fighting for her?"
+
+Though the night was cool, the doctor took off his hat and wiped his
+forehead. He looked up once as though he were about to speak, but in
+the end he only put his hat back on his head, nodded, and went his way,
+his quick, light, uneven tread waking a faint echo in the empty street.
+
+As the Judge let himself in at the front door, a murmur of voices from
+the brightly-lighted parlor struck gratefully on his ear. He was not too
+late. "How are you, Hollister?" he called as he pulled off his overcoat.
+"Glad to see you back. Let's hear all about the Urbana experience."
+
+Hollister's dramatic interest in each engagement of his battle for
+success was infectious. Those who knew him, whether they liked him or
+not, waited for news of the results of his latest skirmish as they
+waited for the installments of an exciting serial story.
+
+As the older man entered, the tall, quick-moving young fellow came over
+to the door and shook his hand with energy. The Judge reflected that
+nobody but Hollister could so convey the effect that he was being made
+kindly welcome in his own house; but he did not dislike this vigor of
+personality. He sat down on the chair which his young guest indicated as
+a suitable one, and rubbed his chin, smiling at his daughter. "Dr.
+Melton sent his love to you, but he wouldn't come in."
+
+Paul looked brightly at Lydia. "I should hope not! My first evening with
+her! To share it with anybody! Except her father, of course!" He added
+the last as an afterthought, more with the air of putting the Judge at
+his ease than of excusing himself for an ungraceful slip of the tongue.
+
+The Judge laughed, restraining an impulse to call out, "You're a wonder,
+young man!" and said instead, "Well, let's hear the news."
+
+Lydia said nothing, but her aspect, always vividly expressive of her
+mood, struck her father as odd. As he glanced at her from time to time
+during the ready, spirited narrative of the young "captain in the army
+of electricity," as he had once called himself, Lydia's father felt a
+qualm of uneasiness. Her lips were very red and a little open, as though
+she were breathless from some exertion, and a deep flush stained her
+cheeks. She looked at Paul while he talked animatedly to her father, but
+when he addressed himself to her she looked down or away, meeting her
+father's eyes with a curious effect of not seeing him at all. The Judge,
+moved by the oblique, harassing intimations he had been forced to hear
+from the doctor as to the possibility of his not understanding all that
+was in his daughter's mind, was oppressed by that most nightmarish of
+emotions for a man of clear-cut intellectual interests--an apprehension,
+like an imperceptible, clinging cobweb, not to be brushed away. He
+wished heartily that the next year were over and Lydia "safely married."
+Daughters were so much more of a responsibility than sons. They forced
+on one the reality of a world of intangible conditions which one could,
+somehow, comfortably ignore with sons. And yet, how about Harry? Perhaps
+if some one had not ignored with him--
+
+"I should have been back ten days ago," Paul drew to the end of his
+story, "but I simply had to wait to oversee those tests myself. Since
+I've adopted that rule of personally checking the inspector's work,
+we've been able to report forty per cent. fewer complaints of newly
+installed dynamos to the general office. And you see in this case, from
+the accident, what might have happened."
+
+"By the Lord!" cried the lawyer, moved in spite of his preoccupations by
+the story of danger the other had been relating, "I should think it
+would turn your hair white every time a dynamo's installed. How did you
+feel when the fly-wheel broke?"
+
+"The fly-wheel isn't on the dynamo, of course," corrected Paul, "so I
+don't feel responsible for it in a business way, and that's everything.
+As for being frightened, why, it's all over so quickly. You don't have
+time to take in what's happening. You're there or you're not. And if you
+are, the best thing is to get busy with repairs," he added, with a
+simple, manly depreciation of his courage. "You mustn't think it often
+happens, you know; it's supposed never to."
+
+He spoke of the personal side of the matter with a dry brevity which
+contrasted effectively with the unconscious eloquence with which he had
+previously brought before their eyes the tense excitement in the new
+power-house when the wheels first stir to life in incredibly rapid
+revolutions and the mysterious modern genii begins to rush through the
+wires. At no time did Lydia's suitor show to better advantage than in
+speaking of his profession. The alertness of his face and the prompt
+decision of his speech suited the subject. His mouth fell into lines of
+grimly fixed purpose which expressed even more than his words when he
+spoke of the rivalry in endurance, patience and daring in the army of
+young electrical engineers, all set, as he was, on crowding one another
+out of the rapidly narrowing road to preferment and the few great golden
+prizes of the profession.
+
+This evening he was more than usually fervent. Judge Emery thought he
+detected in him traces of the same excitement that flamed from Lydia's
+cheeks. "I tell you, Judge, I was wrong when I spoke of the 'army' of
+electricity. In the army advancement comes only from somebody's death,
+and with us it's simply a question of who's got the most to give. He
+gets the most back--and that's all there is to it. The company's bound
+to have the man it can get the most work out of. If you can do two
+ordinary men's work, you get two men's pay. See? There's no limit to the
+application of that principle. Why, our field organizer on the Pacific
+Coast is only a little older than I, and, by Jove! the work they say
+he'll turn off is something marvelous! You wouldn't believe it. But you
+can train yourself to it, like everything else. To be able to
+concentrate--not to lose a detail--to put every ounce of your force into
+it--that's the thing."
+
+He brought one hand down inside the other, and sat for a moment in
+silence as tense with stirring possibilities to the others as to
+himself. The Judge felt moved to a most unusual sensation, as if he were
+a loosened bowstring beside this twanging, taut intensity. He felt
+slightly dismayed to have his unspoken principles carried to this _n_th
+power. He had given the best of himself, all his thoughts, illusions,
+hopes, endeavors, to his ideal of success, but his ambition had never
+been concentrated enough to serve as a lens through which the rays of
+his efforts might focus themselves into the single beam of devastating
+heat on which Paul counted so certainly to burn away the obstacles
+between himself and success. Various protesting comments rose to his
+lips, which he kept back, disconcerted to find how much they resembled
+certain remarks of Dr. Melton's.
+
+The young man stirred, looked at Lydia, and smiled brilliantly. "I
+mustn't keep this little sick-nurse up any later, I suppose," he said;
+but for a moment he made no movement to go. He and Lydia exchanged a
+gaze as long and silent as if they had been alone. It occurred to the
+Judge that they both looked dazzled. When Paul rose he drew a long
+breath and shook his head half humorously at his host. "You and I will
+have to look to our guns, during the next season, to hold our own, won't
+we? I've been making Lydia promise to reserve me three dances at every
+single ball this winter, and I think I'm heroic not to insist on
+more--but her first season--!"
+
+Lydia said, with her pretty, light laugh, a little shaking now, "But
+suppose you're out of town, setting up some new dynamo or something and
+your three dances come along?"
+
+Paul crossed the room to her, as if drawn irresistibly by the sound of
+her voice. He stood by her, looking down into her eyes (he was very
+tall), bending over her, smiling, pressing, confident, masterful.
+"You're to sit out those three dances and think of me, and think of
+me--of course! I shall be thinking of you."
+
+Lydia's little tremulous air of archness dropped under this point-blank
+rejoinder. She flushed, and looked at her father. That unimaginative
+person started toward her as though she had called to him for help, and
+then, ashamed of his inexplicable impulse, turned away confusedly and
+disappeared into the hall.
+
+Paul took this movement as a frank statement of the older man's desire
+to be, for the moment, rid of him. "Oh, I _am_ going, Judge," he called
+after him, unabashed; "it is just a bit hard to tear myself away--I've
+been waiting so long for her to get back!" To Lydia he went on, "I've
+grown thin and pale waiting for you, while you--look at yourself, you
+heartless little witch!"
+
+He pointed across to a tall mirror in which they were reflected against
+the rich background of his roses. For a moment both the beautiful young
+creatures looked each into his own eyes, mysterious with youth's total
+ignorance of its own meaning. Paul took Lydia's hand in his, and pointed
+again to their reflections as they stood side by side. He tried to
+speak, but for once his ready tongue was silent. Judge Emery came back
+to the door, a weary patience on his white, tired face.
+
+The young man turned away with a sigh and a smile. "Yes, yes, Judge, I'm
+off. Good-night, Lydia. Don't forget the theater Wednesday night."
+
+He crossed the room with a rapid, even step, shook hands with the Judge,
+and got himself out of the room with an easy briskness which the older
+man, mindful of his own rustic youth, was half-inclined to envy.
+
+After he and Lydia were left alone he did not venture a word of comment,
+lest he hit on the wrong thing. He went silently about, putting out the
+lights, and locking the windows. Lydia stood where Paul had left her,
+looking at her bright image in the mirror. When the last bulb went out,
+the room was in a flickering twilight, the street arc-light blinking
+uncertainly into the windows. Judge Emery stood waiting for his daughter
+to move. He could scarcely see her form--her face not at all, but there
+flashed suddenly upon him the memory of her appealing look toward him
+earlier. It shook him as it had then. His heart yearned over her. He
+would have given anything he possessed for the habit of intimate talk
+with her. He put out his hands, but in the twilight she did not see the
+gesture. He felt shy, abashed, horribly ill at ease, torn by his
+tenderness, by his sense of remoteness. He said, uncertainly,
+"Lydia--Lydia dear--"
+
+She started. "Oh, yes, of course. It's late." She passed, brushed
+lightly against him, as he stood trembling with the sense of her
+dearness to him. She began to ascend the stairs. He had felt from her
+the emanation of excitement, guessed that she was shivering like himself
+before a crisis--and he could find no word to say.
+
+She had passed him as though he were a part of the furniture. He had
+never talked to her about--about things. He stood at the foot of the
+stairs in the darkness, listening to her light, mounting footfall. Once
+he opened his mouth to call to her, but the habit of a lifetime closed
+it.
+
+"She will talk to her mother," he told himself; "her mother will know
+what to say." When he followed her up the stairs he was conscious
+chiefly that he was immeasurably tired. Melton, perhaps, had something
+on his side with his everlasting warnings about nervous breakdowns. He
+could not stand long strains as he used to do.
+
+He fell asleep tracing out the thread of the argument presented that day
+by the counsel for the defense.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+CASUS BELLI
+
+
+Dr. Melton looked up in some surprise from his circle of lamplight as
+his goddaughter came swiftly into the room. "Your mother worse?" he
+queried sharply.
+
+"No, no, dear Godfather. I just thought I'd come over and see you for a
+while. I had a little headache--Marietta's back from Cleveland to-day,
+and she and Flora Burgess are at the house--"
+
+"You've said enough. I'm thankful that you have this refuge to fly to
+from such--"
+
+"Oh, Flora's not so bad as you make her out, the queer, kind little old
+dowdy--only I didn't feel like talking 'parties,' and 'who's who,'
+to-night--and their being with Mother made it all right for me to leave
+her."
+
+The doctor took off his eye-shade and showed his little wizened face
+rather paler than usual. "That's a combination that would kill _me_, and
+your mother not well yet--still, many folks, many tastes."
+
+He looked at Lydia penetratingly. She had taken a chair before the
+soft-coal fire and was staring at it rather moodily. "Well, Lydia, my
+dear, and how does Endbury strike you now? Speaking of many tastes, what
+are yours going to be like, I wonder?"
+
+"I wonder," she repeated absently.
+
+"Well, at least you know whether the young man who called on you last
+night is to your taste?"
+
+Lydia turned her face away and made a nervous gesture. "Oh, don't,
+Godfather!"
+
+"Very well, I won't," he said cheerfully, turning to his books with the
+instinct of one who knows his womankind.
+
+There was a long silence, broken only by the purring of the coal. Then
+Lydia gave a laugh and went to sit on the arm of his chair. "Of course
+that was what I came to see you about," she admitted, her sensitive lips
+quivering into a smile that was not light-hearted; "but now I'm here I
+find I haven't anything to say. Perhaps you'd better give me a pink pill
+and send me home to forget all about everything."
+
+Dr. Melton took her fingers and held them closely in his thin, sinewy
+hands. "Oh, if I could--if I only could do something for you!" He
+searched her face anxiously. "What did young Hollister say that makes
+you so troubled?"
+
+She sat down on the edge of his writing-table and reflected. "It wasn't
+anything he _said_," she admitted. "He was all right, I guess. Father
+had scared the life out of me before he came, by sort of taking it for
+granted--Oh, you know--the silly way people do--"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, Paul was as nice as could be about that, so far as words go-- He
+didn't say a thing embarrassing or--or hard to answer, but he let me
+_see_--all the same! He kept saying what an immense help I'd be to an
+ambitious man. He said he didn't see why I shouldn't grow into the
+leader of Endbury society, like the Mrs. Hollister, his aunt, that he
+and his sister live with, you know."
+
+"I suppose he's right," conceded the doctor, reluctantly.
+
+"Well, while he was talking about it, it seemed all very well--you know
+the way he goes at things--how he makes you feel as though he were a
+locomotive going sixty miles an hour and you were inside the engine cab,
+holding on for dear life?"
+
+Dr. Melton shook his head. "Paul has given me a great variety of
+sensations," he admitted, "but I can't say that he ever gave me quite
+this locomotive-cab illusion you speak of."
+
+"Well, he has me, lots of times," persisted Lydia. "It's awfully
+exciting--you don't know where you're going, and you can't stop to
+think, everything tears past you so fast and your breath is so blown out
+of you. You feel like screaming. You forget everything else, you get
+so--so stirred up and excited. But after it's over there's always a time
+when things are flat. And this morning, and all day long, I've felt
+very--different about what he wants and all. I don't believe I'm very
+well, perhaps--or maybe--" she broke off, to say with emotion, "Oh,
+Godfather, wouldn't it be too awful if I should turn out to be without
+ambition." She pronounced the word with the reverence for its meaning
+that had been drilled into her all her life, and looked at Dr. Melton
+with troubled eyes.
+
+He thrust his lips out with a grimace habitual to him in moments of
+feeling, and for an instant said nothing. When he spoke his voice broke
+on her name, as it had the night before when he had stood looking up at
+her windows. "Oh, Lydia!--Oh, my dear, I'm terribly afraid of your
+future!"
+
+"I'm a little scared of it myself," she said tremulously, and hid her
+face on his shoulder.
+
+She was the first to speak. "Wouldn't Marietta just scream with laughter
+at us?" she reminded him. "We _are_ foolish, too! There's nothing in the
+world you could lay your finger on. There's nothing anyhow, I guess, but
+nerves. I wouldn't dare breathe it to anybody else, but you always know
+how I'm feeling, anyhow. It's as though--here I am, grown up, and
+there's nothing for me to do that's worth while--even if--even
+if--Paul--"
+
+The doctor took a sudden resolution. "Why don't you talk to your father,
+Lydia? Why don't you ask him about--"
+
+He was cut short by Lydia's gesture of utter wonder. "_Father_? Don't
+you know that there's a big trial on? He couldn't tell without figuring
+up, if you should ask him quick, whether I'm fourteen or nineteen--or
+nine! Mother wouldn't let me, anyhow, even if he could have any idea of
+what I was driving at. She never let us bother him the least bit when
+there was something big happening in his lawyering. I remember that
+time I had pneumonia and nearly died, when I was a little girl, that she
+told him I had just a cold; and he never knew any different for years
+afterward, when I happened to say something about it. She didn't want
+him worried when he needed all his wits for some important business."
+
+The doctor looked at her with frowning intensity, and then down at his
+papers. He seemed on the point of some forcible utterance, which he
+restrained with many twitchings of his mouth. Finally he got up and went
+to a window, staring out silently.
+
+"I think I'll go and look up dear Aunt Julia," said Lydia.
+
+"Very well, my dear," said the doctor over his shoulder. "She's in her
+room, I think." In exactly the same mild tone, he added, "Damnation!"
+
+"What did you say?" asked Lydia.
+
+He turned toward her, and took up a book from the table. "I said
+nothing, dear Lydia--I've nothing to say, I find."
+
+Lydia broke into a light, mocking laugh--the doctor's volubility was an
+old joke--and began to speak, when a woman's voice called, "Oh, Marius,
+here's Mr.---- why, Lydia, how did you get in without my seeing you?"
+
+She entered the room as she spoke--a middle-aged woman, with large blue
+eyes and graying fair hair, who evidently did her duty by the prevailing
+styles in dress with a comfortable moderation of effort. Lydia's mother,
+as the sister of Mrs. Sandworth's long-dead husband, thought it
+necessary, from time to time, to endeavor to stir her sister-in-law up
+to a keener sense of what was due the world in the matter of personal
+appearance; but Mrs. Sandworth, born a Melton, had the irritating
+unconcern for social problems of that distinguished Kentucky family. She
+cared only to please her brother Marius, she said, and he never cared
+what she had on, but only what was in her mind--a remark that had once
+caused Judge Emery to say, in a fit of exasperation with her wandering
+wits, that if she ever had as little on as she had in her mind, he
+guessed Melton would sit up and take notice.
+
+Lydia now rushed at her aunt, exclaiming, "Oh, Aunt Julia, how _good_
+you do look to me! The office door was open and I slipped in that way,
+without ringing the bell."
+
+"It's four years old, and never been touched, not even the sleeves,"
+said the other deprecatingly.
+
+Her brother laughed. "Who did you say was here--Oh, it's you, Rankin;
+come in, come in."
+
+The newcomer was half-way across the room before he saw Lydia. He
+stopped, with a look of extreme pleasure and surprise, which Lydia
+answered with a frank smile.
+
+"Why, have you met my niece?" asked Mrs. Sandworth, looking from one to
+the other.
+
+"Oh, yes; Mr. Rankin's my oldest new friend in Endbury. I met him the
+first day I was back."
+
+"And when I set up the newel-post--"
+
+"And I ran on to his house by accident the day Marietta and I were out
+with little Pete, when it rained and I borrowed his overcoat and
+umbrella--"
+
+"And then I had to call to take them away, of course--"
+
+They intoned their confessions like a gay antiphonal chant. A bright
+color had come up in Lydia's cheeks. She looked very sunny and
+good-humored, like a cheerful child, an expression which up to that year
+had been habitual to her. Dr. Melton looked at her without speaking.
+
+"So, you see," she concluded, "not to speak of several other
+times--we're very well acquainted."
+
+"Well, Marius! Did you ever!" Mrs. Sandworth appealed to her brother.
+
+"Oh, I've known about it all along. Rankin and I have discussed Lydia as
+well as other weighty matters, a great many times."
+
+Mrs. Sandworth's easily diverted mind sped off into another channel.
+"Yes, how you do discuss. I'm going to look right at the clock every
+minute from now on, so's to be sure to remind you of that engagement at
+Judge Emery's office at half-past nine. I know what happens when you and
+Mr. Rankin get to talking."
+
+"I'll not stay long; Miss Emery has precedence."
+
+"Oh, don't mind me," said Lydia.
+
+"They won't--nor anything else," her aunt assured her.
+
+Rankin laughed at this characterization. The doctor did not seem to
+hear. He was brooding, and drumming on the table. From this reverie he
+was startled by the younger man's next statement.
+
+"I've got an apprentice," he announced.
+
+"Eh?" queried the doctor with unexpected sharpness.
+
+"The fifteen-year-old son of my neighbor, Luigi Carfarone, who works on
+the railroad. The boy's been bad--truant--street gamin--all that sort of
+thing, and his mother, who comes in to clean for me sometimes, has been
+awfully anxious about him. But it seems he has a passion for
+tools--maybe his ancestors were mediaeval craftsmen. Anyhow, he's been
+working for me lately, doing some of the simpler jobs, and really
+learning fast. And he's been so interested he's forgotten all his
+deviltry. So, yesterday, didn't he and his father and his mother and
+about a dozen littler brothers and sisters all come in solemn
+procession, dressed in their best, to dedicate him to me and my
+profession, as they grandly call it."
+
+"Oh, how perfectly lovely!" cried Lydia.
+
+The doctor resumed his drumming morosely. "Of course you know the end of
+that."
+
+"You mean he'll get tired of it, and take to robbing chicken-roosts
+again?"
+
+"Not much! He'll like it, and stick to it, and bring others, and you'll
+extend operations and build shops, and in no time you'll go the way of
+all the world--a big factory, running night and day; you on the keen
+jump every minute; dust an inch thick over your books and music; nerves
+taut; head humming with business schemes to beat your competitors;
+forget your wife most of the time except to give her money; making
+profits hand over fist; suborning legislators to wink at your getting
+special railroad rates for your stuff; can't remember how many children
+you have; grand success; notable example of what can be done by
+attention to business; nervous prostration at forty-five; Bright's
+disease at fifty; leave a million."
+
+Rankin burst into a great roar of boyish laughter at this prophetic
+flight. The doctor gnawed his lower lip, and looked at him without
+smiling. "I've got ten million blue devils on my back to-night," he
+said.
+
+"So I see--so I see." Rankin was still laughing, but as he continued to
+look into his old friend's face his own grew grave by reflection. "You
+don't believe all that?"
+
+"Oh, you won't mean to. It'll come gradually." He broke out suddenly,
+"Good Heavens, Rankin, give me a serious answer."
+
+"Answer!" The cabinet-maker's bewilderment was immense. "Have you asked
+me anything?"
+
+The doctor turned away to his desk with the pettish gesture of a woman
+whose inner thoughts are not divined.
+
+"He makes me feel very thick-witted and dense," Rankin appealed to the
+two women.
+
+Mrs. Sandworth exonerated him from blame. "Oh, nobody ever can make out
+what he's driving at. I never try." She took out a piece of crochet
+work. "Lydia, they're at it now. I know the voice Marius gets on.
+_Would_ you make this in shell stitch? It's much newer, of course, but
+they say it don't wash so well." As Lydia's attention wavered, "Oh,
+there's not a particle of use in trying to make out what they're saying.
+They just go on and on."
+
+Rankin was addressing himself to the doctor's back. "I don't, you know,
+see anything wicked in making a lot of chairs by machinery instead of a
+few by hand. I'm no handcraft faddist. I did that in the beginning only
+because I had to begin somehow to earn my living honestly without being
+too tied up to folks, and I couldn't think of any other way. But I
+think, now that you've put the idea into my head--I think it would be a
+good thing to gather the boys of the neighborhood around me--and, by
+gracious! the girls too! That's one of my convictions--that girls need
+very much the same treatment as boys. And if it should develop into a
+large business (which I doubt strongly), what's the harm? The motive
+lying back of it would be different from what I so fear and hate in big
+businesses. You can bet your last cent on one thing, and that is that
+the main idea would not be to make as much furniture as fast as
+possible, as cheap as possible, but to make it good, and to make only as
+much as would leave me and every last one of the folks that work for me
+time and strength to live--'leisure to be good.' Who said that, anyway?
+It's fine."
+
+"_Hymn to Adversity_," supplied the doctor, who was better read in the
+poets than the younger generation. He added, skeptically, "Could you,
+though, do any such thing? Wouldn't it run _you_, once you got to
+going?"
+
+"Well, if worst came to worst--" began Rankin, then changing front, he
+began again: "My great-aunt--"
+
+The doctor fell back in his chair with a groan and a laugh.
+
+"Yes; the same one you may have heard me mention before. She told me
+that all through her childhood her family was saving and pulling
+together to build a fine big house. They worked along for years until,
+when she was a young lady, they finally accomplished it; built a big
+three-story house that was the admiration of the countryside. Then they
+moved in. And it took the women-folks every minute of their time, and
+more, to keep it clean and in order; it cost as much to keep it up,
+heated, furnished, repaired, painted, and everything the way a fine
+house should be, as their entire living used to cost. The fine big
+grounds they had laid out to go with the mansion took so much time to--"
+
+"You see. You see. That's just what I meant," broke in the doctor.
+
+"Well, I'm a near relative of my great-aunt's. One day, when all the
+rest of the family was away, she set fire to the house and burned it to
+the ground, with everything in it."
+
+"She didn't!" broke in Mrs. Sandworth, who had been coaxed to a fitful
+attention by the promise of a coherent story.
+
+Rankin laughed. "Well, that was the way she told it to me, and I don't
+doubt she _would_ have," he amended.
+
+The doctor grunted, "Huh! But would _you_!" He went on, "You couldn't
+compete with your rivals, anyhow, if you didn't concentrate everything
+on making chairs. Don't you know the successful business man's best
+advertisement? 'All of my life-strength I've put into the product I
+offer you,' he says to the public, and it's true."
+
+"Oh, well, if I couldn't do business there'd be an end of the matter,
+and none of your horrible prophecies would come true."
+
+"Your wife wouldn't let you."--Dr. Melton took up another line of
+attack--"she'd want a motor-car and 'nice' associates and a fashionable
+school for the children, and a home in the 'respectable' part of town."
+
+Rankin's easy-going manner changed. He sat up and frowned. "There you
+step on one of my corns, Doctor"--he did not apologize for the rustic
+metaphor--"I don't believe a single, solitary identical word of that.
+It's my most hotly held conviction that women are so much like humans
+that you can't tell the difference with a microscope. I mean, if they're
+interested in petty, personal things it's because they're not given a
+fair chance at big, impersonal things. Everybody's jumping on the
+American woman because she knows more about bridge-whist than about her
+husband's business. _Why_ does she? Because he's satisfied to have
+her--you can take my word for it! He likes her to be absorbed in clubs
+and bridge and idiotic little dabblings in near-culture and pseudo-art,
+just for the reason that a busy mother gives her baby a sticky feather
+to play with. It keeps the baby busy. It keeps his wife's attention off
+him. It's the American man just as much as the woman who's mortally
+afraid of a sure-enough marriage with sure-enough shared interests. He
+doesn't want to bother with children, or with the servant problem or the
+questions of family life, and he doesn't want his wife bothering him in
+his business any more than she wants him interfering with hers. That
+idea of the matter is common to them both."
+
+"That's a fine, chivalric view of the situation," said the doctor
+sardonically. "Maybe if you'd practiced as long in as many American
+families as I have, you might have a less idealistic view of your female
+compatriots."
+
+"I don't idealize 'em," cried Rankin. "Good Lord! Don't I say they're
+just like men? They amount to something if they're given something worth
+while to do--not otherwise."
+
+"Don't you call bringing up children worth while?"
+
+"You bet I do. So much so that I'd have the fathers take their full half
+of it. I'd have men do more inside the house and less outside, and the
+women the other way 'round."
+
+The doctor recoiled at this. "Oh, you're a visionary. It couldn't be
+done."
+
+"It couldn't be done in a minute," admitted Rankin.
+
+The doctor mused. "It's an interesting thought. But it's not for our
+generation. A new idea is like a wedge. You have to introduce it by the
+thin edge. The only way to get it started is by beginning with the
+children. Adults are hopeless. There's never any use trying to change
+them."
+
+"Oh, you can't fool children," said Rankin. "It's no use teaching them
+something you're not willing to make a try at yourself. They see through
+that quick enough! What you're really after, is what they see and learn
+to go after themselves. If anything's to be done, the adults must take
+the first step."
+
+"But, as society is organized, the idea is preposterous."
+
+"Society's been organized a whole lot of different ways in its time. Who
+tells me that it's bound to stay this way? I tell you right now, it
+hasn't got _me_ bluffed, anyhow! My wife--if I ever have one--is going
+to be my sure-enough wife, and my children, _my_ children. I won't
+_have_ a business that they can't know about, or that doesn't leave me
+strength enough to share in all their lives. I can earn enough growing
+potatoes and doing odd jobs of carpentering for that!"
+
+The doctor looked wonderingly at the other's kindling face. "Rankin,"
+he asked irrelevantly, "aren't there _ever_ moments when you despair of
+the world?"
+
+The voice of the younger man had the fine tremor of sincerity as he
+answered, "Why, good heavens, _no_, Doctor! That's why I dare criticize
+it so."
+
+The doctor looked with an intensity almost fierce into the other's
+confident eyes. He laid his thin, sinewy hand on the other's big brown
+fist, as though he would fain absorb conviction by contact. "But I'm
+sick with the slowness of the progress you talk of--believe in," he
+burst out finally. "It comes too late--the advance from our tragic
+materialism; too late for so many that could have profited by it most."
+He looked toward Lydia bending over her aunt's fancy work. Rankin
+followed the direction of his eyes.
+
+"Yes; that's what I mean," said the doctor heavily, rising from his
+chair. "That and such thousands of others. Oh, for a Theseus to hunt
+down this Minotaur of false standards and wretched ideas of success! I
+see them, the precious youths and maidens, going in by thousands to his
+den of mean aspirations, and not a hand is raised to warn them. They
+must be silly and tragic because everyone else is!"
+
+Rankin shook his head. "I think I'm proving that you don't have to go
+into the labyrinth--that you can live in health and happiness outside."
+
+"There's rather more than that to be done, you'll admit," said the
+doctor with an uncompromising bitterness.
+
+Rankin colored. "I don't pretend that it's much of anything--what I've
+done."
+
+The doctor did not deny him. He thrust out his lips and rubbed his hand
+nervously over his face. Finally, "But you have done it, at least," he
+brought out, "and I've only talked. As another doctor has said: 'I've
+never taken a bribe; but there's a pale shade of bribery known as
+prosperity.'"
+
+They fell into a silence, broken by Mrs. Sandworth's asking, "Lydia,
+have your folks got an old mythology book? I studied it at school, of
+course, but it has sort of passed out of my mind. Was it the Minotaur
+that sowed teeth and something else very odd came up that you wouldn't
+expect?"
+
+Lydia did not smile. "I don't know whether we have the book or not, but
+Miss Slater told us the story of the Minotaur. There's a picture of
+Theseus and Ariadne in Europe somewhere--Munich, I think--or maybe
+Siena. It was where one of the girls had a sore throat, I remember, and
+we had to stay quite a while. Miss Slater told us about it then."
+
+The doctor stood up. "Julia, it's nearly half-past now. Who remembered
+this time? I'm off, all of you. Rankin, see that Lydia gets home safely,
+will you?"
+
+"Oh, I must go too--now, with you." The girl jumped up. "I didn't
+realize it was so late. They'll be wondering at home."
+
+"Come along, then, both of you. I'll go with you to the corner where I
+take my car."
+
+The chill of the night air sent them along at a brisk gait, Lydia
+swinging easily between them, her head on a level with Rankin's, the
+doctor's hat on a level with her ear. She said nothing, and the two
+talked across her, disjointed bits of an argument apparently under
+endless discussion between them.
+
+The doctor flung down, with a militant despondency, "It'd be no use
+trying to do anything, even if you weren't so slothful and sedentary as
+you are! It moves in a vicious circle. Because material success is what
+the majority want, the majority'll go on wanting it. Hardy says
+somewhere that it's innate in human nature not to desire the undesired
+of others."
+
+Rankin sang out a ringing "Aw, g'wan! It's innate in human nature to
+murder and steal whenever it pleases, and I guess even Hardy'd admit
+that those aren't the amusements of the majority quite so extensively as
+they used to be--what? First thing you know people'll begin to desire
+things because they're worth desiring and not because other folks have
+them--even so astonishing a flight as that!" he made a boyish
+gesture--"and what a grand time that'll be to live in, to be sure!"
+
+They were waiting at the corner for the doctor's street car, which now
+came noisily down toward them. He watched it advance, and proffered as a
+valedictory, his gloom untempered to the last, "You're a wild man that
+lives in the woods. I've doctored everybody in the world for thirty
+years. Which knows human nature best?"
+
+Rankin roared after him defiantly, waking the echoes and startling the
+occupants of the car, "I do! I do! I do!"
+
+The car bore the doctor away, a perversely melancholy little figure,
+contemplating the young people blackly.
+
+"Whatever do you suppose set him off so?" Rankin wondered aloud as they
+resumed their rapid, swinging walk through the cold air.
+
+"I'm afraid I did," Lydia surmised. "I had a wretched fit of the blues,
+and I guess he must have caught them from me."
+
+Rankin looked down at her keenly, his thoughts apparently quite altered
+by her phrase. "Ah, he worries a great deal about you," he murmured.
+
+Lydia laughed nervously, and said nothing. They walked swiftly in
+silence. The stars were thick above them in the wind-swept autumn night.
+Lydia tilted her head to look up at them once or twice. She saw Rankin's
+face pale under the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat, his eyes meeting
+hers in an intent regard like a wordless speech. The fine, cold, austere
+wind swept them along like leaves, whipping their young pulses, chanting
+loudly in the leafless branches of the maples, and filling the dark
+spaces above with a great humming roar. They thrilled responsive to all
+this and to the mood of high seriousness each divined in the other.
+
+Lydia's voice, breaking in upon the intimate silence, continued the
+talk, but it was with another note. The mute interval, filled with wind
+and darkness and the light of stars, had swung them up to a higher
+plane. She spoke with an artless sureness of comprehension--a
+certainty--they were close in spirit at that moment, and she was not
+frightened, not even conscious of it. "Why should the doctor worry?
+_What is the matter?_ Marietta says the trouble with me is that I'm
+spoiled with having everything that I want."
+
+"_Have_ you everything you want?" Rankin's bluntness of interrogation
+was unmitigated.
+
+Lydia looked up at him swiftly, keenly. In his grave face there was that
+which made her break out with an open quivering emotion she had not
+shown even to the doctor's loving heart. "It's a weight on my very
+soul--that there's nothing for me to look forward to--nothing, nothing
+that's worth growing up to do. I haven't been taught anything--but I
+know I want to be something better than--perhaps I can't be--but I want
+to try! I want to try! That's not much to ask--just a chance to try--But
+I don't even know how to get that. I don't even dare to speak
+of--of--such things. People laugh and say it's Sunday-schooley fancies
+that'll disappear, that I'll forget as I get into living. But I don't
+want to forget. I'm afraid I shall. I want to keep trying. I don't
+know--"
+
+They did not slacken their swift advance as they talked. They looked at
+each other seriously in the starlight.
+
+Rankin had given an indrawn exclamation as she finished, and after an
+instant's pause he said, with a deep emotion, "Oh, perhaps--at least we
+both want to try--_Be Ariadne for me!_ Help me to find the clue to
+what's wrong in our lives, and perhaps--" He looked down at her, shaken,
+drawing quick breaths. She answered his gaze silently, her face as
+shining white as his.
+
+He went on: "You shall decide what Ariadne may be or may come to be--I
+will take whatever you choose to give--and bless you!"
+
+She had a gesture of humility. "_I_ haven't anything to give."
+
+His accent was memorable as he cried, "You have yourself--you--you! But
+you are too gentle! It is hard for you--it will be too hard for you to
+do what you feel should be done. I could perhaps do the things if you
+would tell me--help you not to forget--not to let life make you forget
+what is worth doing and learning!"
+
+She put back a mesh of her wind-blown hair to look at him intently, and
+to say again in wonder, "I'm not anything. What can you think I--what
+can you hope--"
+
+They were standing now on the walk before her father's house. "I can
+hope--" his voice shook, "I can hope that you may make me into a man
+worthy to help you to be the best that's in you."
+
+Lydia put out her hand impulsively. It did not tremble. She looked at
+him with radiant, steady eyes. He raised the slim, gloved fingers to his
+lips. "Whether to leave you, or to try to--Oh, I would give my life to
+know how best to serve you," he said huskily. He turned away, the sound
+of his steps ringing loud in the silent street.
+
+Lydia went slowly up the walk and into the empty hall. She stood an
+instant, her hands clasped before her breast, her eyes closed, her face
+still and clear. Then she moved upstairs like one in a dream.
+
+As she passed her mother's door she started violently, and for an
+instant had no breath to answer. Some one had called her name
+laughingly.
+
+Finally, "Yes," she answered without stirring.
+
+"Oh, come in, come in!" cried Marietta mockingly. "We know all about
+everything. We heard you come up the street, and saw you philandering on
+the front walk. And for all it's so dark, we made out that Paul kissed
+your hand when he went away."
+
+There was a silence in the hall. Then Lydia appeared in the door. Mrs.
+Emery gave a scream. "Why, Lydia! what makes you look so queer?"
+
+They turned startled, inquiring, daunting faces upon her. It was the
+baptism of fire to Lydia. The battle, inevitable for her, had begun. She
+faced it; she did not take refuge in the safe, silent lie which opened
+before her, but her courage was a piteous one. In her utter heartsick
+shrinking from the consequences of her answer she had a premonition of
+the weakness that was to make the combat so unequal. "It was not Paul,"
+she said, pale in the doorway; "it was Daniel Rankin."
+
+- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
+
+                                BOOK II
+
+                         IN THE LOCOMOTIVE CAB
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+WHAT IS BEST FOR LYDIA
+
+
+The girls who were to be debutantes that season, the "crowd" or (more
+accurately to quote Madeleine Hollister's racy characterization) "the
+gang," stood before Hallam's drug store, chattering like a group of
+bright-colored paroquets. They had finished three or four ice-cream
+sodas apiece, and now, inimitably unconscious that they were on the
+street corner, they were "getting up" a matinee party for the
+performance of the popular actress whom, at that time, it was the
+fashion for all girls of their age and condition to adore. They had
+worked themselves up to a state of hysteric excitement over the
+prospect.
+
+A tall brown-eyed blonde, with the physical development of a woman and
+the facial expression of a child of twelve, cried out, "I feel as though
+I should swoon for joy to see that darling way she holds her hands when
+the leading man's making love to her--so sort of helpless--like this--"
+
+"Oh, Madeleine, that's not a _bit_ the way. It's so!"
+
+The first speaker protested, "Well, I guess I ought to be able to do it.
+I've practiced for _hours_ in front of the glass doing it."
+
+"For mercy's sake that's nothing. So have I. Who hasn't?"
+
+Madeleine referred the question to Lydia, "Lyd has seen her later than
+anybody. She saw her in London. Just think of going to the theater in
+London--as if it was anywhere. She says they're crazy about her over
+there."
+
+"_Oh, wild!_" Lydia told them. "Her picture's in every single window!"
+
+"Which one? Which one?" they clamored, hanging on her answer
+breathlessly.
+
+"That fascinating one with the rose, where she's holding her head
+sideways and--" Oh, yes, they had that one, their exclamation cut her
+short, relieved that their collections were complete.
+
+"Lyd met a woman on the steamer coming back whose sister-in-law has the
+same hairdresser," Madeleine went on.
+
+They were electrified. "Oh, _honestly_? Is it her own?" They trembled
+visibly before solution of a problem which had puzzled them, as they
+would have said, "for eternities."
+
+"Every hair," Lydia affirmed, "and naturally that color."
+
+Their enthusiasm was prodigious, "How grand! How perfectly grand!"
+
+They turned on Lydia with reproaches. "Here you've been back two months
+and we haven't got a bit of good out of you. Think of your having known
+that, all this--"
+
+"Her mother's sick, you know," Madeleine Hollister explained.
+
+"She hasn't been so sick but what Lydia could get out to go buggy-riding
+with your brother Paul ever since he got back this last time."
+
+Lydia, as though she wished to lose herself, had been entering with a
+feverish intensity into the spirit of their lively chatter; but now,
+instead of responding with some prompt, defensive flippancy, she colored
+high and was silent. A clock above them struck five. "Oh, I must get
+on," she cried; "I'm down here, you know, to walk home with Father."
+
+They laughed loudly, "Oh, yes, we know all about this sudden enthusiasm
+for Poppa's society. Where are you going to meet Paul?"
+
+Lydia looked about at the crush of drays, trolley-cars, and
+delivery-wagons jamming the busy street, "Well, not here down-town," she
+replied, her tone one of satisfied security.
+
+A confused and conscious stir among her companions and a burst of talk
+from them cut her short. They cried variously, according to their
+temperaments, "Oh, there he comes now!" "I think it's mean Lydia's
+gobbling him up from under our noses!" "I used to have a ride or two
+behind that gray while Lydia was away!" "My! Isn't he a good-looker!"
+
+They had all turned like needles to the north, and stared as the
+spider-light wagon, glistening with varnish, bore down on them, looking
+singularly distinguished and costly among the dingy business-vehicles
+which made up the traffic of the crowded street. The young driver guided
+the high-stepping gray with a reckless, competent hand through the most
+incredibly narrow openings and sent his vehicle up against the
+flower-like group of girls, laughing as he drew rein, at the open,
+humorous outcry against him. A chorus of eager recrimination rose to his
+ears, "Now, Mr. Hollister, this is the first time Lydia's been out with
+our crowd since she came home!" "You might let her alone!" "Go away,
+Paul, you greedy thing!" "I haven't asked Lydia a single thing about her
+European trip!"
+
+"Well, maybe you think," he cried, springing out to the sidewalk, "that
+I've been spending the last year traveling around Europe with Lydia! I
+haven't heard any more than you have." He threw aside the lap-robe of
+supple broadcloth, and offered his hand to Lydia. A flash of resentment
+at the cool silence of this invitation sprang up in the girl's eyes.
+There was in her face a despairing effort at mutiny. Her hands nervously
+opened and shut the clasp of the furs at her throat. She tried to look
+unconscious, to look like the other girls, to laugh, not to know his
+meaning, to turn away.
+
+The young man plunged straight through these pitiful cobwebs. "Why, come
+on, Lydia," he cried with a good-humored pointedness, "I've been all
+over town looking for you." She backed away, looking over her shoulder,
+as if for a lane of escape, flushing, paling. "Oh, no, no thank you,
+Paul. Not _this_ afternoon!" she cried imploringly, with a soft fury of
+protest, "I'm on my way to Father's office. I want to walk home with
+him. I want to see him. I thought it would be nice to walk home with
+him. I see so little of him! I thought it would be nice to walk home
+with him." She was repeating herself, stammering and uncertain, but
+achieving nevertheless a steady retreat from the confident figure
+standing by the wagon.
+
+This retreat was cut short by his next speech. "Oh, I've just come from
+your father. I went to his office, thinking you might be there. He said
+to tell you and your mother that he won't be home to dinner to-night at
+all. He's got some citations on hand he has to verify."
+
+Lydia had stopped her actual recoil at his first words and now stood
+still, but she still tugged at the invisible chain which held her. She
+was panting a little. She shook her head. "Well--anyhow--I want to see
+him!" she insisted with a transparently aimless obstinacy like a
+frightened child's. "I want to see my father." Paul laughed easily,
+"Well, you'd better choose some other time if you want to get anything
+out of him. He had turned everybody out and was just settling to work
+with a pile of law-books before him. You know how your father looks
+under those circumstances!" He held the picture up to her, relentlessly
+smiling.
+
+Lydia's lips quivered, but she said nothing.
+
+Paul went on soothingly, "I've only come to take you straight home,
+anyhow. Your mother wants you. She said she had one of those fainting
+turns again. She said to be sure to bring you."
+
+At the mention of her mother's name, Lydia turned quite pale. She began
+to walk slowly back towards the wagon. There was angry, helpless misery
+in her dark eyes, but there was no longer any resistance. "Oh, if Mother
+needs me--" she murmured. She took the offered hand, stepped into the
+wagon and even went through some fitful pretense of responding to the
+chorus of facetious good-bys which rose from the group they were
+leaving.
+
+She said little or nothing in answer to the young man's kind, cheerful
+talk, as they drove along one main thoroughfare after another,
+conspicuous by the brilliant, prosperous beauty of their well-fed youth
+and their handsome garb, pointed out by people on the sidewalks,
+constantly nodding in response to greetings from acquaintances. Lydia
+flushed deeply at the first of these salutations, a flush which grew
+deeper and deeper as these features of their processional advance
+repeated themselves. She put her hand to her throat from time to time as
+though it ached and when the red rubber-tired wheels turned noiselessly
+in on the asphalt of her home street, she threw the lap-robe brusquely
+back from her knees as though for an instant escape.
+
+The young man's pleasant chat stopped. "Look here, Lydia," he said in
+another tone, one that forced her eyes to meet his, "look here, don't
+you forget one thing!" His voice was deep with the sincerest sympathy,
+his eyes full of emotion, "Don't you forget, little Lydia, that nobody's
+sorrier for you than I am! And I don't want anything that--" he cried
+out in sudden passion--"Good Lord, I'd be cut to bits before I'd even
+_want_ anything that wasn't best for you!" He looked away and mastered
+himself again to quiet friendliness, "You know that, _don't you_, Lydia?
+You know that all I want is for you to have the most successful life
+anyone can?"
+
+He leaned to her imploring in his turn.
+
+She drew a quick breath, and moved her head from side to side
+restlessly. Then drawn by the steady insistence of his eyes, she said,
+as if touched by his patient, determined kindness, "Oh, yes, yes, Paul,
+I realize how awfully good you're being to me! I wish I could--but--yes,
+of course I see how good you are to me!"
+
+He laid his hand an instant over hers, withdrawing it before she herself
+could make the action. "It makes me happy to have you know I want to
+be," he said simply, "now that's all. You needn't be afraid. I shan't
+bother you."
+
+They were in front of the Emery house now. He did not try to detain her
+longer. He helped her down, only repeating as she gave him her gloved
+hand an instant, "That's what I'm for--to be good to you."
+
+The wagon drove off, the young man refraining from so much as a backward
+glance.
+
+The girl turned to the house and stood a moment, opening and shutting
+her hands. When she moved, it was to walk so rapidly as almost to run up
+the walk, up the steps, into the hall and into her mother's presence,
+where, still on the crest of the wave of her resolution, she cried,
+"Mother, did you really send Paul for me again. Did you _really_?"
+
+"Why, yes, dear," said Mrs. Emery, surprised, sitting up on the sofa
+with an obvious effort; "did somebody say I didn't?"
+
+"I hoped you didn't!" cried Lydia bitterly; "it was--horrid! I was out
+with all the girls in front of Hallam's--everybody was so--they all
+laughed so when--they looked at me so!"
+
+Mrs. Emery spoke with dignity, "Naturally I couldn't know where he would
+find you."
+
+"But, Mother, you _did_ know that every afternoon for two weeks
+you've--it's been managed so that I've been out with Paul."
+
+Mrs. Emery ignored this and went on plaintively, "I didn't see that it
+was so unreasonable for an invalid to send whoever she could find after
+her only daughter because she was feeling worse."
+
+Lydia's frenzy carried her at once straight to the exaggeration which is
+the sure forerunner of defeat in the sort of a conflict which was
+engaging her. "_Are_ you feeling any worse?" she cried in a despairing
+incredulity which was instantly marked as inhumanly unfilial by the
+scared revulsion on her face as well as Mrs. Emery's pale glare of
+horror. "Oh, I didn't mean that!" she cried, running to her mother;
+"I'm sorry, Mother! I'm sorry!"
+
+The tears began running down Mrs. Emery's cheeks, "I don't know my
+little Lydia any more," she said weakly, dropping her head back on the
+pillow.
+
+"I don't know myself!" cried Lydia, sobbing violently, "I'm so unhappy!"
+
+Mrs. Emery took her in her arms with a forgiveness which dropped like a
+noose over Lydia's neck, "There, there, darling! Mother knows you didn't
+mean it! But you must remember, Lydia dearest, if you're unhappy these
+days, so is your poor mother."
+
+"I'm making you so!" sobbed Lydia, "I know it! something like this
+happens every day! It's why you don't get well faster! I'm making you
+unhappy!"
+
+"It doesn't make any difference about me!" Mrs. Emery heroically assured
+her, "I don't want you to be influenced by thinking about my feelings,
+Lydia. Above everything in the world, I don't want you to feel the
+_slightest_ pressure from me--or any one of the family. Oh, darling, all
+I want--all any of us want, is what is best for our little Lydia!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+A SOP TO THE WOLVES
+
+
+Six o'clock had struck when Mrs. Sandworth came wearily back from her
+Christmas shopping. It was only the middle of November, but each year
+she began her preparations for that day of rejoicing earlier and
+earlier, in a vain attempt to avoid some of the embittering desolation
+of confusion and fatigue which for her, as for all her acquaintances,
+marked the December festival. She let herself down heavily from the
+trolley-car which had brought her from the business part of Endbury back
+to what was known as the "residential section," a name bestowed on it to
+the exclusion of several other much larger divisions of town devoted
+exclusively to the small brick buildings blackened by coal smoke in
+which ordinary people lived.
+
+As she walked slowly up the street, her arms were full of bundles, her
+heart full of an ardent prayer that she might find her brother either
+out or in a peaceable mood. She loved and admired Dr. Melton more than
+anyone else in the world, but there were moments when the sum total of
+her conviction about him was an admission that his was not a reposeful
+personality. For the last fortnight, this peculiarity had been
+accentuated till Mrs. Sandworth's loyalty had cracked at every seam in
+order not to find him intolerable to live with. Moreover, her own kind
+heart and intense partiality for peace in all things had suffered
+acutely from the same suspense that had wrought the doctor to his
+wretched fever of anxiety. It had been a time of torment for
+everybody--everybody was agreed on that; and Mrs. Sandworth had felt
+that life in the same house with Lydia's godfather had given her more
+than her share of misery.
+
+On this dark November evening she was so tired that every inch of her
+soft plumpness ached. She had not prospered in her shopping. Things had
+not matched. She let herself into the front door with a sigh of relief
+at finding the hall empty. She looked cautiously into the doctor's study
+and drew a long breath, peeped into the parlor and, almost smiling, went
+on cheerfully upstairs to her room. From afar, she saw the welcoming
+flicker of the coal fire in her grate, and felt a glow of surprised
+gratitude to the latest transient from the employment agency who was now
+occupying her kitchen. She did not often get one that was thoughtful
+about keeping up fires when nobody was at home. It would be delicious to
+get off her corset and shoes, let down her hair--there he was, bolt
+upright before the fire, his back to the door. She took in the
+significance of his tense attitude and prepared herself for the worst,
+sinking into a chair, letting her bundles slide at various tangents from
+her rounded surface, and surveying her brother with the utmost
+unresignation. "Well, what is it now?" she asked.
+
+He had not heard her enter, and now flashed around, casting in her face
+like a hard-thrown missile, "Lydia's engaged."
+
+All Mrs. Sandworth's lassitude vanished. She flung herself on him in a
+wild outcry of inquiry--"Which one? Which one?"
+
+He answered her angrily, "Which do you suppose? Doesn't a steam-roller
+make some impression on a rose?"
+
+"Oh!" she cried, enlightened; and then, with widespread solemnity,
+"Well, think--of--that!"
+
+"Not if I can help it," groaned the doctor.
+
+"But that's not fair," his sister protested a moment later as she took
+in the rest of his speech.
+
+"Heaven knows it's not," he agreed bitterly.
+
+She stared. "I mean that Paul hasn't been nearly so steam-rollery as
+usual."
+
+The doctor rubbed his face furiously, as though to brush off a
+disagreeable clinging web. "He hasn't had to be. There have been plenty
+of other forces to do his rolling for him."
+
+"If you mean her father--you know he's kept his hands off
+_religiously_."
+
+"He has that, damn him!" The doctor raged about the room.
+
+A silent prayer for patience wrote itself on Mrs. Sandworth's face.
+"You're just as inconsistent as you can be!" she cried.
+
+"I'm more than that," he sighed, sitting down suddenly on a chair in the
+corner of the room; "I'm heartsick." He shivered, thrust his hands into
+his pockets and surveyed his shoes gloomily.
+
+One of Mrs. Sandworth's cheerful capacities was for continuing
+tranquilly the minute processes of everyday life through every
+disturbance in the region of the emotions. You _had_ to, she said, to
+get them done--anybody that lived with the doctor. She now took
+advantage of his silence to count over her packages, remove her wraps,
+loosen a couple of hooks at her waist and fluff up the roll of graying
+hair over her forehead. The doctor looked at her.
+
+She answered him reasonably, "It wouldn't help Lydia any if I took it
+off and threw it in the fire, would it? It's my best one, too; the
+other's at the hairdresser's, getting curled."
+
+"It's not," the doctor broke out--"it's not, Heaven be my judge! that
+_I_ want to settle it. But I did want Lydia to settle it herself."
+
+"She has, at last," Mrs. Sandworth reminded him, in a little surprise at
+his forgetting so important a fact.
+
+"She has _not_!" roared the doctor.
+
+His literal-minded sister looked aggrieved bewilderment. She felt a
+bitterness at having been stirred without due cause. "Marius, you're
+unkind. What did you tell me she had for--when I'm so tired it seems as
+if I could lie down and die if I--"
+
+Dr. Melton knew his sister. He made a rapid plunge through the
+obscurity of her brain into her heart's warm clarity, and, "Oh, Julia,
+if you had seen her!" he cried.
+
+She leaned toward him, responsive to the emotion in his voice. "Tell me
+about it, poor Marius," she said, yearning maternally over his pain.
+
+"I can't--if you had seen her--"
+
+"But how did you hear? Did she tell you? When did--"
+
+"I was there at five, and her mother met me at the door. She took me
+upstairs, a finger on her lip, and there she and Marietta said they
+guessed this afternoon would settle things. A week ago, she said, she'd
+had an up-and-down talk with that dreadful carpenter and as good as
+forbade him the house--"
+
+Mrs. Sandworth had a gesture of intuition. "Oh, if they've managed to
+shut Lydia off from seeing him--"
+
+The doctor nodded. "That's what her mother counted on. She said she
+thought it a sign that Lydia was just infatuated with Rankin--her being
+so different after she'd seen him--so defiant--so unlike Lydia! But now
+she hadn't seen him for a week, and her mother and Marietta had been
+'talking to her'--_Julia!_--and then Paul had come to see her every
+evening, and had been just right--firm and yet not exacting, and ever so
+gentle and kind--and this afternoon when he came Lydia cried and didn't
+want to go down, but her mother said she mustn't be childish, and
+Marietta had just taken her right down to the library and left her there
+with Paul, and there she was now." The doctor started up and beat his
+thin, corded hand on the mantel. He could not speak. His sister got up
+and laid a tender hand on his shoulder. "Poor Marius!" she said again.
+
+He drew a long breath. "I did not fly at their throats--I turned and ran
+like mad down the stairs and into the library. It was Rankin I wanted to
+kill for letting his pride come in--for leaving her there alone with
+those--I was ready to snatch Lydia up bodily and carry her off to--" He
+stopped short and laughed harshly. "I reach to Lydia's shoulder," he
+commented on his own speech. "That's me. To see what's to be done and--"
+
+"What _was_ to be done?" asked Mrs. Sandworth patiently. She was quite
+used to understanding but half of what her brother said and had acquired
+a quiet art of untangling by tireless questionings the thread of
+narrative from the maze of his comments and ejaculations.
+
+"There was nothing to be done. I was too late."
+
+"You didn't burst in on them while Paul was kissing her or anything, did
+you?"
+
+"Paul wasn't there."
+
+"Not there! Why, Marius, you're worse than usual. Didn't you tell me her
+mother said--"
+
+"He had been there--one look at Lydia showed that. She sat there alone
+in the dim light, her face as white--and when I came in she said,
+without looking to see who it was, 'I'm engaged to Paul.' She said it to
+her mother, who was right after me, of course, and then to Marietta."
+
+"Well--!" breathed Mrs. Sandworth as he paused; "so that was all there
+was to it?"
+
+"Oh, no; they did the proper thing. They kissed her, and cried, and
+congratulated everybody, and her mother said, with an eye on me:
+'Darling, you're _not_ doing this just because you know it'll make us so
+very happy, _are_ you?' Lydia said, 'Oh, no; she supposed not,' and
+started to go upstairs. But when Marietta said she'd go and telephone to
+Flora Burgess to announce it, Lydia came down like a flash. It was _not_
+to be announced she told them; she'd _die_ if they told anybody! Paul
+had promised solemnly not to tell anybody. Her mother said, of course
+she knew how Lydia felt about it. It _was_ a handicap for a girl in her
+first season. Lydia was half-way up the stairs again, but at that she
+looked down at her mother--_God!_ Julia, if a child of mine had ever
+looked at me like that--"
+
+Mrs. Sandworth patted him vaguely. "Oh, people always look white and
+queer in the twilight, you know--even quite _florid_ complexions."
+
+The doctor made a rush to the door.
+
+"But dinner must be ready to put on the table," she called after him.
+
+"Put it on, then," he cried, and disappeared.
+
+A plain statement was manna to Mrs. Sandworth. She had finished her
+soup, and was beginning on her hamburg steak when the doctor came
+soberly in, took his place, and began to eat in silence. She took up the
+conversation where they had left it.
+
+"So it's all over," she commented, watching his plate to see that he did
+not forget to salt his meat and help himself to gravy.
+
+"Nothing's ever over in a human life," he contradicted her. "Why do you
+suppose she doesn't want it announced?"
+
+"You don't suppose she means to break it off later?"
+
+"I haven't any idea _what_ she means, any more than she has, poor child!
+But it's plain that this is only to gain time--a sop to the wolves."
+
+"Wolves!" cried poor Mrs. Sandworth.
+
+"Well, tigers and hyenas, perhaps," he added moderately.
+
+"They're crazy about Lydia, that whole Emery family," she protested.
+
+"They are that," he agreed sardonically. "But I don't mean only her
+family. I mean unclean prowling standards of what's what, as well as--"
+
+"They'd lie down and let her walk over them! You know they would--"
+
+"If they thought she was going in the right direction."
+
+Mrs. Sandworth gave him up, and drifted off into speculation. "I wonder
+what she could have found in that man to think of! A girl brought up as
+she's been!"
+
+"Perhaps she was only snatching a little sensible talk where she could
+get it."
+
+"But they _didn't_ talk sensibly. Marietta said Lydia tried, one of the
+times when they were going over it with her, Lydia tried to tell her
+mother some of the things they said that night when he took her home
+from here. Marietta said they were 'too sickish!' 'Flat Sunday-school
+cant about wanting to be good,' and all that sort of thing."
+
+"That certainly wouldn't have tempted _Marietta_ from the path of virtue
+and sharp attention to a good match," murmured the doctor. "Nobody can
+claim that there's anything very seductive to the average young lady in
+Rankin's fanaticism."
+
+"Oh, you admit he's a fanatic!" Mrs. Sandworth seized on a valuable
+piece of driftwood which the doctor's tempest had thrown at her feet.
+
+"Everybody who's worth his salt is a fanatic."
+
+"Not Paul. Everybody says he's so sane and levelheaded."
+
+"There isn't a hotter one in creation!"
+
+"Than _Paul_?"
+
+"Than Paul."
+
+"Oh, Marius!" she reproached him for levity.
+
+"He's a fanatic for success."
+
+"Oh, I don't call _that_--"
+
+"Nor nobody else in Endbury--but it is, all the same. And the only
+wonder is that Lydia should have been attracted by Rankin's heretical
+brand and not by Paul's orthodox variety. It shows she's rare."
+
+"Good gracious, Marius! You talk as though it were a question of ideas
+or convictions."
+
+"That's a horrible conception," he admitted gravely.
+
+"It's which one she's in love with!" Mrs. Sandworth emitted this with
+solemnity.
+
+The doctor stood up to go. "She's not in love with either," he
+pronounced. "She's never been allowed the faintest sniff at reality or
+life or experience--how can she be in love?"
+
+"Well, they're in love with her," she triumphed for her sex.
+
+"I don't know anything about Paul's inner workings, and as for Rankin, I
+don't know whether he's in love with her or not. He's sorry for
+her--he's touched by her--"
+
+Mrs. Sandworth felt the ground slip from beneath her feet. "Good
+gracious me! If he's not in love with her, nor she with him, what are
+you making all this fuss about?"
+
+The doctor thrust out his lips. "I'm only protesting in my usual feeble,
+inadequate manner, after the harm's all done, at idiots and egotists
+laying their dirty hands on a sacred thing--the right of youth to its
+own life--"
+
+"Well, if you call that a feeble protest--!" she called after him.
+
+He reappeared, hat in hand. "It's nothing to what I'd like to say. I
+will add that Daniel Rankin's a man in a million."
+
+Mrs. Sandworth responded, rather neatly for her, that she should hope so
+indeed, and added, "But, Marius, she couldn't have married him--really!
+Mercy! What had he to offer her--compared with Paul? Everybody has
+always said what a _suitable_ marriage--"
+
+Dr. Melton crammed his hat on his head fiercely and said nothing.
+
+"But it's so," she insisted.
+
+"He hasn't anything to offer to Marietta, perhaps."
+
+"Marietta's _married_!" Mrs. Sandworth kept herself anchored fast to the
+facts of any case under discussion.
+
+"_Is_ she?" queried the doctor with a sincerity of interrogation which
+his sister found distracting.
+
+"Oh, Marius!" she reproached him again; and then helplessly, "How did we
+get on to Marietta, anyhow? I thought we were talking of Lydia's
+engagement."
+
+"I was," he assured her.
+
+"And I was going to ask you really seriously, just straight out, what
+you are so down on the Emerys for? What have they done that's so bad?"
+
+"They've brought her up so that now in her time of need she hasn't a
+weapon to resist them."
+
+"Oh, Ma--" began Mrs. Sandworth despairingly.
+
+"Well, then, I will tell you--I'll explain in words of one syllable.
+Mind you, I don't undertake to settle the question--Heaven forbid! It
+may be all right for Marietta Mortimer to kill herself body and soul by
+inches to keep what bores her to death to have--a social position in
+Endbury's two-for-a-cent society, but, for the Lord's sake, why do they
+make such a howling and yelling just at the time when Lydia's got the
+tragically important question to decide as to whether that's what _she_
+wants? It's like expecting her to do a problem in calculus in the midst
+of an earthquake."
+
+Mrs. Sandworth had a mortal antipathy to figures of speech, acquired of
+much painful experience with her brother's conversation. She sank back
+in her chair and waved him off. "Calculus!" she cried, outraged;
+"earthquakes! And I'm sure you're as unfair as can be! You can't say her
+father's obscured any question. You _know_ he's not a dictatorial
+father. His principle is not to interfere at all with his children."
+
+"Yes; that's his principle all right. His specialties are in other
+lines, and they have been for a long time. His wife has seen to that."
+
+Mrs. Sandworth had one of her lucid divinations of the inner meaning of
+a situation. "Oh, the poor Emerys! Poor Lydia! Oh, Marius, aren't you
+glad we haven't any children!"
+
+"Every child that's not getting a fair chance at what it ought to have,
+should be our child," he said.
+
+He went up to her and kissed her gently. "Good-night," he said.
+
+"Where are you going?"
+
+"To the Black Rock woods."
+
+"Tell him--" she was inspired--"tell him to try to see Lydia again."
+
+"I was going to do that. But she won't be allowed to. It's pretty late
+now. She ought to have seen him a great many years ago--from the time he
+was born."
+
+"But she's ever so much younger than he," cried Mrs. Sandworth after
+him, informingly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+LYDIA DECIDES IN PERFECT FREEDOM
+
+
+The maid had announced to Mrs. Emery, finishing an unusually careful
+morning toilet, that Miss Burgess, society reporter of the Endbury
+_Chronicle_, was below. Before the mistress of the house could finish
+adjusting her well-matched gray pompadour, a second arrival was
+heralded, "The gentleman from the greenhouse, to see about Miss Lydia's
+party decorations." And as the handsome matron came down the stairs a
+third comer was introduced into the hall--Mme. Boyle herself, the best
+dressmaker in town, who had come in person to see about the refitting of
+the debutante's Paris dresses, the debutante having found the change
+back to the climate of Endbury so trying that her figure had grown quite
+noticeably thinner.
+
+"It was the one thing necessary to make Maddemwaselle's tournoor exactly
+perfect," Mme. Boyle told Mrs. Emery. Out of a sense of what was due her
+loyal Endbury customers, Mme. Boyle assumed a guileless coloring of
+Frenchiness, which was evidently a symbol, and no more intended for a
+pretense of reality than the honestly false brown front that surmounted
+her competent, kindly Celtic face.
+
+Mrs. Emery stopped a moment by the newel-post to direct Madame to
+Lydia's room and to offer up a devout thanksgiving to the kindly
+Providence that constantly smoothed the path before her. "Oh, Madame,
+just think if it had been a season when hips were in style!" As she
+continued her progress to what she was beginning to contemplate calling
+her drawing-room, she glowed with a sense of well-being which buoyed her
+up like wings. In common with many other estimable people, she could
+not but value more highly what she had had to struggle to retain, and
+the exciting vicissitudes of the last fortnight had left her with a
+sweet taste of victory in her mouth.
+
+She greeted Miss Burgess with the careful cordiality due to an ally of
+many years' standing, and with a manner perceptibly but indefinably
+different from that which she would have bestowed on a social equal.
+Mrs. Emery had labored to acquire exactly that tone in her dealings with
+the society reporter, and her achievement of it was a fact which brought
+an equal satisfaction to both women. Miss Burgess' mother was an
+Englishwoman, an ex-housekeeper, who had transmitted to her daughter a
+sense, rare as yet in America, of the beauty and dignity of class
+distinctions. In her turn Miss Burgess herself, the hard-working,
+good-natured woman of fifty who for twenty years had reported the doings
+of those citizens of Endbury whom she considered the "gentry," had
+toiled with the utmost disinterestedness to build up a feeling, or, as
+she called it, a "tone," which, among other things, should exclude her
+from equality. When she began she was, perhaps, the only person in town
+who had an unerring instinct for social differences; but, like a kindly,
+experienced actor of a minor role in theatricals, she had silently given
+so many professional tips to the amateur principals in the play, and had
+acted her own part with such unflagging consistency and good-will, that
+she had often now the satisfaction of seeing one of her pupils move
+through her role with a most edifying effect of having been born to it.
+
+Long ago she had taken the Emerys to her warm heart and she had rejoiced
+in all their upward progress with the sweet unenvious joy of an ugly
+woman in a pretty, much-loved sister's successes. Lydia was to her, as
+to Mrs. Emery, a bright symbol of what she would fain have been herself.
+Miss Burgess' feeling for her somewhat resembled that devout affection
+which, she had read, was felt by faithful old servants of great English
+families for the young ladies of the house. The pathetic completeness of
+her own insignificance of aspect had spared her any uneasy ambitions
+for personal advancement, and it is probable that the vigor of her
+character and her pleasure in industry were such that she had been
+happier in her daily column and weekly five-column _Society Notes_ than
+if she had been as successful a society matron as Mrs. Emery herself.
+
+She lived the life of a creator, working at an art she had invented, in
+a workroom of her own contriving, loyally drawing the shutters to shade
+an unfortunate occurrence in one of the best families, setting forth a
+partial success with its best profile to the public, and flooding with
+light real achievements like Mrs. Hollister's rose party (_the_ Mrs.
+Hollister--Paul's aunt, and Madeleine's). All that she wrote was read by
+nearly every woman in Endbury. She was a person of importance, and a
+very busy and happy old maid.
+
+Mrs. Emery had a great taste for Miss Burgess' conversation, admiring
+greatly her whole-hearted devotion to Endbury's social welfare. She had
+once said of her to Dr. Melton, "There is what _I_ call a
+public-spirited woman." He had answered, "I envy Flora Burgess with the
+fierce embittered envy I feel for a cow"--an ambiguous compliment which
+Mrs. Emery had resented on behalf of her old ally.
+
+Now, as Mrs. Emery added to her greeting, "You'll excuse me just a
+moment, won't you, I must settle some things with my decorator," Miss
+Burgess felt a rich content in her hostess' choice of words. There
+_were_ people in Endbury society who would have called him, as had the
+perplexed maid, "the gentleman from the greenhouse." Later, asked for
+advice, she had walked about the lower floor of the house with Mrs.
+Emery and the florist, saturated with satisfaction in the process of
+deciding where the palms should be put that were to conceal the
+"orchestra" of four instruments, and with what flowers the mantels
+should be "banked."
+
+After the man had gone, they settled to a consideration of various
+important matters which was interrupted by an impassioned call of Madame
+Boyle from the stairs, "Could she bring Maddemwaselle down to show this
+_perfect_ fit?"--and they glided into a rapt admiration of the
+unwrinkled surface of peach-colored satin which clad Lydia's slender and
+flexibly erect back. When she turned about so that Madame could show
+them the truly exqueese effect of the trimming at the throat, her face
+showed pearly shadows instead of its usual flower-like glow. As Madame
+left the room for a moment, Miss Burgess said, with a kind, respectful
+facetiousness, "I see that even fairy princesses find the emotions of
+getting engaged a little trying."
+
+Lydia started, and flushed painfully. "Oh, Mother--" she began.
+
+Her mother cut her short. "My _dear_! Miss Burgess!" she pointed out, as
+who should deplore keeping a secret from the family priest, "You know
+she never breathes a word that people don't want known. And she had to
+be told so she can know how to _put_ things all this winter."
+
+"I'm sure it's the most wonderfully _suitable_ marriage," pronounced
+Miss Burgess.
+
+A ring at the door-bell was instantly followed by the bursting open of
+the door and the impetuous onslaught of a girl, a tall, handsome,
+brown-eyed blonde about Lydia's age, who, wasting no time in greetings
+to the older women, flung herself on Lydia's neck with a wild outcry of
+jubilation. "My dear! Isn't it dandy! Perfectly _dandy_! Paul met me at
+the train last night and when he told me I nearly swooned for joy! Of
+all the tickled sisters-in-law! I wanted to come right over here last
+night, but Paul said it was a secret, and wouldn't let me." A momentary
+failure of lung-power forced her to a pause in which she perceived
+Lydia's attire. She recoiled with a dramatic rush. "Oh, you've got one
+of them _on_! Lydia, how insanely swell you do look! Why, Mrs.
+Emery"--she turned to Lydia's mother with a light-hearted
+unconsciousness that she had not addressed her before--"she doesn't look
+_real_, does she!"
+
+There was an instant's pause as the three women gazed ecstatically at
+Lydia, who had again turned her back and was leaning her forehead
+against the window. Then the girl sprang at her again. "Well, my
+goodness, Lydia! I just love you to pieces, of course, but if we were of
+the same complexion I should certainly put poison in your candy. As it
+is, me so blonde and you so dark--I tell you what--what we won't do this
+winter--" She ran up to her again, putting her arms around her neck from
+behind and whispering in her ear.
+
+Miss Burgess turned to her hostess with her sweet, motherly smile.
+"Aren't girls the _dearest_ things?" she whispered. "I love to see them
+so young, and full of their own little affairs. I think it's dreadful
+nowadays how so many of them are allowed to get serious-minded."
+
+Madeleine was saying to Lydia, "You sly little thing--to land Paul
+before the season even began! Where are you going to get your lingerie?
+Oh, _isn't_ it fun? If I go abroad I'll smuggle it back for you. You
+haven't got your ring yet, I don't suppose? Make him make it a ruby.
+That's ever so much sweller than that everlasting old diamond. He's
+something to land, too, Paul is, if I do say it--not, of course, that
+we've either of us got any money, but," she looked about the handsomely
+furnished house, "you'll have lots, and Paul'll soon be making it hand
+over fist--and I'll be marrying it!" She ended with a triumphant
+pirouette her vision of the future, and encountered Madame Boyle,
+entering with a white and gold evening wrap which sent her into another
+paroxysm of admiration. The dressmaker had just begun to say that she
+thought another line of gold braid around the neck would--when Mrs.
+Emery, looking out of the window, declared the caterer to be approaching
+and that she _must_ have aid from her subordinates before he should
+enter. "I do _not_ want to have that old red lemonade and sweet crackers
+everybody has, and slabs of ice-cream floating around on your plate.
+Think quick, all of you! What kind of crackers can we have?"
+
+"Animal crackers," suggested Madeleine, with the accent of a remark
+intended to be humorous, drawing Lydia into a corner. "Now, don't make
+Lydia work. She's _It_ right now, and everything's to be done for her.
+Madame, come over here with that cloak and let's see about the--and Oh,
+you and Lydia, for the love of Heaven tell me what I'm to do about this
+fashion for no hips, and me with a figure of eight! Lydia, the fit of
+that thing is _sublime_!"
+
+"Maddemwaselle, don't you see how a little more gold right here--"
+
+"Here, Lydia," called her mother, "it wasn't the caterer after all; it's
+flowers for you. Take it over there to the young lady in pink," she
+directed the boy.
+
+Madeleine seized on the box, and tore it open with one of her vigorous,
+competent gestures. "_Orchids!_" she shouted in a single volcanic burst
+of appreciation. "I never had orchids sent me in my life! Paul must have
+telegraphed for them. You can't buy them in Endbury. And here's a note
+that says it's to be answered at once, while the boy waits--Oh, my! Oh,
+my!"
+
+"Lydia, dear, here's the caterer, after all. Will you just please say
+one thing. Would you rather have the coffee or the water-ices served
+upstairs--Oh, here's your Aunt Julia--Julia Sandworth, I never needed
+advice more."
+
+Mrs. Sandworth's appearance was the chord which resolved into one burst
+of sound all the various motives emitted by the different temperaments
+in the room. Every one appealed to her at once.
+
+"Just a touch of gold braid on the collar, next the face, don't you--"
+
+"Why not a real supper at midnight, with creamed oysters and things, as
+they do in the East?"
+
+"Do _you_ see anything out of the way in publishing the details of Miss
+Lydia's dress the day before? It gives people a chance to know what to
+look for."
+
+[Illustration: "No, no; I can't--see him--I can't see him any more--"]
+
+"How can we avoid that awful jam-up there is on the stairs when people
+begin to--"
+
+Mrs. Sandworth made her way to the corner where Lydia stood, presenting
+a faultlessly fitted back to the world so that Madame Boyle might, with
+a fat, moist forefinger, indicate the spot where a "soupcon" of gold
+was needed.
+
+"Please, ma'am, the gentleman said I was to wait for an answer," said
+the messenger boy beside her.
+
+"And she hasn't _read_ it, yet!" Madeleine was horrified to remember
+this fact.
+
+"Turn around, Lydia," said Mrs. Sandworth.
+
+Lydia's white lids fluttered. The eyes they revealed were lustrous and
+quite blank. Madeleine darted away, crying, "I'm going to get pen and
+paper for you to write your note right now."
+
+"Lydia," said Mrs. Sandworth, in a low tone, "Daniel Rankin wants to
+speak with you again. Your godfather is waiting here in the hall to know
+if you'll see him. He didn't want to _force_ an interview on you if you
+didn't want it. He wants to see you but he wanted you to decide in
+perfect _freedom_--"
+
+The tragic, troubled, helpless face that Lydia showed at this speech was
+a commentary on the last word. She looked around the room, her eyebrows
+drawn into a knot, one hand at her throat, but she did not answer. Her
+aunt thought she had not understood. "Just collect your thoughts,
+Lydia--"
+
+The girl beat one slim fist inside the other with a sudden nervous
+movement. "But that's what I can't do, Aunt Julia. You know how easily I
+get rattled--I don't know what I'm--I _can't_ collect my thoughts."
+
+As the older woman opened her lips to speak again she cut her short with
+a broken whispered appeal. "No, no; I can't--see him--? I can't stand
+any more--tell him I guess I'll be all right--it's settled now--Mother's
+told all these--I like Paul. I _do_ like him! Mother's told everybody
+here--no, no--I can't, Aunt Julia! I _can't_!"
+
+Mrs. Sandworth, her eyes full of tears, opened her arms impulsively, but
+Lydia drew back. "Oh, let me alone!" she wailed. "I'm so tired!"
+
+Madame Boyle caught this through the clatter of voices. "Why, poor
+Maddemwaselle!" she cried, her kindly, harassed, fatigued face melting.
+"Sit down. Sit down. I can show the ladies about this collar just as
+well that way--if they'll ever look."
+
+Mrs. Sandworth had disappeared.
+
+Madeleine, coming with the pen and ink, was laughing as she told them,
+"I didn't know Dr. Melton was in the house. I ran into him pacing up and
+down in the hall like a little bear, and just now I saw him--isn't he
+too comical! He must have heard our chatter--I saw him running down the
+walk as fast as he could go it, his fingers in his ears as if he were
+trying to get away from a dynamite bomb before it went bang."
+
+"He hasn't much patience with many necessary details of life," said Mrs.
+Emery with dignity. She turned her criticism of her doctor into a
+compliment to her brother's widow by adding, "Whatever he would do
+without Julia to look after him, I'm sure none of us can imagine."
+
+"He is a very original character," said Miss Burgess, discriminatingly.
+
+Madeleine dismissed the subject with a compendious, "He's the most
+killingly, screamingly funny little man that ever lived!"
+
+"Now, _ladies_," implored Madame Boyle, "one more row--not solid--just a
+soupcon--"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+MID-SEASON NERVES
+
+
+"If I should wait and read my paper here instead of on the cars, do you
+suppose Lydia would be up before I left?" asked the Judge as he put his
+napkin in the ring and pushed away from the breakfast table.
+
+Mrs. Emery looked up, smiling, from a letter, "'Of course such a great
+favorite as Miss Emery,'" she read aloud, "'will be hard to secure, but
+both the Governor and I feel that our party wouldn't be complete without
+her. We're expecting a number of other Endbury young people.' And do you
+know who writes that?" she asked triumphantly of her husband.
+
+"How should I?" answered the Judge reasonably.
+
+"Mrs. Ex-Governor Mallory, to be sure. It's their annual St. Valentine's
+day house-party at their old family estate in Union County."
+
+The Judge got up, laughing. "Old family estate," he mocked.
+
+"They are one of the oldest and best families in this State," cried his
+wife.
+
+"The Governor's an old blackguard," said her husband tolerantly.
+
+"The Mallorys--the Hollisters--Lydia is certainly," began Mrs. Emery,
+complacently.
+
+Lydia's father laughed again. "Oh, with you and Flora Burgess as manager
+and press agent--! You haven't answered my question about whether if I
+waited and--"
+
+"No, she wouldn't," said Mrs. Emery decisively. "After dancing so late
+nights, I want her to sleep every minute she's not wanted somewhere. _I_
+have the responsibility of looking after her health, you know. I hope
+she'll sleep now till just time to get up and dress for Marietta's
+lunch-party at one o'clock."
+
+The father of the family frowned. "Is Marietta giving another
+lunch-party for Lydia? They can't afford to do so much. Marietta's--"
+
+"This is a great chance for Marietta--poor girl! she hasn't many such
+chances--Lydia's carrying everything before her so, I mean."
+
+"How does Marietta get into the game?" asked her father obtusely.
+
+Mrs. Emery hesitated a scarcely perceptible instant, a hesitation
+apparently illuminating to her husband. He laughed again, the tolerant,
+indifferent laugh he had for his women-folks' goings-on. "She thinks she
+can go up as the tail to Lydia's kite, does she? She'd better not be too
+sure. If I don't miss my guess, Paul'll have a word or two to say about
+carrying extra weight. Gosh! Marietta's a fool some ways for a woman
+that has her brains."
+
+He stated this opinion with a detached, impersonal irresponsibility, and
+began to prepare himself for the plunge into the damp cold of the
+Endbury January. His wife preserved a dignified silence, and in the
+middle of a sentence of his later talk, which had again turned on his
+grievance about never seeing Lydia, she got up, went into the hall, and
+began to use the telephone for her morning shopping. Her conversation
+gave the impression that she was ordering veal cutlets, maidenhair
+ferns, wax floor-polish, chiffon ruching, and closed carriages, from one
+and the same invisible interlocutor, who seemed impartially unable to
+supply any of these needs without rather testy exhortation. Mrs. Emery
+was one of the women who are always well served by "tradespeople," as
+she now called them, "and a good reason why," she was wont to explain
+with self-gratulatory grimness.
+
+The Judge waited, one hand on the door-knob, squaring his jaw over his
+muffler, and listening with a darkening face to the interminable
+succession of purchases. After a time he released the door-knob,
+loosened his muffler, and sat down heavily, his eyes fixed on his wife's
+back.
+
+After an interval, Mrs. Emery paused in the act of ringing up another
+number, looked over her shoulder, saw him there and inquired uneasily,
+"What are you waiting for? You'll catch cold with all your things on.
+Isn't Dr. Melton always telling you to be careful?"
+
+She felt a vague resentment at his being there "after hours," as she
+might have put it, so definitely had long usage accustomed her to a
+sense of solitary proprietorship of the house except at certain fixed
+and not very frequent periods. She almost felt that he was eavesdropping
+while she "ran her own business." There was also his remark about
+Marietta and kites, unatoned for as yet. She had not forgotten that she
+"owed him one," as Madeleine Hollister light-heartedly phrased the
+connubial balanced relationship which had come under her irreverent and
+keen observation. A cumulative sharpness from all these causes was in
+her voice as she remarked, "Didn't I tell you that Lydia--"
+
+Judge Emery's voice in answer was as sharp as her own. "Look-y here,
+Susan, I bet you've ordered fifty dollars' worth of stuff since you
+stood there."
+
+"Well, what if I have?" She was up in arms in an instant against his
+breaking a long-standing treaty between them--a treaty not tacit, but
+frequently and definitely stated.
+
+They regulated their relations on a sound business basis, they were wont
+to say of themselves, the natural one, the right one. The husband earned
+the money, the wife saw that it was spent to the best advantage, and
+neither needed to bother his head or dissipate his energies about the
+other's end of the matter. They had found it meant less friction, they
+said; fewer occasions for differences of opinion. Once, when they had
+been urging this system upon their son George, then about to marry, Dr.
+Melton had made the suggestion that there would be still fewer
+differences of opinion if married people agreed never to see each other
+after the ceremony in the church. There would be no friction at all
+with that system, he added. It was one of his preposterous speeches
+which had become a family joke with the Emerys.
+
+"Well, what if I have?" Mrs. Emery advanced defiantly upon her husband,
+with this remark repeated.
+
+Judge Emery shared a well-known domestic peculiarity with other
+estimable and otherwise courageous men. He retreated precipitately
+before the energy of his wife's counter-attack, only saying sulkily, to
+conceal from himself the fact of his retreat, "Well, we're not
+millionaires, you know."
+
+"Did I ever think we were?" she said, smiling inwardly at his change of
+front. "If you stand right up to men, they'll give in," she often
+counseled other matrons. She began to look up another number in the
+telephone book.
+
+"If you order fifty dollars' worth every morning, besides--"
+
+"Three-four-four--Weston," remarked his wife to the telephone. To her
+husband she said conclusively, "I thought we were agreed to make Lydia's
+first season everything it ought to be. And isn't she being worth it?
+There hasn't a girl come out in Endbury in _years_ that's been so
+popular, or had so much--" She jerked her head around to the
+telephone--"Three-four-four--Weston? Is this Mr. Schmidt? I want Mr.
+Schmidt himself. Tell him Mrs. Emery--"
+
+The Judge broke in, with the air of launching the most startling of
+arguments, "Well, my salary won't stand it; that's sure! If this keeps
+up I'll have to resign from the bench and go into practice again."
+
+His wife looked at him without surprise. "Well, I've often thought that
+might be a very good thing." She added, with good-humored impatience,
+"Oh, go along, Nathaniel. You know it's just one of your bilious
+attacks, and you will catch cold sitting there with all your--Mr.
+Schmidt, I want to complain about the man who dished up the ice-cream at
+my last reception. I am going to give another one next week, and I want
+a different--"
+
+"I won't be back to lunch," said her husband. The door slammed.
+
+As he turned into the front walk it opened after him, and his wife
+called after him, "I'm going to give a dinner party for Lydia's girl
+friends here this evening, so you'd better get your dinner down-town or
+at the Meltons'. I'll telephone Julia that--"
+
+The Judge stopped, disappointment, almost dismay, on his face. "I'm
+going to keep track from now on," he called angrily, "of just how often
+I catch a glimpse of Lydia. I bet it won't be five minutes a week."
+
+Mrs. Emery evidently did not catch what he said, and as evidently
+considered it of no consequence that she did not. She nodded
+indifferently and, drawing in her head, shut the door.
+
+At the end of the next week the Judge announced that he had put down
+every time he and Lydia had been in a room together, and it amounted to
+just forty-five minutes, all told. Lydia, a dazzling vision in white and
+gold, had come downstairs on her way to a dance, and because Paul, who
+was to be her escort, was a little late, she told her father that now
+was his time for a "visit." This question of "visiting" had grown to be
+quite a joke. Judge Emery clutched eagerly at anything in the nature of
+an understanding or common interest between them.
+
+"Oh, I don't know you well enough to visit with you," he now said
+laughingly, "but I'll look at you long enough so I'll recognize you the
+next time I meet you on the street-car."
+
+Lydia sat down on his knee, lightly, so as not to crumple her gauzy
+draperies, and looked at her father with the whimsical expression that
+became her face so well. "I'm paying you back," she said gayly. "I
+remember when I was a little girl I used to wonder why you came all the
+way out here to eat your meals. It seemed so much easier for you to get
+them near your office. Honest, I did."
+
+"Ah, that was when I was still struggling to get my toes into a crack in
+the wall and climb up. I didn't have time for you then. And you're very
+ungrateful to bring it up against me, for all I was doing was to wear my
+nose clear off on the grindstone so's to be able to buy you such pretty
+trash as this." He stroked the girl's shimmering draperies, not thinking
+of what he was saying, smiling at her, delighted with her beauty, with
+her nearness to him, with this brief snatch of intimate talk.
+
+"Ungrateful--yourself! What am I doing but wearing my nose off on the
+grindstone--Dr. Melton threatens nervous prostration every day--so's to
+show off your pretty trash to the best advantage. _I_ haven't any time
+to bother with _you_ now!" she mocked him laughingly, her hands on his
+shoulders.
+
+"Well, that sounds like a bargain," he admitted, leaning back in his
+chair; "I suppose I've got to be satisfied if you are. _Are_ you
+satisfied?" he asked with a sudden seriousness. "How do you like Paul,
+now you know him better?"
+
+Lydia flushed, and looked away in a tremulous confusion. "Why, when I'm
+with him I can't think of another thing in the world," she confessed in
+a low, ardent tone.
+
+"Ah, well, then that's all right," said the Judge comfortably.
+
+There was a pause, during which Lydia looked at the fire dreamily, and
+he looked at Lydia. The girl's face grew more and more absent and
+brooding.
+
+The door-bell rang. "There he is, I suppose," said her father.
+
+"But isn't it a pity we couldn't make connections?" she asked musingly.
+"Maybe I'd have liked you better with your nose on, better even than
+pretty trash."
+
+"Eh?" said Judge Emery. His blankness was so acute that he slipped for
+an instant back into a rusticity he had long ago left behind him. "What
+say, Lydia?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, yes, Paul; I didn't hear you come in," called the girl, jumping up
+and beginning to put on her wraps.
+
+The young man darted into the room to help her, saying over his
+shoulder: "Much obliged to you, Judge, for your good word to Egdon,
+March and Company. I got the contract for the equipment of their new
+factory to-day."
+
+The Judge screwed himself round in his chair till he could see Paul
+bending at Lydia's feet, putting on her high overshoes. "That's quite a
+contract, isn't it?" he asked, highly pleased.
+
+"The biggest I ever got my teeth into," said Paul, straightening up.
+"I'm ashamed to have Lydia know anything about it, though. I didn't
+bring a hack to take her to the dance."
+
+"Oh, I never thought you would," cried Lydia, standing up and stamping
+her feet down in her overshoes--an action that added emphasis to her
+protest. "I'd rather walk, it's such a little way. I like it better when
+I'm not costing people money."
+
+"You're not like most of your sex," said Paul. "Down in Mexico, when I
+was there on the Brighton job, I heard a Spanish proverb: 'If a pretty
+woman smiles, some purse is shedding tears.'"
+
+The two men exchanged laughing glances of understanding. Lydia frowned.
+"That is hateful--and horrid--and a _lie_!" she cried energetically,
+finding that they paid no attention to her protest.
+
+"_I_ didn't invent it," Paul exonerated himself lightly.
+
+"But you laughed at it--you think it's so--you--" She was trembling in a
+sudden resentment at once inexplicable and amusing to the other two.
+
+"Highty-tighty! you little spitfire!" cried her father, laughing. "I see
+_your_ finish, my boy!"
+
+"Good gracious, Lydia, how you do fly at a man! I take it back. I take
+it back." Paul looked admiringly at his pretty sweetheart's flashing
+eyes and crimson cheeks as he spoke.
+
+She turned away and picked up her cloak without speaking.
+
+"To tell the truth," said Paul, going on with the conversation as though
+it had not been interrupted, and addressing his father-in-law-to-be,
+"every penny I can rake and scrape is going into the house. Lydia's
+such a sensible little thing I knew she'd think it better to have
+something permanent than an ocean of orchids and candy now. Besides,
+such a belle as she is gets them from everybody else."
+
+Mrs. Emery often pointed out to Lydia's inexperience that it was rare to
+see a man so magnanimously free from jealousy as her fiance.
+
+"The architect and I were going over it to-day," the young electrician
+went on, "and I decided, seeing this new contract means such a lot, that
+I would have the panels in the hall carved, after all--of course if you
+agree," he turned to Lydia, but went on without waiting for an answer.
+"The effect will be much handsomer--will go with the rest of the house
+better."
+
+"They'd be lots harder to dust," said Lydia dubiously, putting a
+spangled web of gold over her hair. The contrast between her aspect and
+the dingy suggestions of her speech made both men laugh tenderly. "When
+Titania takes to being practical--" laughed Paul.
+
+Lydia went on seriously. "Honestly, Paul, I'm afraid the house is
+getting too handsome, anyhow--everything in it. It's too expensive,
+I'm--"
+
+"Nothing's too good for you." Paul said this with conviction. "And
+besides, it's an asset. The mortgage won't be so very large. And if
+we're in it, we'll just have to live up to it. It'll be a stimulus."
+
+"I hope it doesn't stimulate us into our graves," said Lydia, as she
+kissed her father good-night.
+
+"Well, your families aren't paupers on either side," said Paul.
+
+A casual remark like this was the nearest approach he ever made to
+admitting that he expected Lydia to inherit money. He would have been
+shocked at the idea of allowing any question of money to influence his
+marriage, and would not have lifted a hand to learn the state of his
+future father-in-law's finances. Still, it was evident to the most
+disinterested eye that there were plenty of funds behind the Emery's
+ample, comfortable mode of life, and on this point his eyes were keen,
+for all their delicacy.
+
+As the young people paused at the door, Judge Emery took a note-book out
+of his pocket and elaborately made a note. "Fifty-five minutes in eight
+days, Lydia," he called.
+
+At the end of a fortnight he proclaimed aloud that the record was too
+discouraging to keep any longer; he was losing ground instead of
+gaining. He had followed Mrs. Emery to her room one afternoon to make
+this complaint, and now moved about uneasily, trying to bestow his
+large, square figure where he would not be in the way of his wife, who
+was hurrying nervously about to pack Lydia's traveling bag. She looked
+very tired and pale, and spoke as though near a nervous outbreak of some
+sort. Didn't he know that Lydia had to start for the Mallory Valentine
+house-party this afternoon, she asked with an asperity not directed at
+the Judge's complaint, for she considered that negligible, but at Lydia
+for being late. She often became so absorbed and fascinated by her own
+managerial capacity that she was vastly put out by lapses on the part of
+the object of it. She did not spare herself when it was a question of
+Lydia's career. Without a thought of fatigue or her own personal tastes,
+she devoted herself with a fanatic zeal to furthering her daughter's
+interests. It sometimes seemed very hard to bear that Lydia herself was
+so much less zealous in the matter.
+
+When the girl came in now, flushed and guiltily breathless, Dr. Melton
+trotted at her heels, calling out excuses for her tardiness. "It's my
+fault. I met her scurrying away from a card-party, and she was exactly
+on time. But I walked along with her and detained her."
+
+"It was the sunset," said Lydia, hurrying to change her hat and wraps.
+"It was so fine that when Godfather called my attention to it, I just
+_stood_! I forgot everything! There may have been sunsets before this
+winter, but it seems as though I hadn't had time to see one before--over
+the ironworks, you know, where that hideous black smoke is all day, and
+the sun turned it into such loveliness--"
+
+"You've missed your trolley-car," said her mother succinctly.
+
+"Oh, I'm _sorry_!" cried Lydia, in a remorse evidently directed more
+toward displeasing her mother than the other consequences of her delay,
+for she asked in a moment, very meekly, "Will it make so very much
+difference if I don't go till the next one?"
+
+"You'll miss the Governor. He was coming down to meet those on this car.
+You'll have to go all alone. All the rest of the party were on this
+one."
+
+"Oh, I don't care about that," cried Lydia. "If that's all--I'd ever so
+much rather go alone. I'm never alone a single minute, and it'll rest
+me. The crowd would have been so noisy and carried on so--they always
+do."
+
+Her mother's aggrieved disappointment did not disappear. She said
+nothing, bringing Lydia's traveling wraps to her silently, and emanating
+disapproval until Lydia drooped and looked piteously at her godfather.
+
+Dr. Melton cried out at this, "Look here, Susan Emery, you're like the
+carpenter that was so proud of his good planing that he planed his
+boards all away to shavings."
+
+Mrs. Emery looked at him with a lack of comprehension of his meaning
+equaled only by her evident indifference to it.
+
+"I mean--I thought what you were going in for was giving Lydia a good
+time this winter. You're running her as though she were a
+transcontinental railway system."
+
+"You can't accomplish anything without system in this world," said Mrs.
+Emery. She added, "Perhaps Lydia will find, when she comes to ordering
+her own life, that she will miss her old mother's forethought and care."
+
+Lydia flung herself remorsefully on her mother's neck. "I'm so _sorry_,
+Mother dear," she almost sobbed. Dr. Melton's professional eye took in
+the fact that everyone in the room was high-strung and tense. "The
+middle-of-the-social-season symptom," he called it to himself. "I'm so
+sorry, Mother," Lydia went on. "I will be more careful next time. You
+are _so_ good to--to--"
+
+"Good Heavens!" said Dr. Melton. "All the child did was to give herself
+a moment's time to look at a fine spectacle, after spending all a
+precious afternoon on such a tragically idiotic pursuit as cards."
+
+"Oh, _sunsets_!" Mrs. Emery disposed of them with a word. "Come, Lydia."
+
+"I'll go with her, and carry her bag," said the doctor.
+
+"You made such a good job of getting her here on time," said Mrs. Emery,
+unappeased.
+
+The Judge offered to go, as a means of one of his rare visits with
+Lydia, but his wife declared with emphasis that she didn't care who went
+or didn't go so long as she herself saw that Lydia did not take to
+star-gazing again. It ended by all four proceeding down the street
+together.
+
+"You're sure you remember everything, Lydia?" asked her mother.
+
+"Let me see," said the girl, laughing nervously. "Do I? The Governor's
+wife is his second, so I'm to waste no time admiring the first set of
+children. They're Methodists, so I'm to keep quiet about our being
+Episcopalians--"
+
+"I guess we're not Episcopalians enough to hurt," commented her father,
+who had never taken the conversion of his women-folks very seriously.
+
+"And it's my pink crepe for dinner and tan-colored suit if they have
+afternoon tea. And Mrs. Mallory is to be asked to visit us, but not her
+daughter, because of her impossible husband, and I'm to play my
+prettiest to the Governor, because he's always needing dynamos and such
+in the works, and Paul--"
+
+The big car came booming around the corner, and she stopped her category
+of recommendations. The doctor rushed in with a last one as they stepped
+hurriedly toward the rear platform: "And don't forget that your host is
+the most unmitigated old rascal that ever stood in with two political
+machines at once."
+
+The Judge swung her up on the platform, the doctor gave her valise to
+the conductor, her mother waved her hand, and she was off.
+
+The two men turned away. Not so Mrs. Emery. She was staring after the
+car in a fierce endeavor to focus her gaze on the interior. "Who was
+that man that jumped up so surprised to speak to Lydia?"
+
+"I didn't notice anybody," said the Judge.
+
+Dr. Melton spoke quickly. "Lydia's getting in a very nervous state, my
+friends; I want you to know that. This confounded life is too much for
+her."
+
+"She doesn't kill herself getting up in the morning," complained her
+father. "It is a month now since I've seen her at breakfast."
+
+"I don't _let_ her get up," said Mrs. Emery. "I guess if you'd been up
+till two every morning dancing split dances because you were _the_ belle
+of the season, you'd sleep late! Besides," she went on, "she'll be all
+right as soon as her engagement is announced. The excitement of that'll
+brace her up."
+
+"Good Lord! It's not more excitement she needs," began Dr. Melton; but
+they had reached the house, and Mrs. Emery, obviously preoccupied,
+pulled her husband quickly in, dismissing the doctor with a nod.
+
+She drew the Judge hurriedly into the hall, and, "It was that Rankin!"
+she cried, the slam of the door underscoring her words, "and _I_ believe
+Marius Melton knew he was going on that car and made Lydia late on
+purpose."
+
+Judge Emery was in the state in which of late the end of the day's work
+found him--overwhelmingly fatigued. He had not an ounce of superfluous
+energy to answer his wife's tocsin. "Well, what if it was?" he said.
+
+"They'll be an hour and a half together--alone--more alone than anywhere
+except on a desert island. Alone--an hour and a half!"
+
+"Oh, Susan! If Paul can't in three months make more headway than Rankin
+can tear down in an hour and a half--"
+
+She raged at him, revolted at the calmness with which he was
+unbuttoning his overcoat and unwinding his muffler, "You don't
+understand--_anything_! I'm not afraid she'll elope with him--Paul's got
+her too solid for that--Rankin probably won't say anything of _that_
+kind! But he'll put notions in her head again--she's so impressionable.
+And she says queer things now, once in a while, if she's left alone a
+minute. She needs managing. She's not like that levelheaded, sensible
+Madeleine Hollister. Lydia has to be guided, and you don't see
+anything--you leave it all to me."
+
+She was almost crying with nervous exhaustion. That Lydia's course ran
+smooth through a thousand complications was not accomplished without an
+incalculable expenditure of nervous force on her mother's part. Dr.
+Melton had several times of late predicted that he would have his old
+patient back under his care again. Judge Emery, remembering this
+prophecy, was now moved by his wife's pale agitation to a
+heart-sickening mixture of apprehension for her and of recollection of
+his own extreme discomfort whenever she was sick. He tried to soothe
+her. "But, Susan, there's nothing we can do about it," he said
+reasoningly, hanging up his overcoat, blandly ignorant that her
+irritation came largely from his failure to fall in with her conception
+of the moment as a tragic one.
+
+"You could _care_ something about it," she said bitterly, standing with
+all her wraps on. The telephone bell rang. She motioned him back. "No; I
+might as well go first as last. It'll be something I'd have to see
+about, anyway."
+
+As he hesitated in the middle of the hall, longing to betake himself to
+a deep easy chair and a moment's relaxation, and not daring to do so, he
+was startled by an electric change in his wife's voice. "You're at
+Hardville, you say? Oh, Flora Burgess, I could go down on my knees in
+thanksgiving. I want you to run right out as fast as you can and get on
+the next Interurban car from Endbury. Lydia's on it--" she cast caution
+from her desperately--"and I've just heard that there's somebody I
+don't want her to talk to--you know--_carpenters_--run--fly--never mind
+what they say! Make them talk to you, too!"
+
+She turned back to her husband, transfigured with triumph. "I guess
+that'll put a spoke in _his_ wheel!" she cried. "Flora Burgess's at
+Hardville, and that's only half an hour from here. I guess they can't
+get very far in half an hour."
+
+The Judge considered the matter with pursed lips. "I wish it hadn't
+happened," he mused, as unresponsive to his wife's relief as he had been
+to her anxiety. "At first, I mean--last autumn--at all."
+
+His wife caught him up with a good humor gay with relief. "Oh, give you
+time, Nat, and you come round to seeing what's under your nose. I was
+wishing it hadn't happened long before I knew it had. I breathed it in
+the air before we ever knew she'd so much as seen him."
+
+"Melton says he thinks the fellow has a future before him--"
+
+"Oh, Marius Melton! How many of his swans have stuffed feather pillows!"
+
+The Judge demurred. "I often wish I could think he _was_--but Melton's
+no fool." He added, uneasily, "He's been pestering me again about taking
+a long rest--says I'm really out of condition."
+
+"Perhaps a change of work would do you good--to be in active practice
+again. You could be your own master more--take more vacations, maybe."
+
+The Judge surveyed her with a whimsical smile. "I'd make a lot more
+money in practice," he admitted.
+
+If she heard this comment she made no sign, but went on, "You do work
+too constantly, too. I've always said so! If you'd be willing to take a
+little more relaxation--go out more--"
+
+Judge Emery shuddered. "Endbury tea-parties--!"
+
+His wife, half-way up the stairs, laughed down at him. "Tea-parties!
+There hasn't been a tea-party given in Endbury since we were wearing
+pull-backs."
+
+The laugh was so good-natured that the Judge hoped for a favorable
+opening and ventured to say irrelevantly, as though reverting
+automatically to a subject always in his mind, "But, honest, Susie,
+can't we shave expenses down some? This winter is costing--"
+
+She turned on him, not resentfully this time, but with a solemn appeal.
+"Why, Nat! Lydia's season! The last winter we'll have her with us, no
+doubt! I'd go on bread and water afterward to give her what she wants
+now--wouldn't _you_? What are we old folks good for but to do our best
+by our children?"
+
+The Judge looked up at her, baffled, inarticulate. "Oh, of course," he
+agreed helplessly, "we want to do the best by our children."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+A HALF-HOUR'S LIBERTY
+
+
+Inside the big Interurban car Lydia and Rankin were talking with a
+freedom that enormously surprised Lydia. The man had started up with an
+exclamation of pleasure, had taken her bag, found a vacant seat, put her
+next the window and sat down by her before Lydia, quite breathless with
+the shock of seeing him, could do more than notice how vigorous he
+looked, his tall, spare figure alert and erect, his ruddy hair and
+close-clipped beard contrasting vividly with his dark-blue flannel shirt
+and soft black hat. He was on a business trip, evidently, for on his
+knees he held a tool-box with large ungloved hands, roughened and red.
+
+With his usual sweeping disregard of conventional approaches, he plunged
+boldly into the matter with which their thoughts were at once occupied.
+"So this was why Dr. Melton insisted I should take this car. Well, I'm
+grateful to him! It gives me a chance to relieve my mind of a weight of
+remorse I've been carrying around."
+
+Lydia looked at him, relieved and surprised at the hearty spontaneity of
+this opening.
+
+He misunderstood her expression. "You don't mind, do you, my speaking to
+you about last fall--my saying I am so very sorry I made you all the
+trouble Dr. Melton tells me I did? I'm really very sorry!"
+
+Nothing could have more completely disarmed Lydia's acquired fear of him
+as the bogey-man of her mother's exhortations. It is true that she was,
+as she put it to herself, somewhat taken down by the contrast between
+her secret thought of him as a wounded, rejected suitor, and this
+clear-eyed, self-possessed, friendly reality before her; but, after a
+momentary feeling of pique, coming from a sense of the romantic,
+superficially grafted on her natural good feeling, she was filled with
+an immense relief. Lydia was no man-eater. In spite of traditional
+wisdom, she, like a considerable number of her contemporaries, was as
+far removed from this stage of feminine development as from a Stone-age
+appetite for raw meat. She now drew a long breath of the most honest
+satisfaction that she had done him no harm, and smiled at Rankin. He
+waited for her to speak, and she finally said: "It's awfully good of you
+to put it that way! I've been afraid you must have been angry with me
+and hurt that I--so you didn't mind at all!"
+
+Rankin smiled at little ruefully at her swift conclusion. "I believe in
+telling the truth, even to young ladies, and I can not say I didn't mind
+at all--or that I don't now. But I am convinced that you were right in
+dropping me--out of the realm of acquaintances." His assumption was,
+Lydia saw with gratitude, that they were talking simply about a possible
+acquaintanceship between them. "It's evidently true--what I told you the
+very first time I saw you. We don't belong in the same world."
+
+As he said this, he looked at her with an expression Lydia thought
+severe. She protested, "What makes you so sure?"
+
+"Because to live in my world--even to step into it from time to
+time--requires the courage to believe in it."
+
+"And you think I didn't?" asked Lydia. It was an inestimable comfort to
+her to have brought into the light the problem that had so long lain in
+the back of her head, a confused mass of dark conjecture.
+
+"Did you?" he asked steadily. "You ought to know."
+
+There was silence, while Lydia turned her head away and looked at the
+brown, flat winter landscape jerking itself past the windows as the car
+began to develop speed in the first long, open space between
+settlements. She was trying to remember something distinct about the
+nightmare of misery that had followed her admission of the identity of
+the man who had kissed her hand that starry night in October, but from
+the black chaos of her recollection she brought out only, "Oh, you don't
+realize how things are with a girl--how many million little ways she's
+bound and tied down, just from everybody in the family loving her as--"
+
+"Oh, yes, I do; I prove I do by saying that you were probably right in
+yielding so absolutely to that overwhelming influence. If you hadn't the
+strength to break through it decisively even once, you certainly
+couldn't have gotten any satisfaction out of doing things contrary to
+it. So it's all right, you see."
+
+Lydia's drooping face did not show that she derived the satisfaction
+from this view of her limitations that her companion seemed to expect.
+"You mean I'm a poor-spirited, weak thing, who'd better never try to
+take a step of my own," she said with a sorry smile.
+
+"I don't mean anything unkind," he told her gently. "I've succeeded in
+convincing myself that your action of last autumn was the result of a
+deep-rooted instinct for self-preservation--and that's certainly most
+justifiable. It meant I'd expected too harsh a strength from you--" he
+went on with a whimsical smile, which even the steadiness of his eyes
+did not keep from sadness--"as though I'd hoped you could lift a
+thousand-pound weight, like the strong woman in the side-show."
+
+She responded to his attempt at lightness with as plain an undercurrent
+of seriousness as his own. "Why do you live so that people have to lift
+thousand-pound weights before they dare so much as say good-morning to
+you?"
+
+"Because I don't dare live any other way," he answered.
+
+"It's hard on other people," Lydia ventured, but retreated hastily
+before the first expression of upbraiding she had seen in his eyes. He
+had so suddenly turned grave with the thought that it had been harder on
+him than on anyone else that she cried out hurriedly, "But you didn't
+help a bit--you left it all to me--"
+
+She stopped, her face burning in uncertainty of the meaning of her
+words.
+
+Rankin's answer came with the swiftness of one who has meditated long on
+a question. "I'm glad you've given me a chance to say what--I've wished
+you might know. I thought it over and over at the time--and since--and
+I'm sure it would not have been honorable--or delicate--or right, _not_
+to leave it all to you. That much was yours to decide--whether you would
+take the first step. It would have been a crime to have hurried or urged
+you beyond what lay in your heart to do--or to have overborne you
+against some deep-lying, innate instinct."
+
+Lydia's voice was shaking in self-pity as she cried out, "Oh, if you
+knew what the others--nobody _else_ was afraid to hurry or urge me to--"
+
+She stopped and looked away, her heart beating rapidly with a flood of
+recollections. Rankin's lips opened, but he shut them firmly, as though
+he did not trust himself to speak. His large red hands closed savagely
+on the handle of his tool-box. There was a silence between them.
+
+The car began to move more slowly, and the conductor, standing up from
+the seat where he had been dozing, remarked in a conversational tone to
+a woman with two children near him, "Gardenton--this is the cross-roads
+to Gardenton." Later, as the car stood still under the singing vibration
+of the trolley-wire overhead, he added in the general direction of Lydia
+and Rankin, now the only passengers, "Next stop is Wardsboro'!" His
+voice came to them with a singular clearness in the quiet of the
+momentary stop. They were in the midst of a mournful expanse of bare
+ploughed fields, frozen and brown. The motorman released his brake,
+letting the brass arm swing noisily about, the conductor sat down again,
+and as the car began to move forward again he closed his eyes. He looked
+very tired and, now that an almost instant sleep had relaxed his
+features, pathetically young.
+
+"How pale he is," said Lydia, wishing to break the silence with a
+harmless remark. "He looks tired to death."
+
+"He probably is just that," said Rankin, wincing. "It's sickening, the
+way they work. Seven days a week, most of them, you know."
+
+"No; I didn't know," cried Lydia, shocked. "Why, that's awful. When do
+they see their families?"
+
+"They don't. One of them, whose house isn't far from mine, told me that
+he hadn't seen his children, except asleep, for three weeks."
+
+"But something ought to be done about it!" The girl's deep-lying
+instinct for instant reparation rose up hotly.
+
+"Are they so much worse off than most American business men?" queried
+Rankin. "Do any of them feel they can take the time to see much more
+than the outside of their children; and isn't seeing them asleep about
+as--"
+
+Lydia cut him short quickly. "You're always blaming them for that," she
+cried. "You ought to pity them. They can't help it. It's better for the
+children to have bread and butter, isn't it--"
+
+Rankin shook his head. "I can't be fooled with that sort of talk--I've
+lived with too many kinds of people. At least half the time it isn't a
+question of bread and butter. It's a question of giving the children
+bread and butter and sugar rather than bread and butter and father. Of
+course, I'm a fanatic on the subject. I'd rather leave off even the
+butter than the father--let alone the sugar."
+
+"But here's this very motorman you know about--what could he do?"
+
+"They're not forced by the company to work seven days a week--only
+they're not given pay enough to let them take even one day off without
+feeling it. This very motorman I was talking with got to telling me why
+he was working so extra hard just then. His oldest daughter is going to
+graduate from the high school and he wants to give her a fine graduating
+dress, as good as anybody's, and a graduating 'present.' It seems that's
+the style now for graduating girls. He said he and his wife wanted her
+always to remember that day as a bright spot, and not as a time when
+she was humiliated by being different from other girls."
+
+"Well, my goodness! you're not criticizing them for that, are you? I
+think it was just as sweet and lovely of them as can be to realize how a
+girl feels."
+
+Rankin looked at her, smiled slightly, and said nothing. His silence
+made Lydia thoughtful. After a time, "I see what you mean, of course,"
+she said slowly, "that it would be _better_ for her, perhaps--but if he
+_loves_ her, her father _wants_ to do things for her."
+
+Rankin's roar of exasperation at this speech was so evidently directed
+at an old enemy of an argument that Lydia was only for an instant
+startled by it. "I _don't_ say he can do too much for her," he cried.
+"He can't! Nobody can do too much for anybody else if it's the right
+thing."
+
+"And what in the world do you think _would_ be the right thing in this
+case?" Lydia put the question as a poser.
+
+"Why, of course, to pamper her vanity; to feed her moral cowardice; to
+make her more afraid than ever of senseless public opinion; to deprive
+her of a fine exercise for her spiritual force; to shut her off from a
+sense of her material situation in life until the knowledge of it will
+come as a tragedy to her; to let her grow up without any knowledge of
+her father's point of view--"
+
+"There, there! That's enough!" said Lydia.
+
+"I didn't need to be so violent about it, that's a fact," apologized
+Rankin.
+
+"But you're talking of people the way they ought to be," objected Lydia,
+apparently drawing again from a stock of inculcated arguments. "Do you
+really, honestly, suppose that that girl would rather have an
+opportunity to do something for her parents and--and--and all that, than
+have a fine dress that would cost a lot and make the other girls
+envious?"
+
+"Oh, Lydia!" cried her companion, not noticing the betrayal of a mental
+habit in the slipping out of her name. "You're just in a state of
+saturated solution of Dr. Melton. Don't you believe a word he says
+about folks. They're lots better than he thinks. The only reason anybody
+has for raging at them for being a bad lot is because they are such a
+good lot! They are so chuck-full of good possibilities! There's so much
+more good in them than bad. You think that, don't you? You _must_!
+There's nothing to go on, if you don't."
+
+As Lydia began to answer she felt herself, as once or twice before when
+with Rankin, suddenly an immeasurable distance from her usual ways of
+mental life. She looked about her upon a horizon very ample and quite
+strange, without being able to trace the rapid steps that had carried
+her away from the close-walled room full of knickknacks and trifles,
+where she usually lived. She drew a deep breath of surprise and changed
+her answer to an honest "I don't believe I know whether I believe you or
+not. I don't think I ever thought of it before."
+
+"What _do_ you think about?" The question was evidently too sincere an
+interrogation to resent.
+
+The girl made several beginnings at an answer, stopped, looked out of
+the window, looked down at her shoe-tip, and finally burst into her
+little clear trill of amusement. "I don't," she said, looking full at
+Rankin, her eyes shining. "You've caught me! I can't remember a single
+time in my day when I think about anything but hurrying to get dressed
+in time to be at the next party promptly. Maybe some folks can think
+when they're hurrying to get dressed, but I can't."
+
+Rankin was very little moved to hilarity by this statement, but he was
+too young to resist the contagion of Lydia's mirth, and laughed back at
+her, wondering at the mobility of her ever-changing face.
+
+"If you don't think, what do you _do_?" he interrogated with mock
+relentlessness.
+
+"Nothing," said Lydia recklessly, still laughing.
+
+"What do you feel?" he went on in the same tone, but Lydia's face
+changed quickly.
+
+"Oh--lots!" she said uncertainly, and was silent.
+
+The car began to pass some poor, small houses, and in a moment came to
+a standstill in the midst of a straggling village. The young conductor
+still slept on, his head fallen so far on his shoulder that his
+breathing was difficult. The motorman, getting no signal to go on,
+looked back through the window, putting his face close to the glass to
+see, for it had grown dusky outside and the electric lights were not yet
+turned on. After a look at the sleeping man he glanced apprehensively at
+the two passengers, and then, apparently reassured that they were not
+"company detectives," he pushed open the door. "This is Wardsboro'," he
+told them as he went down the aisle, "and the next stop is Hardville."
+
+He was a strong, burly man, and easily lifted the slight, boyish form of
+the conductor to a more comfortable position, propping him up in a
+corner of the seat. The young man did not waken, but his face relaxed
+into peaceful lines of unconsciousness as his head fell back, and his
+breathing became long and regular, like a sleeping child's. As the big
+motorman went back to his post, he explained a little sheepishly to the
+two, who had watched his operation in attentive silence, "It's against
+the rules, I know, but there ain't anybody but you two here, and he
+don't look as though he'd really got his growth yet. I got a boy ain't
+sixteen that looks as old as he does, and ruggeder at that. I reckon the
+long hours are too much for him."
+
+"Do you know him?" asked Rankin.
+
+The motorman turned his red, weather-beaten face to them from the
+doorway where he stood, pulling on his clumsy gloves. "Who, me?" he
+asked. "No; I never seen him till to-day. He's a new hand, I reckon." He
+drew the door after him with a rattling slam, rang the bell for himself,
+and started the car forward.
+
+In the warm, vibrating solitude of the car, the two young people looked
+at each other in a silent transport. Lydia's dark eyes were glistening,
+and she checked Rankin, about to speak, with a quick, broken "No; don't
+say a word! You'd spoil it!"
+
+There was between them one of the long, vital silences, full of
+certainty of a common emotion, which had once or twice before marked a
+significant change in their relation. Finally, "That's something I shall
+never forget," said Lydia.
+
+Rankin looked at her in silence, and then, quickly, away.
+
+"It's like an answer to what I was saying--a refutation of what Dr.
+Melton thinks--about people--"
+
+As Rankin still made no answer, she exclaimed in a ravished surprise,
+"Why, I never saw anything so lovely--that made me so happy! I feel warm
+all over!"
+
+Indeed, her face shone through the dusk upon her companion, who could
+now no longer constrain himself to look away from her. He said, his
+voice vibrant with a deep note which instantly carried Lydia back to the
+other time when she had heard it, under the stars of last October, "It's
+only an instrument exquisitely in tune which can so respond--" He broke
+off, closed his lips, and, turning away from her, gazed sightlessly out
+at the dim, flat horizon, now the only outline visible in the twilight.
+
+Lydia said nothing, either then or when, after a long pause, he said
+that he would leave the car at the next station.
+
+"It has been very pleasant to see you again," he said, bending over his
+tool-box, "and you mustn't lay it up against me that I haven't
+congratulated you on your engagement. Of course you know how I wish you
+all happiness."
+
+"Thank you," said Lydia.
+
+Ahead of the car, some lights suddenly winking above the horizon
+announced the approach of Hardville. Rankin stood up, slipped on his
+rough overcoat, and sat down again. He drew a long breath, and began
+evenly: "I know you won't misunderstand me if I try to say one more
+thing. I probably won't see you again for years, and it would be a great
+joy to me to be sure that you know how hearty is my good-will to you.
+I'm afraid you can't think of me without pain, because I was the cause
+of such discomfort to you, but I know you are too generous to blame me
+for what was an involuntary hurt. Of course I ought to have known how
+your guardians would feel about your knowing me--"
+
+"Oh, _why_ should you be so that all that happened!" cried Lydia
+suddenly. "If it was too hard for me, why couldn't you have made it
+easier--thought differently--acted like other people. _Would_ you--if I
+hadn't--if we had gone on knowing each other?"
+
+Rankin turned very white. "No," he said; "I couldn't."
+
+"It seems to me," said Lydia hurriedly, "that, without being willing to
+concede anything to their ideas, you ask a great deal of your friends."
+
+"Yes," said Rankin, "I do. It's a hard struggle I'm in with myself and
+the world--oh, evidently much too hard for you even to look at from a
+distance." His voice broke. "The best thing I can do for you is to stay
+away--" He rose, and stepped into the aisle. "But you are so kind--you
+will let me serve you in any other way, if I can--ever. If I can ever do
+something that's hard for you to do--you must know that I stand as ready
+as even Dr. Melton to do it for you if I can."
+
+Indeed, for the moment, as Lydia looked up into his kind, strong face,
+his impersonal tenderness made him seem almost such an old, tried friend
+as her godfather; almost as unlikely to expect any intimate personal
+return from her.
+
+"You must remember," he went on, "the great joy it gave us both to-day
+even to see an act of kindness. Give me an opportunity to do one for you
+if I ever can."
+
+It already seemed to Lydia as though he had gone away from her, as
+though this were but a beneficent memory of him lingering by her side.
+She hardly noticed when he left her alone in the car.
+
+The conductor started up, wakened by the silence, and announced wildly,
+"Wardsboro', Wardsboro'!"
+
+"No, it ain't; it's the first stop in Hardville," contradicted the
+motorman, sticking his head in through the door. "Turn on them lights!"
+
+As the glass bulbs leaped to a dazzling glare, Lydia blinked and looked
+away out of the window. A moment later an arm laid about her neck made
+her bound up in amazement and confront a small, middle-aged woman, with
+a hat too young for her tired, sallow face, with a note-book in her
+hand and an apologetic expression of affection in her light blue eyes.
+"I'm sorry I startled you, Miss Lydia," she said. "I keep forgetting
+you're not still a little girl I can pick up and hug."
+
+"Oh, you!" breathed the girl, sitting down again. "I didn't think there
+was anybody in the car with me, you see."
+
+"Have you come all the way from Endbury alone, then?" asked Miss
+Burgess, looking about her suspiciously.
+
+"No, I have not," said Lydia uncompromisingly. "Mr. Rankin, the
+cabinet-maker, has been with me till just now."
+
+Miss Burgess sat down hastily in the vacant seat by Lydia. "And he's
+coming back?" she inquired.
+
+"No; he got off at Hardville. This _is_ Hardville, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes. I happened to be out reporting a big church bazaar here." She
+settled back comfortably. "What a nice chance for a cozy little visit I
+shall have with you. These long trips on the Interurban are fine for
+talking. Unless I shall tire you? Did Mr. Rankin talk much? What does he
+talk _about_, anyhow? He's always so rude to me that I've never heard
+him say a word except about his work."
+
+Lydia considered for a moment. "We talked about the street-car
+conductors having such long hours to work," she said, "and later about
+whether people have more bad in them than good."
+
+"Oh!" said Miss Burgess.
+
+Lydia smiled faintly, the ghost of her whimsical little look of mockery.
+"We decided that they have more good," she said.
+
+Miss Burgess cast about her for a suitable comment. At last, "Really!"
+she said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+ENGAGED TO BE MARRIED
+
+
+All over the half-finished house the workmen began to lay down their
+tools. Paul Hollister's face broke into a good-humored smile as a moment
+later he caught the faraway five-o'clock whistles calling from the city.
+He was in a very happy mood these days and the best aspect of the
+phenomena of the world was what impressed him most. As the workmen
+disappeared down the driveway to the main road, running to catch the
+next trolley-car to Endbury, he looked after them with little of the
+usual exasperation of the house-builder whose work they were slighting,
+but with an agreeable sense of their extreme inferiority to him in the
+matter of fixity of purpose. He felt that they symbolized the weakness
+of most of humanity, and promised himself with a comfortable confidence
+an easy and lifelong victory over such feeble adversaries. Of late,
+business had been going even better than ever.
+
+The days had begun to grow appreciably longer with the approach of
+spring, and there had been several noons of an almost summer-like
+mildness, but now, in spite of the fact that the sun was still shining,
+the first chill of the late March evening dropped suddenly upon the
+bare-raftered structure whose open windows and door-spaces offered no
+barrier to the damp breeze. Hollister stirred from his pleasant reverie
+and began to walk briskly about, inspecting the amount of work
+accomplished since his last visit. He kept very close track of the
+industry of his workmen and the competence of his contractor, and
+Lydia's father admired greatly the way in which his future son-in-law
+did not allow himself to be "done" by those past masters of the art. It
+argued well for the future, Judge Emery thought, and he called Lydia's
+attention to the trait with approval.
+
+Before the wide aperture which was to be the front door, the owner of
+the house stopped and looked eagerly out toward the road. It was near
+the time when Lydia had promised to be there, and he meant to see her
+and run to meet her when she first turned in upon the ground that was to
+be her home. It was the first time that Lydia had happened to visit the
+new house alone. Either her mother or Hollister's sister had accompanied
+her on the two or three other occasions, but to-day she telephoned that
+Mrs. Emery had been really out-and-out forbidden by Dr. Melton to get
+out of bed for two or three days, and as for Madeleine--at this point
+Madeleine had snatched the receiver from Lydia's hand and had informed
+her brother that Madeleine was going to be busy with _her_ young man and
+couldn't get off to chaperone people that had been as long engaged as he
+and Lydia.
+
+That was part of the bright color of the world to Paul--his sister's
+recent engagement to their uncle's partner in the iron works, a very
+prosperous, young-old bachelor of fifty-odd, whose intense preoccupation
+with business had never been pierced by any consciousness of the other
+sex until Madeleine had, as she proclaimed in her own vernacular, "taken
+a club to him." It was a very brilliant match for her, and justified her
+own prophecy concerning herself that she was not to be satisfied with
+any old-fashioned, smooth-running course for true love. "It must shoot
+the chutes, or nothing," she was accustomed to say, in her cheerful,
+high-spirited manner.
+
+Paul thought, with self-approval, that, for orphans of the poorer branch
+of the Hollister family, he and Madeleine had not done badly with their
+lives thus far.
+
+He looked again impatiently toward the entrance to the grounds. A
+trolley-car had just rattled by on the main road. If Lydia was on it,
+she would appear at that turning under the trees. No; evidently she had
+not been on that one. The harsh jar of the trolley's progress died away
+in the distance and no Lydia appeared. He had fifteen minutes to wait
+for the next one.
+
+He drew out a note-book and began jotting down some ideas about the
+disposition of the five acres surrounding the house. He was ambitious to
+have the appearance of a country estate and avoid the "surburban" look
+which would be so fatally easy to acquire in the suburban place. He
+decided that he would not as yet fence in his land. The house was the
+last one of a group of handsome residences that had lately sprung up in
+the vicinity of the new Country Club, and to the south was still open
+country, so that without a fence, he reflected, he could have himself,
+and convey tacitly to others, the illusion of owning the wide sweep of
+meadow and field which stretched away a mile or more to a group of beech
+trees.
+
+He jumped down lightly from the porch, as yet but sketchily outlined in
+joists and rafters, and stood in a litter of shavings, bits of board and
+piles of yellow earth, with a kindling eye. He had that happy prophetic
+vision of the home-builder which overlooks all present deficiencies and
+in an instant, with a confident magic, erects all that the slow years
+are to build. He saw a handsome, well-kept house, correctly colonial in
+style, grounds artfully laid out to increase the impression of space, a
+hospitable, smoothly run interior, artistic, homelike, admired.
+
+A meadow-lark near him began to tinkle out its pretty silver notes. The
+sun set slowly below the smoky horizon; a dewy peace fell about the
+deserted place. Paul had his visions of other than material elements in
+his future and Lydia's. Such a dream came to him there, standing in the
+dusk before the germ of his home to be. He saw himself an alert man of
+forty-five, a good citizen, always on the side of civic honor; a good
+captain of industry, quick to see and reward merit; a good husband who
+loved and cherished his wife as on the day he married her, and protected
+her from all the asperities of reality; a good father--he had almost an
+actual vision of the children who would carry on his work in
+life--girls of Lydia's beauty and sweetness, boys with his energy and
+uprightness--and there was Lydia, too, the Lydia of twenty years from
+now--in the full bloom of physical allurement still, a gracious hostess,
+a public-spirited matron, lending the luster of his name to all worthy
+charities indorsed by the best people, laying down with a firm good
+taste dictates as to the worthy social development of the town. Before
+this vision there rose up in him the ardent impulse to immediate effort
+which is the sign manual of the man of action. He stirred and flung his
+arm out.
+
+"It's all up to me," he said aloud. "I can do it if I go after it hard
+enough. I've got to make good for Lydia's sake and mine. She must have
+the best I can get--the very best I know how to get for her."
+
+A sound behind him made him catch his breath. He was trembling as he
+turned about and saw Lydia coming swiftly up the driveway. "Good
+Heavens, how I love her!" he thought as he ran down to meet her.
+
+He was trembling when he took her in his arms, folding her in that close
+embrace of surprised rapture at finding everything real, and no dream,
+which is the unique joy of betrothal. He would not let her speak for a
+moment, pressing his lips upon hers. When he released her, she cried in
+a whisper, "Oh, it's wonderful how when you're close to me everything
+else just isn't in the world!"
+
+"That's being in love, Lydia," Paul told her with a grave thankfulness.
+
+"I don't mean," she went on, with her ever-present effort to express
+honestly her meaning, "I don't mean just--just being really
+close--having your arms around me, though that always makes me forget
+things, too--but being--_feeling_ close, you know--inside. Not having
+any inner corner where we're not together--the way we are now--the way I
+knew we should be when I saw you running down to meet me. I always know
+the minute I see you whether it's going to be this way." She added, a
+little wistfully, "Sometimes, you know, it isn't."
+
+Paul lifted her up to the porch and led her across into the hallway.
+Here he took her in his arms again and said with a shaken accent:
+"Dearest Lydia, dearest! I wish it were always the way you want it--"
+
+Lydia dropped her head back on his shoulder and looked at him earnestly.
+In the half-light, white and clear from the freshly plastered walls, her
+face was like alabaster. "Dear Paul, isn't that what getting married
+means--to learn how to be really, really close to each other all the
+time. There isn't anything else worth getting married for, is there?
+_Is_ there?"
+
+Her lover looked down into her eyes, into her sweet, earnest face, and
+could not speak. Finally, his hand at his throat, "Oh, Lydia, you're too
+good for me!" he said huskily. "You're too good for any man!"
+
+"No, no, no!" she protested with a soft energy. "I'm weak, as weak as
+water. You must give me a lot of your strength or I'll go under."
+
+"God knows I'll give you anything I have."
+
+"Then, never let things come between us--never, never, never! I'm all
+right as long as I'm close to you. If we just keep that, nothing else
+can matter."
+
+They were silent, standing with clasped hands in the passage-way that
+was to be the thoroughfare of their common life. It was a moment that
+was to come back many times to Lydia's memory during later innumerable,
+hurried daily farewells. The thought of the significance of the place
+came to her mind now. She said softly, "This must be a foretaste of what
+we're to have under this roof. How good it seems not to be in a hurry
+to--"
+
+With a start Paul came to himself from his unusual forgetfulness of his
+surroundings. "We _ought_ to be in a hurry now, dearest. Dr. Melton
+keeps me stirred up all the time to take care of you, and I'm sure I'm
+not doing that to let you stand here in this cold evening air. Come, let
+me show you--the closet under the stairs, you know, and the place for
+the refrigerator."
+
+Lydia yielded to his care for her with her sweet passivity, echoed his
+opinion about the details, and ran beside him down the driveway, to
+catch the next car to Endbury, with a singular light grace for a tall
+woman encumbered with long skirts.
+
+In spite of their haste, they missed the car and were obliged to wait
+for a quarter of an hour beside the tracks. They talked cheerfully on
+indifferent topics, the sense of intimate comradeship gilding all they
+said. In their hearts was fresh the memory of the scene in the new
+house. They looked at each other and smiled happily in the intervals of
+their talk.
+
+Paul was recapitulating to Lydia the advantages of the location of their
+house. "We are in the vanguard of a new movement in American life," he
+said, "the movement away from the cities. Madeleine tells me that she
+and Lowder are planning a house at the other end of this street, and you
+can be sure they know what they are about."
+
+Lydia did not dissent from this opinion of her future sister-in-law, but
+she interrupted Paul a moment later, to say fondly, "_Oh_, but I'm glad
+that you aren't fifty-five and bald and with lots of money!"
+
+Paul laughed. "Madeleine'll get on all right. She knows what she's
+about. It's a pair of them."
+
+"Well, I am church-thankful that that is not what _we_ are about!"
+exclaimed Lydia.
+
+Her lover voiced the extreme content with his lot which had been his
+obsession that day. "We have _everything_, darling. We shall have all
+that Madeleine and old Lowder have and we have now all this heavenly
+happiness that they'll never know--or miss," he added, giving them their
+due.
+
+"I didn't mean that," protested Lydia. "It seems to me that being like
+them and being like us are two contradictory things. You _can't_ be both
+and have the things that go with both. And what I'm so thankful for is
+that we're us and not them."
+
+Paul laughed. "You just see if there's anything so contradictory. Trust
+me. You just see if you don't beat Madeleine on her own ground yet."
+
+"I don't _want_--" began Lydia; but Paul had gone back to his first
+theme and was expanding it for her benefit. "Yes; we're getting the
+English idea. In twenty years from now you'll find the social center of
+every moderate-sized American city shifted to some such place as this."
+
+Lydia craned her neck down the tracks impatiently. "I hope we don't miss
+a trolley car every day of those twenty years," she said, laughing.
+
+"We'll have an automobile," he said. Then, reflecting that this was a
+somewhat exaggerated prophecy, he went on, with the honesty he meant
+always to show Lydia (so far as should be wise), "No; I'm afraid we
+sha'n't, either--not for some time. It'll take several years to finish
+paying altogether for the house, and we'll have to pull hard to keep up
+our end for a time. But we're young, so much won't be expected of
+us--and if we just dig in for a few years now while we're fresh, we can
+lie back and--"
+
+"Well, _gracious_!" said Lydia, "who wants an automobile, anyhow! Only I
+wish the trolley didn't take so long. It's going to take the best part
+of an hour, you know; the ten or twelve minutes to get here from the
+house, the two or three minutes to wait, the thirty minutes on the car,
+the ten minutes to your office--and then all that turned inside out when
+you come back in the evening."
+
+"Oh, I'll be able to do a lot of business figuring in that time. It
+won't be wasted."
+
+They fell into happy picture-making of their future. Lydia wanted to
+have chickens and a garden, she said. She'd always wanted to be a
+farmer's wife--an idea that caused Paul much laughter. They revised the
+plans for the furnishing of the hall--the china closet could stand
+against the west wall of the dining-room; why had they not thought of
+that before? The little room upstairs was to be a sewing-room "Although
+I hate sewing," cried Lydia, "and nowadays, when ready-mades are so
+cheap and good--"
+
+"Nobody expected you to make yourself tailored street dresses," said
+Paul; "but don't I all the time hear Madeleine and my aunt saying how
+the 'last _chic_ of a costume, the little indefinable touches that give
+a toilet distinction,' they have to fuss up themselves out of bits of
+lace and ribbon and fur and truck?" He was quoting, evidently, with an
+amused emphasis.
+
+Lydia leaned to him, her eyes wide in a mock solemnity. "Paul, I have a
+horrible confession to make to you. I _loathe_ the 'last _chic_, the
+little indefinable touches that give a toilet,' and so forth! It makes
+me sick to spend my time on them. What difference does it make to real
+folks if their toilets _aren't_ 'and so forth!'"
+
+She looked so deliciously whimsical with her down-drawn face of
+rebellious contrition that Paul was enchanted. "And this I learn when
+it's too late for me to draw back!" he cried in horror. "Woman! woman!
+this tardy confession"
+
+"Oh, there are lots of other confessions. Just wait."
+
+"Out with them!"
+
+"I don't know _anything_."
+
+"That's something," admitted Paul.
+
+"And you must teach me."
+
+"Oh, this docile little 1840 wife! Don't you know the suffragists will
+get you if you talk meek like that? What do you want to know? Volts, and
+dynamos, and induction coils?"
+
+"Everything," said Lydia comprehensively, "that you know. Books,
+politics, music--"
+
+"Lord! what a hash! What makes you think I know anything about such
+things?"
+
+"Why, you went through Cornell. You must know about books. And you're a
+man, you must know about politics; and as for music, we'll learn about
+that together. Aunt Julia and Godfather are going to give us a
+piano-player--though I know they can't afford it, the dears!"
+
+"People _are_ good to us." Paul's flush of gratitude for his good
+fortune continued.
+
+"You like music, don't you?" asked Lydia.
+
+"I guess so; I don't know much about it. Some crazy German post-grads at
+Cornell used to make up a string quartette among themselves and play
+some things I liked to hear--I guess it was pretty good music, too. They
+were sharks on it, I know. Yes; now I think of it, I used to like it
+fine. Maybe if I heard more--"
+
+"Oh, the evenings together!" breathed Lydia. "Doesn't it take your
+breath away to think of them? We'll read together--"
+
+Paul saw the picture. "Yes; there're lots of books I've always meant to
+get around to."
+
+They were silent, musing.
+
+Then Paul laughed aloud. Lydia started and looked at him inquiringly.
+
+"Oh, I was just thinking how old married folks would laugh to hear us
+infants planning our little castles in Spain. You know how they always
+smile at such ideas, and say every couple starts out with them and after
+about six months gets down to concentrating on keeping up the furnace
+fire and making sure the biscuits are good."
+
+Lydia laid her hand eagerly on his arm. "But don't let's, Paul! Please,
+_please_ don't let us! Just because everybody else does is no reason why
+we _have_ to. You're always saying folks can make things go their way if
+they try hard enough--you're so clever and--"
+
+"Oh, I'm a wonder, I know! You needn't tell me how smart I am."
+
+"But, Paul, I'm in earnest--I mean it--"
+
+The car had arrived by this time and he swung her up to the platform.
+Like other moderns they were so accustomed to spend a large part of
+their time in being transported from place to place that they were quite
+at home in the noisy public conveyance, and after a pause to pay fares,
+remove wraps, and nod to an acquaintance or two, they went on with their
+conversation as though they were alone. People looked approvingly at the
+comely, well-dressed young couple, so naively absorbed in each other,
+and speculated as to whether they were just married or just about to
+be.
+
+After they were deposited at the corner nearest the Emery house, the
+change to the silent street, up which they walked slowly, reluctant to
+separate, took them back to their first mood of this loveliest of all
+their hours together--the sweet intimacy of their first meeting in the
+new house.
+
+Lydia felt herself so wholly in sympathy with Paul that she was moved to
+touch upon something that had never been mentioned between them. "Paul,
+dear," she said, her certainty that he would understand, surrounding her
+with an atmosphere of spiritual harmony which she recognized was the
+thing in all the world which mattered most to her, "Paul dear, I never
+told you--there's nothing to tell, really--but when I went to the
+Mallory's house-party in February I rode from here to Hardville with Mr.
+Rankin and had a long talk with him. You don't mind, do you?"
+
+Her lover drew her hand within his arm and gave it an affectionate
+pressure. "You may not know things, Lydia, as you say, but you are the
+_nicest_ girl! the straightest! I knew that at the time--Miss Burgess
+told me. But I'm glad you've given me a chance to say how sorry I was
+for you last autumn when everybody was pestering you so about him. I
+knew how you felt--better than you did, I'll bet I did! I wasn't a bit
+afraid. I knew you could never care for anybody but me. Why, you're
+_mine_, Lydia, I'm yours, and that's all there is to it. You know it as
+well as I do."
+
+"_I know it when I'm with you_," she told him with a bravely honest,
+unspoken reservation.
+
+He laughed his appreciation of her insistent sincerity. "Well, when
+you're married won't you be with me all the time? So that's fixed! And
+as for meeting somebody by accident on the street-cars--why, you foolish
+darling, you're not marrying a Turk, or an octopus--but an American."
+
+Lydia was silent, but her look was enough to fill the pause richly. She
+was savoring to the full the joy of close community of spirit which had
+been so rare in her pleasant life of material comfort, and she was
+saying a humble prayer that she might be good enough to be worthy of it,
+that she might be wise enough to make it the daily and hourly atmosphere
+of her life with Paul.
+
+"What are you thinking about, darling?" asked the other.
+
+"I was thinking how lovely it's going to be to be really married and
+come to know each other well. We don't know each other at all yet,
+_really_, you know."
+
+Paul was brought up short, as so often with Lydia, by an odd,
+disconcerted feeling, half pleasure, half shock, from the discovery in
+her of pages that he had not read, germs of ideas that had not come from
+him. "Why, darling Lydia, what do you mean? We know each other through
+and through!" he now protested. It gave a tang of the unexpected to her
+uniform sweetness, this always having a corner still to turn which kept
+her out of his sight. Paul was used to seeing most women achieve this
+effect of uncertainty by the use of coquetry, and in the free-and-easy
+give and take between young America of both sexes, he had learned with a
+somewhat cynical shrewdness to discount it. He entered into the game,
+but, in his own phrase, he always knew what he was about. Lydia, on the
+contrary, often penetrated his armor by one of these shafts, barbed by
+her complete unconsciousness of any intent. He felt now, with a
+momentary anguish, that he could never be sure of her belonging quite to
+him until they were married, and cried out upon her idea almost angrily,
+"I don't know what you mean! We know each other now."
+
+"Oh, no, we don't," she insisted. "There are lots of queer fancies in me
+that you'll only find out by living with me--and, Oh, Paul! the fine,
+noble things I _feel_ in you! But I can see the whole of them only by
+seeing you day by day. And then there are lots of things that aren't in
+us, really, yet, but only planted. They'll grow--we'll grow--Paul,
+to-day is an epoch. We've passed a new milestone."
+
+"How do you mean?" he asked.
+
+"The way we've felt--the way we've talked--of real things--out there in
+our own--" She laughed a little, a serene murmur of drollery which came
+to her when she was at peace. "We've been engaged since November, but we
+only got engaged to be married to-day--just as our wedding's to be in
+June, but goodness knows when our marriage will be."
+
+Paul smiled at her tenderly. "If I'd known the date was so uncertain as
+that I shouldn't have dared to go so far in my house-building."
+
+"Oh, it's all right so far," she reassured him, smiling; "but we must
+pitch in and finish it. Why, that's just it, Paul--" she was struck with
+the aptness of her illustration--"that's just it. We've got the rafters
+and joists up now; maybe before we're married, if we're good, we can get
+the roof on so it won't rain on us; but all the finishing, all that
+makes it good to live in, has got to be done after the wedding."
+
+He did not know exactly what she was talking about, but he made up for
+vagueness by fervor. "After we are married," he cried, "I'll move
+mountains and turn stones to gold."
+
+"But the first thing to do is to lay floors for us to walk on," Lydia
+told him.
+
+For answer, he drew her into his arms and closed her mouth with a kiss.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+CARD-DEALING AND PATENT CANDLES
+
+
+Spring had come with its usual hotly advancing rush upon the low-lying,
+sheltered southerly city. There had been a few days of magical warmth,
+full of spring madness, when every growing thing had expanded leaves
+with furious haste, when the noise of children playing in the street
+sounded loud through newly-opened windows, when, even on city streets,
+every breath of the sweet, lively air was an intoxicating potion. Then,
+with a bound, the heat was there. Evenings and nights were still cool,
+but noons were as oppressive as in July. The scarcely expanded leaves
+hung limp in a summer heat.
+
+All during that eventful winter, Mrs. Emery had frequently remarked to
+her sister-in-law that Lydia's social career progressed positively with
+such brilliancy that it was like "something you read about." Mrs.
+Sandworth invariably added the qualifying clause, "But in a very nice
+book, you know, with only nice people in it, where everything comes out
+nicely at the end." Her confidence in literature as a respectable source
+of pleasure was not so guileless as Mrs. Emery's. It had been cruelly
+shaken by dipping into some of the Russian novels of the doctor's.
+
+Not infrequently the two ladies felt, with a happy importance, that they
+were the authors of the book and that the agreeable episodes and
+dramatic incidents which had kept the flow of the narrative so sparkling
+were the product of their own creative genius. When April came on, and
+Lydia agreed to the announcement of her engagement, they felt the need
+of some remarkable way of signaling that important event and of closing
+her season with a burst of glory. For her season had to end! Dr. Melton
+said positively that if Lydia had another month of the life she had been
+leading he would not be responsible for the consequences. "She has a
+fine constitution, inherited from her farmer grandparents," he said,
+smiling to see Mrs. Emery wince at this uncompromising statement of
+Lydia's ancestry, "but her nervous organization is too fine for her own
+good. And I warn you right now that if you get her nerves once really
+jangled, I shall take to the woods. You can just give the case to
+another doctor. It would be too much for _me_."
+
+The girl herself insisted that she felt perfectly well and able to stand
+more than when she first began going out. She affirmed this with some
+impatience, her eyes very bright, her cheeks flushed, whenever her
+godfather protested against a new undertaking. "When you get going, you
+_can't_ stop," she told him, shaking off his detaining hand. Mrs. Emery
+told the doctor that he'd forgotten the time when he was young or he'd
+remember that all girls who'd been popular at all--let alone a girl like
+Lydia--looked thin and worn by the end of the season; but during the
+last week of April, when the first hot days had arrived, a small
+incident surprised her into thinking that perhaps the doctor had some
+right on his side.
+
+Not that there was in itself anything so very alarming about a nervous
+explosion from a girl so high-strung and susceptible as Lydia. The
+startling thing was that this explosion proceeded, so far as her mother
+could see, from nothing at all, from the idlest of chance remarks by
+Mrs. Sandworth, as always, whitely innocent of the smallest intention to
+wound.
+
+She and Mrs. Emery were much given to watching Lydia dress for the
+innumerable engagements that took her away from the house. They made a
+pretext of helping her, but in truth they were carried away by the
+delight in another's beauty which is more common among women than is
+generally imagined. They took the profoundest interest in the selection
+of the toilet she should wear, and regarded with a charmed surprise the
+particular aspect of Lydia's slim comeliness which it brought out. They
+could not decide whether they liked her best in clinging, picture
+costumes, big hats, plumes, trailing draperies, and the like, or
+dashing, jaunty effects. Once in the winter, after she had left them on
+her way to an evening skating party and they had seen her from the
+window join Hollister and add her skates to those glittering on his
+shoulder, Mrs. Sandworth promulgated one of her unexpected apothegms:
+"Do you know what we are, Susan Emery? We're a couple of old children
+playing with a doll." Mrs. Emery protested with an instant, reproving
+self-justification: "_You_ may be--you're not her mother; but I
+understand Lydia through and through."
+
+Mrs. Emery felt that if Lydia had overheard that remark of her aunt's
+her excitement and resentment might have been natural; but the one which
+led to the distressing little scene in late April was as neutral as an
+ordinary morning salutation. The two were watching Lydia dress for a
+luncheon which Mrs. Hollister--_the_ Mrs. Hollister--was giving in her
+honor. It was about noon of a warm day, and the air that came in at the
+open windows was thrillingly alive with troubling, disquieting
+suggestions of the new life of spring. Lydia, however, showed none of
+the languor which the sudden heat had brought to the two elder women.
+She was a little late, and her hurry had sent a high color to her
+cheeks, the curves of which were refined to the most exquisite subtlety
+by the loss of flesh so deplored by Dr. Melton. She was used, by this
+time, to dressing in a hurry, but her fingers trembled a little, and she
+tried three times before she could coil her dark silky hair smoothly.
+She was frowning a little with the fixity of her concentration as she
+turned to snatch up her long gloves and she did not hear Mrs.
+Sandworth's question until it had been repeated,
+
+"I said, Lydia, is it to be bridge this afternoon?"
+
+"I don't know," said Lydia with the full stop of absent indifference.
+
+"Didn't Mrs. Hollister say?"
+
+"Maybe she did. I didn't notice." The girl was tugging at her glove.
+
+"Well, anyhow," said her mother, "since everybody's giving you
+card-parties, I should think you'd want to practice up and learn how to
+deal better. It's queer," she went on to Mrs. Sandworth, "Lydia's so
+deft about so many things, that she should deal cards so badly."
+
+"Oh, goodness! As if there was nothing better to do than that!" cried
+Lydia, beginning on the other glove.
+
+"Well, what _have_ you to do that's better?" asked her aunt in some
+astonishment. "Lydia, my dear, your collar is pinned the least bit
+crooked. Here, just let me--"
+
+Lydia had stopped short, her glove dangling from her wrist. "Why, what a
+horrible thing to say!" She brought this out with a tragic emphasis,
+immensely disconcerting to her two elders.
+
+"Horrible!" protested Mrs. Sandworth.
+
+"Yes, horrible," insisted the girl. She had turned very pale. "The very
+way you say it and don't think anything about it, _makes_ it horrible."
+
+Mrs. Sandworth began to doubt her own senses. "Why, what did I say?" she
+appealed to Mrs. Emery in bewildered interrogation, but before the
+latter could answer Lydia broke out: "If I really believed that, why,
+I'd--I'd--" She hesitated, obviously between tragic consequences, and
+then, to the great dismay of her companions, began to cry, still
+standing in the middle of the floor, her glove dangling from her slim,
+white wrist.
+
+"Don't Lydia! Oh, don't, dear! You'll make yourself look like a fright
+for the luncheon." Mrs. Emery ran to her daughter with a solicitude in
+which there was considerable irritation. "You're perfectly exhausting,
+taking everything that deadly serious way. Don't be so _morbid_! You
+know your Aunt Julia didn't mean anything. She never does!"
+
+Lydia pulled away and threw herself on the bed, still sobbing, and
+protesting that she could not go to the luncheon; and in the end Mrs.
+Emery was obliged to make the profoundest apologies over the telephone
+to a justly indignant hostess.
+
+In the meantime Lydia was undressed and put to bed by Mrs. Sandworth,
+who dared not open her mouth. The girl still drew long, sobbing breaths,
+but before her aunt left the room she lay quiet, her eyes closed. The
+other was struck by the way her pallor brought out the thinness of her
+lovely face. She hovered helplessly for a moment over the bed. "Is there
+anything I can do for you, dearie?" she asked humbly.
+
+Lydia shook her head. "Just let me be quiet," she murmured.
+
+At this, Mrs. Sandworth retreated to the door, from which she ventured a
+last "Lydia darling, you know I'm sorry if I said anything to hurt--"
+
+Lydia raised herself on her elbow and looked at her solemnly. "It wasn't
+what you _said_; it was what it _meant_!" she said tragically.
+
+With this cryptic utterance in her ears, Mrs. Sandworth fled downstairs,
+to find her sister-in-law turning away from the telephone with a frown.
+"Mrs. Hollister was very much provoked about it, and I don't blame her.
+It's hard to make her understand we couldn't have given her a _little_
+warning. And--that's the most provoking part--I didn't dare say Lydia is
+really sick, when, as like as not, she'll be receiving company this
+evening."
+
+"You wouldn't want her sick, just so it would be easier to explain,
+would you?" asked Mrs. Sandworth with her eternal disconcerting
+innocence.
+
+Mrs. Emery relieved her mind by snapping at her sister-in-law with the
+violence allowed to an intimate of many years' standing, "Good gracious,
+Julia! you're as bad as Lydia! Turning everything people say into
+something quite different--"
+
+Mrs. Sandworth interrupted hastily, "Susan, tell me, for mercy's sake,
+what did I say? The last thing I remember passing my lips was about her
+collar's being a little crooked,--and just now she told me, as though it
+was the crack of Doom, that it wasn't what I said, but what it meant,
+that was so awful. What in the world does she mean?"
+
+Mrs. Emery sank into a seat with a gesture of utter impatience. "Mean?
+Mean nothing! Didn't you ever know an engaged girl before?"
+
+"Well, I'm sure when I was engaged I never--"
+
+"Oh, yes, you did; you _must_ have. They all do. It's nerves."
+
+But a moment later she contradicted her own assurance with a sigh of
+unresignation. "Oh, dear! why can't Lydia be just bright and wholesome
+and fun-loving and _natural_ like Madeleine Hollister!" She added
+darkly, "I just feel in my bones that this has something to do with that
+Rankin and his morbid ideas."
+
+Mrs. Sandworth was startled. "Good gracious! You don't suppose she--"
+
+"No; of course I don't! I never thought of such a thing. You ought to
+see her when she is with Paul. She's just _fascinated_ by him! But you
+know as well as I do that ideas go right on underneath all that!" Her
+tone implied a disapproval of their tenacity of life. "And yet, Lydia's
+really nothing unusual! Before they get married and into social life,
+and settled down and too busy to think, most girls have a queer spell.
+Only most of them take it out on religion. Oh, why couldn't she have met
+that nice young rector--if she had to meet somebody to put ideas into
+her head--instead of an anarchist."
+
+"Well, it's certainly all past now," Mrs. Sandworth reassured her.
+
+"Yes; hasn't it been a lovely winter! Everybody's been so good to Lydia.
+Everything's succeeded so! But I suppose Dr. Melton's right. We ought to
+call her season over, except for the announcement party--and the
+wedding, of course--and oh, dear! There are so many things I'd planned
+to do I can't possibly get in now. It seems strange a child of mine
+should be so queer and have such notions."
+
+However, after the two had talked over the plans for a great evening
+garden-party in the Emery "grounds" and Mrs. Emery's creative eye had
+seen the affair in a vista of brilliant pictures, she felt more
+composed. She went up quietly to Lydia's door and looked in.
+
+The girl was lying on her back, her wide, dark eyes fixed on the
+ceiling. Something in the expression of her face gave her mother a throb
+of pain. She yearned over the foolish, unbalanced young thing, and her
+heart failed her, in that universal mother's fear for her child of the
+roughnesses of life, through which she herself has passed safely and
+which have given savor to her existence. In her incapacity to conceive
+other roughnesses than those she could feel herself, she was, it is
+probable, much like the rest of humankind. She advanced to the bed, her
+tenderest mother-look on her face, and cut Lydia off from speech with
+gentle wisdom. "No, no, dear; don't try to talk. You're all tired out
+and nervous and don't know--"
+
+Lydia had begun excitedly: "I've been feeling it for a long time, but
+when Aunt Julia said right out that I didn't know how to do anything
+better than--that I was only good to--"
+
+Her mother laid a firm, gentle hand over the quivering mouth, and said
+in a soothing murmur, "Hush, hush! darling. It wasn't anything your poor
+foolish Aunt Julia said. It isn't anything, anyhow, but being up too
+much and having too much excitement. People get to thinking all kinds of
+queer things when they're tired. Mother knows. Mother knows best."
+
+She had prepared a glass of bromide, and now, lifting Lydia as though
+she were still the child she felt her to be, she held it to her lips.
+"Here, Mother's poor, tired little girl--take this and go to sleep;
+that's all you need. Just trust Mother now."
+
+Lydia took the draught obediently, but she sighed deeply, and fixed her
+mother with eyes that were unrelentingly serious.
+
+When Mrs. Emery looked in after half an hour, she saw that Lydia was
+still awake, but later she fell asleep, and slept heavily until late in
+the afternoon.
+
+On her appearance at the dinner-table, still languid and heavy-eyed, she
+was met with gentle, amused triumph. "There, you dear. Didn't I tell you
+what you needed was sleep. There never was a girl who didn't think a
+sick headache meant there was something wrong with her soul or
+something."
+
+Judge Emery laughed good-naturedly, as he sliced the roast beef, and
+said, with admiration for his wife, "It's a good thing my high-strung
+little girl has such a levelheaded mother to look after her. Mother
+knows all about nerves and things. She's had 'em--all kinds--and come
+out on top. Look at her now."
+
+Lydia took him at his word, and bestowed on her mother a long look. She
+said nothing, and after a moment dropped her eyes listlessly again to
+her plate. It was this occasion which Mrs. Emery chose to present to the
+Judge her plans for the expensive garden-party, so that in the animated
+and, at times, slightly embittered discussion that followed, Lydia's
+silence was overlooked.
+
+For the next few days she stayed quietly indoors, refusing and canceling
+engagements. Mrs. Emery said it was "only decent to do that much after
+playing Mrs. Hollister such a trick," and Lydia did not seem averse. She
+sewed a little, fitfully, tried to play on the piano and turned away
+disheartened at the results of the long neglect--there had been no time
+in the season for practice--and wandered about the library, taking out
+first one book then another, reading a little and then sitting with
+brooding eyes, staring unseeingly at the page. Once her mother, finding
+her thus, inquired with some sharpness what book she was reading to set
+her off like that. "It's a book by Maeterlinck," said Lydia, "that
+Godfather gave me ever so long ago, and I've never had time to read it."
+
+"Do you like it? What's it about?" asked her mother, suspiciously.
+
+"I can't understand it," said Lydia, "when I'm reading it. But when I
+look away and think, I can, a little bit. I love it. It makes me feel
+like crying. It's all about our inner life."
+
+"My dear Lydia, you put your hat right on and go over to have a little
+visit with Marietta. What you need is a little fresh air and some
+sensible talk. I've been too busy with my invitation list to visit with
+you as I ought. Marietta'll be real glad to see you. Here's your hat.
+Now, you run right along, and stop at Hallam's on the way and get
+yourself an ice-cream soda. It's hot, and that'll do you good."
+
+As Lydia was disappearing docilely out of the door, her mother stopped
+before going back to her desk and the list of guests for the
+garden-party, which had been torturing her with perplexity, to say, "Oh,
+Lydia, don't forget to ask Marietta to order the perforated candles."
+
+"Perforated--!" said Lydia blankly, pausing at the door.
+
+"Yes; don't you remember, the last time Mrs. Hollister called here she
+told us all about them."
+
+"No, I don't remember," said Lydia, with no shade of apology in her
+tone.
+
+"Why, my dear! You're getting so absent-minded! Do you mean to say you
+didn't take in anything of what she was talking about? It's a new kind,
+that has holes running through it so the melted wax runs down the
+inside! Why, we were talking about them the whole time she was here that
+last call."
+
+Lydia opened the door, observing vaguely, "Oh, yes; I do seem to
+remember something. It was a very dull visit, anyhow."
+
+Mrs. Emery returned to her list, pursing up her lips and wagging her
+head. "You'll have to learn, dearie, that it's little details like that
+that make the difference between success and failure."
+
+"We have electric light and gas," said Lydia.
+
+Mrs. Emery looked up in astonishment and a little vexation. She, too,
+had nerves these days. "Why, Lydia, what's the matter with you? You know
+nobody uses those for table decoration."
+
+"_We_ could," said Lydia.
+
+"Why, my dear child, I never knew before there was a contrary streak in
+you, like your father. What in the world possesses you all of a sudden
+to object to candles?"
+
+"It's not candles--it's the idea of--Oh, all the fuss and bother, when
+everybody's so tired, and the weather's so hot, and it's going to cost
+too much anyhow."
+
+"Well, what would you have us fuss and bother about, if not over having
+everything nice when we entertain?" Mrs. Emery's air of enforced
+patience was strained.
+
+Lydia surveyed her from the hall in silence. "That's just it--that's
+just it," she said finally, and went away.
+
+Mrs. Emery laid down her pen to laugh to herself over the queer ways of
+children. "They begin to have notions with their first teeth, and I
+suppose they don't get over them till _their_ first baby begins to
+teethe."
+
+When Lydia arrived at her sister's house, she found that competent
+housekeeper engaged in mending the lace curtains of her parlor. She had
+about her a battery of little ingenious devices to which she called
+Lydia's attention with pride. "I've taught myself lace-mending just by
+main strength and awkwardness," she observed, fitting a hoop over a torn
+place, "and it's not because I have any natural knack, either. If
+there's anything I hate to do, it's to sew. But these curtains do go to
+pieces so. I wash them myself, to be careful, but they are so fine.
+Still," she cast a calculating eye on the work before her, "I'll be
+through by the end of this week, anyhow--if that new Swede will only
+stay in the kitchen that long!"
+
+She bent her head over her work again, holding it up to the light from
+time to time and straining her eyes to catch the exact thread with her
+almost impalpably fine needle. Lydia sat and fanned herself, looking
+flushed and tired from the walk in the heat, and listening in silence to
+Mrs. Mortimer's account of the various happenings of her household:
+"And didn't I find that good-for-nothing negro wench had been having
+that man--and goodness knows how many others--right here in the house. I
+told Ralph I never would have another nigger--but I shall. You can't get
+anything else half the time. I tell you, Lydia, the servant problem is
+getting to be something perfectly terrible--it's--"
+
+Lydia broke in to say, "Why don't you buy new ones?"
+
+Mrs. Mortimer paused with uplifted needle to inquire wildly, "New
+_what_?"
+
+"New curtains, instead of spending a whole week in hot weather mending
+those."
+
+"Good gracious, child! Will you ever learn anything about the cost of
+living! I think it's awful, the way Father and Mother have let you grow
+up! Why, it would take half a month's salary to reproduce these
+curtains. I got them at a great bargain--but even then I couldn't afford
+them. Ralph was furious."
+
+"You could buy muslin curtains that would be just as pretty," suggested
+Lydia.
+
+"Why, those curtains are the only things with the least distinction in
+my whole parlor! They _save_ the room."
+
+"From what?"
+
+"From showing that there's almost nothing in it that cost anything, to
+be sure! With them at the window, it would never enter people's heads to
+think that I upholstered the furniture myself, or that the pictures
+are--"
+
+"Why shouldn't they think so, if you did?" Lydia proffered this
+suggestion with an air of fatigued listlessness, which, her sister
+thought, showed that she made it "simply to be contrary." Acting on this
+theory, she answered it with a dignified silence.
+
+There was a pause. Lydia tilted her head back against the chair, and
+looked out of the window at the new green leaves of the piazza vine.
+Mrs. Mortimer's thin, white, rather large hands drew the shining little
+needle back and forth with a steady, hurrying industry. It came into her
+mind that their respective attitudes were symbolical of their lives,
+and she thought, glancing at Lydia's drooping depression, that it would
+be better for her if she were obliged to work more. "Work," of course,
+meant to Marietta those forms of activity which filled her own life.
+"_I_ never have any time for notions," she thought, the desperate,
+hurrying, straining routine of her days rising before her and moving
+her, as always, to rebellion and yet to a martyr's pride.
+
+Lydia stirred from her listless pose and came over to her sister,
+sitting down on a stool at her feet. "Marietta, dear, please let me talk
+to you. I'm so miserable these days--and Mother won't let me say a word
+to her. She says it's spring fever, and being engaged, and the end of
+the season, and everything. Please, _please_ be serious, and let me tell
+you about it, and see if you can't help me."
+
+Her tone was so broken and imploring that Mrs. Mortimer was startled.
+She was, moreover, flattered that Lydia should come to her for advice
+rather than to her parents. She put her arm around her sister's
+shoulders, and said gently, "Why, yes, dear; of course; anything--"
+
+"Then stop sewing and listen to me--"
+
+"But I can sew and listen, too."
+
+"Oh, Etta, _please_! That's just the kind of thing that gets me so wild.
+Just a little while!"
+
+The harassed housekeeper cast an anxious eye on the clock, but loyally
+stifled the sigh with which she laid her work aside. Lydia apologized
+for interrupting her. "But I do want you to really think of what I am
+saying. Everybody's always so busy thinking about _things_! Oh, Etta,
+I'm just as unhappy as I can be--and so scared when I think about--about
+the future."
+
+Mrs. Mortimer's face softened wonderfully. She stroked Lydia's dark
+hair. "Why, poor dear little sister! Yes, yes, darling, I know all about
+it. I felt just so myself the month before I was married, and Mother
+couldn't help me a bit. Either she had forgotten all about it, or else
+she never had the feeling. I just had to struggle along through without
+anybody to help me or to say a word. Oh, I'm so glad I can help my
+little sister. _Don't_ be afraid, dear! There's nothing so terrible
+about it; nothing to be scared of. Why, once you get used to it you find
+it doesn't make a bit of difference to you. Everything's just the same
+as before."
+
+Lydia lifted a wrinkled brow of perplexity to this soothing view of
+matrimony. "I don't know what you're talking about, Etta!" she cried in
+a bewilderment that seemed to strike her as tragic.
+
+"Why--why, being married! Wasn't that what you meant?"
+
+"Oh, no! _No!_ Nothing so definite as that! I couldn't be afraid of
+Paul--why should I be? I'm just frightened of--everything--what
+everybody expects me to do, and to go on doing all my life, and never
+have any time but to just hurry faster and faster, so there'll be more
+things to hurry about, and never talk about anything but _things_!" She
+began to tremble and look white, and stopped with a desperate effort to
+control herself, though she burst out at the sight of Mrs. Mortimer's
+face of despairing bewilderment, "Oh, don't tell me you don't see at all
+what I mean. I can't say it! But you _must_ understand! Can't we somehow
+all stop--_now_! And start over again! You get muslin curtains and not
+mend your lace ones, and Mother stop fussing about whom to invite to
+that party--that's going to cost more than he can afford, Father
+says--it makes me _sick_ to be costing him so much. And not fuss about
+having clothes just so--and Paul have our house built little and plain,
+so it won't be so much work to take care of it and keep it clean. I
+would so much rather look after it myself than to have him kill himself
+making money so I can hire maids that you _can't_--you say yourself you
+can't--and never having any time to see him. Perhaps if we did, other
+people might, and we'd all have more time to like things that make us
+nicer to like--"
+
+At this perturbing jumble of suggestions, Mrs. Mortimer's head whirled.
+She took hold of the arms of her chair as if to steady herself, but,
+conscientiously afraid of discouraging the girl's confidence, she nodded
+gravely at her, as if she were considering the matter. Lydia sprang up,
+her eyes shining. "Oh, you dear! You _do_ see what I mean! You see how
+dreadful it is to look forward to just that--being so desperately
+troubled over things that don't really matter--and--and perhaps having
+children, and bringing them up to the same thing--when there must be so
+many things that do matter!"
+
+To each of these impassioned statements her sister had returned an
+automatic nod. "I see what you mean," she now put in, a statement which
+was the outward expression of a thought running, "Mercy! Dr. Melton's
+right! She's perfectly wild with nerves! We must get her married as soon
+as ever we can!"
+
+Lydia went over to the window, and stood looking out as she talked, now
+with an excited haste, now with a dragging note of fatigue in her voice.
+Her need of sympathy was so great that she did a violence to the
+reticence she had always kept, even with herself. She wondered aloud if
+it were not perhaps Daniel Rankin and his queer ideas that lay at the
+bottom of her trouble. She added, whirling about from the window, "For
+mercy's sake! don't go and think I am in love with him, or anything! I
+haven't so much as thought of him all winter! I see, now that Mother's
+pointed it out to me, how domineering he really was to me last autumn.
+I'm just crazy about Paul, too! When I'm with him he takes my breath
+away! But maybe--maybe I can't forget Mr. Rankin's _ideas_! You know he
+talked to me so much when I was first back--and if somebody would just
+argue me out of them, the way he did into them! I don't believe I'd ever
+have thought it queer to live the way we do, just to have more things
+and get ahead of other people--if he hadn't put the idea into my head.
+But nobody else will even _talk_ about it! They laugh when I try to."
+
+She came over closer to the matron, and said imploringly, her voice
+trembling, "I don't _want_ to be queer, Marietta! What makes me? I
+don't like to have queer ideas, different from other people's--but every
+once in a while it all comes over me with a rush--what's the _good_ of
+all we do?"
+
+Poor Lydia propounded this question as though it were the first time in
+the world's history that it had passed the lips of humanity. Her
+curious, puzzled distress rose up in a choking flood to her throat, and
+she stopped, looking desperately at her sister.
+
+Mrs. Mortimer nodded again, calmly, drew a long breath, and seemed about
+to speak. Lydia gazed at her, her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright with
+unshed tears--all one eager expectancy. The older woman's eyes wandered
+suddenly for an instant. She darted forward, clapped her hands together
+once, and then in rapid succession three or four times. Then rolling
+triumphantly something between her thumb and forefinger, she turned to
+Lydia. The little operation had not taken the third of a moment, but the
+change in the girl's face was so great that Mrs. Mortimer was moved to
+hasty, half-shamefaced, half-defiant apology. "I _was_ listening to you,
+Lydia! I _was_ listening! But it's just the time of year when they lay
+their eggs, and I have to fight them. Last year my best furs and Ralph's
+dress suit were perfectly _riddled_! You know we can't afford new."
+
+Lydia rose in silence and began pinning on her hat. Her sister, for all
+her vexation over the ending of the interview, could hardly repress a
+smile of superior wisdom at the other's face of tragedy. "Don't go,
+Lyddie, don't go!" She tried to put her arms around the flighty young
+thing. "Oh, dear Lydia, cultivate your sense of humor! That's all that's
+the matter with you. There's nothing else! Look here, dear, there _are_
+moths as well as souls in the world. People have to be on the lookout
+for them,--for everything, don't you see?"
+
+"They look out for _moths_, all right," said Lydia in a low tone. She
+submitted, except for this one speech, in a passive silence to her
+sister's combination of petting and exhortation, moving quietly toward
+the door, and stepping evenly forward down the walk.
+
+She had gone down to the street, leaving Mrs. Mortimer still calling
+remorseful apologies, practical suggestions, and laughing comments on
+her "tragedy way of taking the world." At the gate, she paused, and then
+came back, her face like a mask under the shadow of her hat.
+
+Marietta stood waiting for her with a quizzical expression. Under her
+appearance of lightly estimating Lydia's depression as superficial, she
+had been sensible of a not unfamiliar qualm of doubt as to her own
+manner of life, an uneasy heaving of a subconscious self not always
+possible to ignore; but, as was her resolute custom, she forced to the
+front that perception of the ridiculous which she had urged on her
+sister. She bit her lips, to conceal a smile at Lydia's mournful
+emphasis as she went on: "I forgot to tell you, Marietta, what I was
+sent over for. You're to be sure to order the perforated candles. It's
+the kind that has holes down the middle, so the wax doesn't look mussy
+on the outside, and it's very, very important to have the right kind of
+candles."
+
+Mrs. Mortimer, willfully amused, looked with an obstinate smile into her
+sister's troubled eyes as Lydia hesitated, waiting, in spite of herself,
+for the understanding word.
+
+"You're a darling, Lyddie," said the elder woman, kissing her again;
+"but you are certainly _too_ absurd!"
+
+- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
+
+                                BOOK III
+
+                          A SUITABLE MARRIAGE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+TWO SIDES TO THE QUESTION
+
+
+Lydia's unmarried life had given her but few abstract ideas for the
+regulation of conduct, and fewer still ideals of self-discipline, but
+chief among the small assortment that she took away from her mother's
+house had been the high morality of keeping one's husband unworried by
+one's domestic difficulties. "Domestic difficulties" meant, apparently,
+anything disagreeable that happened to one. Not only her mother, but all
+the matrons of her acquaintance had concentrated on the extreme
+desirability of this wifely virtue. "It pays! It pays!" Mrs. Emery had
+often thus chanted the praises of this quality in her daughter's
+presence. "I've noticed ever so many times that men who have to worry
+about domestic machinery and their children don't get on so well. Their
+minds are distracted. Their thoughts _can't_ be, in the nature of
+things, all on their business." She was wont to go on, to whatever
+mother she was addressing, "We know, my dear Mrs. Blank, don't we, how
+perfectly distracting the problems are in bringing up children--to say
+nothing of servants. How much energy would men have for their own
+affairs if they had to struggle as we do, I'd like to know! Besides, if
+one person's got to be bothered with such things, she might as well do
+it all and be done with it. It's easier, besides, to have only one head.
+Men that interfere about things in the house are an abomination. You
+can't keep from quarreling with them--angels couldn't."
+
+She had once voiced this universally recognized maxim before Dr. Melton,
+who had cut in briskly with a warm seconding of her theory. "Yes,
+indeed; in the course of my practice I have often thought, as you do,
+that it would be easier all around if husbands didn't board with their
+wives at all."
+
+Mrs. Emery had stared almost as blankly as Mrs. Sandworth herself might
+have done. "I never said such a crazy thing," she protested.
+
+"Didn't you? Perhaps I don't catch your idea then. It seemed to be that
+every point of contact was sure to be an occasion for friction between
+husband and wife, and so, of course, the fewer they were--"
+
+"Oh, bother take you, Marius Melton!" Mrs. Emery had quite lost patience
+with him. "I was just saying something that's so old, and has been said
+so often, that it's a bromide, actually. And that is that it's a poor
+wife who greets her tired husband in the evening with a long string of
+tales about how the children have been naughty and the cook--"
+
+"Oh, yes, yes; now I see. Of course. The happiest ideal of American
+life, a peaceful exterior presented to the husband at all costs, and the
+real state of things kept from him because it might interfere with his
+capacity to pull off a big deal the next day."
+
+Mrs. Emery had boggled suspiciously at this version of her statement,
+but finding, on the whole, that it represented fairly enough her idea,
+had given a qualified assent in the shape of silence and a turning of
+the subject.
+
+Lydia had not happened to hear that conversation, but she heard
+innumerable ones like it without Dr. Melton's footnotes. On her wedding
+day, therefore, she conceived it an essential feature of her duty toward
+Paul to keep entirely to herself all of the dismaying difficulties of
+housekeeping and keeping up a social position in America. She knew, as a
+matter of course, that they would be dismaying. The talk of all her
+married friends was full of the tragedies of domestic life. It had
+occurred to her once or twice that it was an odd, almost a pathetic,
+convention that they tried to maintain about their social existence--a
+picture of their lives as running smoothly with self-adjusting machinery
+of long-established servants and old social traditions; when their every
+word tragically proclaimed the exhausting and never-ending personal
+effort that was required to give even the most temporary appearance of
+that kind. "We all know what a fearful time everybody has trying to give
+course dinners--why need we pretend we don't?" she had thought on
+several painful occasions; but this, like many of her fancies, was a
+fleeting one. There had been as little time since her wedding day as
+before it for leisurely speculation. The business of being _the_ bride
+of a season had been quite as exciting and absorbing as being _the_
+debutante.
+
+The first of February, six months after her marriage, found her as thin
+and restlessly active as she had been on that date a year before. It was
+at that time that she had the first intimation of a great change in her
+life, and since the one or two obscure and futile revolts of her
+girlhood, nothing had moved her to more rebellious unresignation than
+the fact that her life left her no time to take in the significance of
+what was coming to her.
+
+"Oh, my dear! Isn't it too good!" said her mother, clasping her for a
+moment as they stood, after removing their wraps, in the dressing-room
+of a common acquaintance. "Aren't you the lucky, lucky thing!"
+
+"I don't know. I don't know a thing about it," Lydia returned
+unexpectedly, though her face had turned a deep rose, and she had smiled
+tremulously. "Ever since Dr. Melton told me it was probably so, I've
+been trying to get a moment's time to think it over, but you--"
+
+"It's something to _feel_, not to think about!" cried her mother. "You
+don't need time to feel."
+
+"But I'd like to think about everything!" cried Lydia, as they moved
+down the stairs. "I get things wrong just feeling about them. But I'm
+not quick to think, and I never have any time--they're always so many
+other things to do and to think about--the dinner, getting Paul off in
+time in the morning, how badly the washwoman does up the table linen--"
+
+"Oh, Lydia! Why will you be so contrary? Everybody says _laundress_
+now!"
+
+"--And however Paul and I can pay back all the social debts we've
+incurred this winter. Everybody's invited us. It makes me wild to think
+of how we owe everybody."
+
+"Oh, you can give two or three big receptions this spring and clear
+millions off the list. And then a dinner party or two for the more
+exclusives. You won't need to be out of things till June--with the
+fashion for loose-fitting evening gowns; you're so slender. And you'll
+be out again long before Christmas. It's very fortunate having it come
+at this time of year."
+
+Lydia looked rather dazed at this brisk and matter-of-fact disposing of
+the matter, and seemed about to make a comment, but the bell rang for
+card-playing to begin and Mrs. Emery hurried to her table.
+
+Lydia had meant to ask her mother's sympathy about another matter that
+for the time was occupying her own thoughts, but there was no other
+opportunity for further speech between them during the card party--Mrs.
+Emery devoting herself with her usual competent energy to playing a good
+game. She played much better bridge than did either of her daughters.
+She liked cards, liked to excel and always found easy to accomplish what
+seemed to her worth doing. Marietta also felt that to avoid being
+"queer" and "different" one had to play a good hand, but, as she herself
+confessed, it made her "sick" to give up to it the necessary time and
+thought. As for Lydia, she got rid of her cards as fast as possible, as
+if with the deluded hope that when they were all played, she might find
+time for something else. On the afternoon in question her game was more
+unscientific than usual. Criticism was deterred from articulate
+expression by the common feeling in regard to her, assiduously fostered
+by Flora Burgess' continuous references to her in _Society Notes_ as
+the coming social ruler of Endbury's smart set. There was as yet, to be
+sure, no visible indication whatever of such a capacity on Lydia's part,
+but the printed word--particularly Miss Burgess' printed word--was not
+to be doubted. Madeleine Hollister, however (now soon to be Madeleine
+Lowdor), was no respecter of personages, past or future. At the
+appearance of an especially unexpected and disappointing card from her
+sister-in-law's hand, she pounced upon her with: "Lydia, what _are_ you
+thinking about?"
+
+"My washwoman's grandson," burst out Lydia, laying down her cards with a
+careless negligence, so that everyone could see the contents of her
+hand. "Oh, Madeleine! I'm so worried about her, and I wish you'd--"
+
+She got no further. Madeleine's shriek of good-natured laughter cut her
+short like a blow in the face. The other ladies were laughing, too.
+
+"Oh, Lydia! You are the most original, unexpected piece in the world!"
+cried her sister-in-law. "You'll be the death of me!" She appealed to
+the other players at their table: "Did you ever hear anything come out
+funnier?"
+
+To the players at the next tables, who were looking with vague,
+reflected smiles at this burst of merriment, she called: "Oh, it's too
+killing! Lydia Hollister just played a trump on a trick her partner had
+already taken, and when I asked what in the world she was thinking
+about--meaning, of course--"
+
+Lydia sat silent, looking at her useless cards during the rest of the
+narration of her comic speech. She was reflecting rather sadly that she
+had been very foolish to think, even in a thoughtless impulse, of
+telling Madeleine the story she had so impetuously begun. After a time
+it came to her, as a commentary of the little incident, that neither
+could she get anything from Marietta in the matter. At the end of the
+party, she and her mother walked together to the street-cars, but she
+still said nothing of what was in her mind. She would not admit to
+herself that her mother would receive it as she felt sure Marietta and
+Madeleine would, but--she dared not risk putting her to the test. It was
+a period in Lydia's life when she was constantly in fear of tests
+applied to the people she loved and longed to admire.
+
+During the half-hour's noisy journey out to Bellevue--the unhackneyed
+name that had been selected for the new and fashionable suburb she
+inhabited--she had eliminated from this crisis in her mind, one by one,
+all the people in her circle. Dr. Melton was out of town. Otherwise she
+would have gone to him at once. Mrs. Sandworth without her brother was a
+cipher with no figure before it. Her father?--she realized suddenly that
+it was the first time she had ever thought of going to her father with a
+perplexity. No; she knew too little about his view of things. She had
+never talked with him of anything but the happenings of the day. Flora
+Burgess--devoted Flora? Lydia smiled ruefully as she thought of the
+attitude Flora Burgess would be sure to take.
+
+It finally came to the point where there was no one left but Paul; and
+Paul ought not to be worried with domestic questions lest his capacity
+for business be impaired. She had a deep inculcated sense of the
+necessity and duty of "doing her share," as the phrase had gone in the
+various exhortations addressed to her before her marriage. The next few
+years would be critical ones in Paul's career, and the road must be
+straight and clear before his feet--the road that led to Success. No one
+had voiced a doubt that this road was not coincident with all other
+desirable ones; no one had suggested that the same years would be
+critical in other directions and would be certain to be terribly and
+irrevocably determinative of his future relation to his wife.
+
+Lydia, ardently and naively anxious to find something "worth doing,"
+therefore had settled on this one definite duty. She had wrestled in a
+determined silence with the many incompetent and degenerate negresses,
+with the few impertinent Americans, with the drunken Irish and insolent
+Swedes, who had filed in and out of her kitchen ever since her
+marriage. Suburban life was a new thing in Endbury, and "help" could see
+no advantages in it. She had strained every nerve to make them appear to
+Paul, as well as to the rest of the world, the opposite of what they
+were; and to do herself, furtively, when Paul was not there, those of
+their tasks they refused or neglected. Every effort was concentrated, as
+in her mother's and sister's households, on keeping a maid presentable
+to open the door and to wait on the table, rather than to perform the
+heavier parts of the daily round. Those Lydia could do herself, or she
+could hire an unpresentable older scrubwoman to do them. She often
+thought that if she could but employ scrubwomen all the time, the
+problem would be half solved. But the achievement of each day was,
+according to Endbury standards, to keep or get somebody into the kitchen
+who could serve a course dinner, even if the mistress of the house was
+obliged to prepare it.
+
+She had never dreamed of feeling herself aggrieved, or even surprised,
+by this curious reverse side to her outward brilliant life. All her
+married friends went through the same experience. Madeleine, it is true,
+announced that she was going to make Lowdor import two Japanese servants
+a year, and dismiss them when they began to get American ideas; but
+Madeleine was quite openly marrying Lowdor for the sake of this and
+similar advantages. Lydia felt that her own problems were only the usual
+lot of her kind, and though she was nearly always sick at heart over
+them, she did not feel justified in complaining--least of all to Paul.
+
+But this present trouble--this was not just a question of help. For the
+last month they had been floating in the most unexpected lull of the
+domestic whirlwind. The intelligence office had sent out Ellen--Ellen,
+the deft-handed cook, the silent, self-effacing, competent servant of
+every housekeeper's dreams. Her good luck seemed incredible. Ellen was
+perfection, was middle-aged and settled, never went out in the evenings,
+kept her kitchen spotlessly clean, trained the rattle-headed second
+girls who came and went, to be good waitresses and made pastry that
+moved Paul, usually little preoccupied about his food provided there was
+plenty of meat, to lyric raptures. The difference she made in Lydia's
+life was inconceivable. It was as though some burdensome law of nature
+had been miraculously suspended for her benefit. She gauged her past
+discomfort by her present comfort.
+
+And yet--
+
+From the first Lydia had had an uneasy feeling in the presence of her
+new servant, a haunting impression when her back was turned to Ellen
+that if she could turn quickly enough, she would see her cook with some
+sinister aspect quite other than the decent, respectful mask she
+presented to her mistress. The second girl of the present was a
+fresh-faced, lively young country lass, whom Ellen herself had secured,
+and whose rosy child's face had been at first innocence itself; but now
+sometimes Lydia overheard them laughing together, a laughter which gave
+her the oddest inward revulsion, and when she came into the kitchen
+quickly she often found them looking at books which were quickly whisked
+out of sight.
+
+And then, a day or so before, old Mrs. O'Hern, her washwoman, had come
+directly to her with that revolting revelation of Ellen's influence on
+her grandson, little Patsy. At the recollection of the old woman's face
+of embittered anguish, Lydia shuddered. Oh, if she could only tell Paul!
+He was so loving and caressing to her--perhaps he would not mind being
+bothered this once--she did not know what to think of such things--she
+did not know what to do, which way to turn. She was startled beyond
+measure at having real moral responsibility put on her.
+
+Perhaps Paul could think of something to do.
+
+He was waiting for her when she entered the house, having come in from
+an out-of-town trip on an earlier train than he had expected to catch.
+He dropped his newspaper and sprang up from his chair to put his arms
+about her and gloat over her beauty. "You're getting prettier every day
+of your life, Lydia," he told her, ruffling her soft hair, and kissing
+her very energetically a great many times. "But pale! I must get some
+color into your cheeks, Melton says--how's this for a way?"
+
+He seemed to Lydia very boyish and gay and vital. She caught at him
+eagerly--he had been away from home three days--and clung to him. "Oh,
+Paul! How much good it does me to have you here, close! You are _so_
+much nicer than a room of women playing the same game of cards they
+began last September!"
+
+Paul shouted with laughter--his pleasant, hearty mirth. "I'm appreciated
+at my full worth," he cried.
+
+"Oh, how I loathe cards!" cried Lydia, taking off her hat.
+
+"It's better than the talk you'd get from most of the people there, I
+bet," conjectured Paul, taking up his newspaper again. "Cards are a
+blessing _that_ way, compared with conversation."
+
+"Oh, dear, I suppose so!" Lydia stopped a moment in the doorway. "But
+doesn't it seem a pity that you never see anybody but people who'd bore
+you to death if you didn't stop their mouth with cards?"
+
+"That's the way of the world," remarked Paul comfortably, returning to
+the news of the day.
+
+The little friendly chat gave Lydia courage for her plan of asking her
+husband's advice about her perplexity, but, mindful of traditional
+wisdom, she decided, as she thriftily changed her silk "party dress" for
+a house-gown of soft wool, that she would wait until the mollifying
+influence of dinner had time to assert itself. She wondered fearfully,
+with a quick throb of her heart, how he would receive her confidence.
+When she called him to the table she looked searchingly into his strong,
+resolute, good-natured face, and then, dropping her eyes, with an
+indrawn breath, began her usual fruitless endeavors to learn from him a
+little of what had occupied his day--his long, mysterious day, spent in
+a world of which he brought back but the scantiest tidings to her.
+
+As usual, to-night he shook his shoulders impatiently at her
+questioning. "Oh, Lydia darling, don't talk shop! I'm sick and tired of
+it after three days of nothing else. I want to leave all that behind me
+when I come home. That's what a home is for!"
+
+Lydia did not openly dissent from this axiom, though she murmured
+helplessly: "I feel so awfully shut out. It is what you think about most
+of the time, and I do not know enough about it even to imagine--"
+
+Paul leaned across the table to lay an affectionate hand on his wife's
+slim fingers. "Count your mercies, my dear. It's all grab, and snap, and
+cutting somebody's throat before he has a chance to cut yours. It
+wouldn't please you if you did know anything about it--the business
+world." He drew a long breath, and went on appreciatively with his
+cutlet--Lydia had learned something about meats since the year
+before--"You are a very good provider, little girl; do you know it?"
+
+"Oh, I love to," said Lydia. She added reflectively: "Wouldn't it be
+nice if things were so I could do the cooking myself and not have to
+bother with these horrible creatures that are all you can get usually?"
+
+Paul laughed at the fancy. "That's a high ambition for my wife, I must
+say!"
+
+"We'd have better things to eat even than Ellen gives us," said Lydia
+pensively. "If I had a little more time to put on it, I could do
+wonders, I'm sure of it."
+
+"I don't doubt that," said her husband gallantly; "but did you ever know
+anybody who _was_ her own cook?"
+
+"Well, not except in between times, when they couldn't get anybody
+else," confessed Lydia. "But lots of people I know who do go through the
+motions of keeping one would be better off without one. They can't
+afford it, and--Oh, I wish we were poorer!"
+
+Paul was highly amused by this flight of fancy. "But we're as poor as
+poverty already," he reminded her.
+
+"We're poor for buying hundred-dollar broadcloth tailor-made suits for
+me, and cut glass for the table, but we'd have plenty if I could wear
+ready-made serge at--"
+
+Paul laughed outright. "Haven't you ever noticed, my dear, that the
+people who wear ready-made serge are the ones who could really
+comfortably afford to wear calico wrappers? It goes right up and down
+the scale that way. Everybody is trying to sing a note above what he
+can."
+
+"I know it does--but does it _have_ to? Wouldn't it be better if
+everybody just--why doesn't somebody begin--"
+
+"It's the law of progress, of upward growth," pronounced Paul.
+
+Lydia was impressed by the pontifical sound of this, though she ventured
+faintly: "Well, but does progress always mean broadcloth and cut glass?"
+
+"_We_ have the wherewithal to cultivate our minds!" said Paul, laughing
+again. "Weren't the complete works of the American essayists among our
+wedding presents!" He referred to an old joke between them, at which
+Lydia laughed loyally, and the talk went on lightly until the meal was
+over.
+
+As they walked away from the table together Lydia said to herself,
+"Now--now--" but Paul began to laugh as he told an incident of
+Madeleine's light-hearted, high-handed tyranny over her elderly fiance,
+and it seemed impossible for Lydia to bring out her story of mean and
+ugly tragedy.
+
+As usual the evening was a lively one. Some acquaintances from the
+"younger married set" of Bellevue dropped in for a game of cards,
+Madeleine and "old Pete" Lowdor came out to talk over the plans for
+their new handsome house at the end of the street and at Paul's
+suggestion Lydia hastily got together a chafing-dish supper for the
+impromptu party which prolonged itself with much laughter and many
+friendly wranglings over trumps and "post-mortems" until after midnight.
+Paul was in the highest of gay spirits as he stood with his pretty wife
+on the porch, calling good-nights to his guests disappearing down the
+starlit driveway. He inhaled the odor of success sweet and strong in his
+nostrils.
+
+As they looked back into the house, they saw the faithful Ellen clearing
+away the soiled dishes, her large, white, disease-scarred face
+impassive over her immaculate and correct maid's dress.
+
+"Isn't she a treasure!" cried the master of the house. "To sit up to
+this hour!" He started, "What's that?"
+
+From the shadow of the house a slim lad's figure shambled out into the
+driveway. As he passed the porch where Paul stood, one strong arm
+protectingly about Lydia, he looked up and the light from the open door
+struck full on a white, purposeless, vacant smile. The upward glance
+lost for him the uncertain balance of his wavering feet. He reeled,
+flung up his arms and pitched with drunken soddenness full length upon
+the gravel, picking himself up clumsily with a sound of incoherent, weak
+lament. "Why, it's a drunken man--in _our driveway_!" cried Paul, with
+proprietary indignation. "Get out of here!" he yelled angrily at the
+intruder's retreating back. When he turned again to Lydia he saw that
+one of her lightning-swift changes of mood had swept over her. He was
+startled at her pale face and burning, horrified eyes, and remembering
+her condition with apprehension, picked her up bodily and carried her up
+the stairs to their bedroom, soothing her with reassuring caresses.
+
+There, sitting on the edge of their bed, her loosened hair falling about
+her white face, holding fast to her husband's hands, Lydia told him at
+last; hesitating and stumbling because in her blank ignorance she knew
+no words even to hint at what she feared--she told him who Patsy was,
+the blue-eyed, fifteen-year-old boy, just over from Ireland, ignorant of
+the world as a child of five, easily led, easily shamed, by his fear of
+appearing rustic, into any excess--and then she told him what the boy's
+grandmother had told her about Ellen. It was a milestone in their
+married life, her turning to him more intimately than she would have
+done to her mother, her breaking down the walls of her lifelong
+maiden's reserve and ignorance. She finished with her face hidden in his
+breast. What should she do? What _could_ she do?
+
+Paul took her into the closest embrace, kissed her shut eyes in a
+passion of regret that she should have learned the evil in the world, of
+relieved belittling of the story, Lydia's portentous beginning of which
+had quite startled him, and of indignation at "Mrs. O'Hern's foul
+mouth--for you can just be sure, darling Lydia, that it's all nothing
+but rowings among the servants. Probably Ellen won't let Mrs. O'Hern
+take her usual weekly perquisite of sugar and tea. Servants are always
+quarreling and the only way to do is to keep out of their lies about
+each other and let them fight it out themselves. You never can have any
+idea of who's telling the truth if you butt in and try to straighten it,
+and the Lord knows that Ellen's too good a cook and too much needed in
+this family until the new member arrives safely, to hurt her feelings
+with investigating any of Mrs. O'Hern's yarns. Just you refuse to listen
+to servants' gossip. If you'd been a little less of a darling,
+inexperienced school-girl, you'd have cut off such talk at the first
+words. Just you take my word for it, you dear, you sweetheart, you best
+of--" he ran on into ardent endearments, forgetting the story himself,
+blinding and dazzling Lydia with the excitement which always swept her
+away in those moments when Paul was her passionate, youthful lover.
+
+She tried to revert to the question once or twice later, but now Paul
+alternated between shaming her laughingly for her gullibility and making
+fun of her "countrified" interest in the affairs of her servants. "But,
+Paul, Mrs. O'Hern says that Patsy doesn't _want_ to drink and--and go to
+those awful houses--his father died of it--only Ellen makes him, by--"
+
+Paul tried to close the discussion with a little impatience at her
+attempt to press the matter. "Every Irish boy drinks more or less, you
+little goose. That's nothing! Of course it's too bad to have you _see_ a
+drunken man, but it's nothing so tragic. If he didn't drink here, he
+would somewhere else. The only thing we have to complain about that I
+can see, is having the cook's followers drunk--but Ellen's such a
+miracle of competence we must overlook that. As for the rest of Mrs.
+O'Hern's dirty stories, they're spite work evidently." As Lydia looked
+up at him, her face still anxious and drawn, he ended finally, "Good
+gracious, Lydia, don't you suppose I know--that my experience of the
+world has taught me more about human nature than you know? You act to me
+as though you trusted your washwoman's view of things more than your
+husband's. And now what you want to do, anyhow, is to get some rest. You
+hop into bed, little rabbit, and go to sleep. Don't wait for me; I've
+got a lot of figuring to do."
+
+When he went to bed, a couple of hours later, Lydia was lying quietly
+with closed eyes, and he did not disturb her; but afterward he woke out
+of a sound sleep and sat up with a sense that something was wrong. He
+listened. There was not a sound in the room or in the house. Apparently
+Lydia was not wakened by his startled movement. She lay in a profound
+immobility.
+
+But something about her very motionlessness struck a chill to his heart.
+Women in her condition sometimes had seizures in the night, he had
+heard. With a shaking hand, he struck a match and leaned over her. He
+gave a loud, shocked exclamation to see that her eyes were open, steady
+and fixed, like wide, dark pools. He threw the match away, and took her
+in his arms with a fond murmur of endearments. "Why, poor little girl!
+Do you lie awake and worry about what's to come?"
+
+Lydia drew a painful breath. "Yes," she said; "I worry a great deal
+about what's to come."
+
+He kissed her gently, ardently, gently again. "You mustn't do that,
+darling! You're all right! Melton said there wasn't one chance in a
+thousand of anything but just the most temporary illness, without any
+complications. It won't be so bad--it'll be soon over, and think what it
+means to us--dearest--dearest--dearest!"
+
+Lydia lay quiet in his arms. She had been still so long that he thought
+her asleep, when she said, in a whisper: "I hope it won't be a girl!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+LYDIA'S NEW MOTTO
+
+
+Lydia's two or three big receptions, of which her mother had spoken with
+so casual a confidence, came off, while not exactly with nonchalant
+ease, still, on the whole, creditably. It is true that Dr. Melton had
+stormed at Lydia one sunny day in spring, finding her bent over her
+desk, addressing invitations.
+
+"It's April, child!" he cried, "April! The crocuses are out and the
+violets are almost here--and, what is more important, your day of trial
+gets closer with every tick of the clock. Come outdoors and take a walk
+with me."
+
+"Oh, I can't!" Lydia was aghast at the idea, looking at a mountain of
+envelopes before her.
+
+"Here! I'll help you finish those, and then we'll--"
+
+"No, no, _no_!" In Lydia's negation was a touch of the irritation that
+was often during these days in her attitude toward her godfather. "I
+can't! Please don't tease me to! The curtains to the spare room have to
+be put up, and the bed draperies somehow fixed. A stray dog got in there
+when he was wet and muddy and went to sleep on my best lace bedspread."
+
+Dr. Melton had not practiced for years among Endbury ladies without
+having some knowledge of them and a corresponding readiness of mind in
+meeting the difficulties they declared insurmountable. "I'll buy you a
+white marseilles bedspread on our way back from the walk," he offered
+gravely.
+
+"Oh, I've got plenty of plain white ones," she admitted incautiously,
+"but they don't go with the scheme of the room--and the first
+reception's only two days off."
+
+Dr. Melton fixed her with an ironical and melancholy smile: "Now,
+Lydia, I did think you had it in you to realize that your health and the
+strength of your child are worth more than--"
+
+Lydia sprang up and confronted him with an apparent anger of face and
+accent that was contradicted by her trembling chin and suffused eyes.
+"Oh, go away!" she commanded him, shaking her head and motioning him
+off. "Don't talk so to me! I can't help it--what I do! Everything's a
+part of the whole system, and I'm in that up to my neck--you know I am.
+If that's right, why, everything's all right, just the way everybody
+thinks it is. And if it's wrong--" She caught her breath, and turned
+back to her desk. "If it's wrong, what good would be done by little
+dribbling compromises of an occasional walk." She sat down wearily, and
+leaned her head on her hand. "I just wish you wouldn't keep me so
+stirred up--when I'm trying so _hard_ to settle down!"
+
+Dr. Melton seemed to divine perfectly the significance of this
+incoherent outbreak. He thrust out his lips in his old grimace that
+denoted emotion, and observed the speaker in a frowning silence. When
+she finished, he nodded: "You are right, Lydia, I do no good." He
+twirled his hat about between his fingers, looking absently into the
+crown, and added, "But you must forgive me, I love you very dearly."
+
+Lydia ran over to him, conscience-stricken. He took her embrace and
+remorseful kiss quietly. "Don't be sorry, Lydia dear. You have just
+shown me, as in a flash of lightning, how much more powerful a grasp on
+reality you have than I."
+
+Lydia recoiled from him with an outcry of exasperation. "I! Why, I'm
+almost an idiot! I haven't a grasp on anything! I can't see an inch
+before my nose. I'm in a perfect nightmare of perplexity all the time
+because I can't make out what I'm driving at--or ought to--"
+
+She went on more quietly, with a reasoning air: "Only look here,
+Godfather, it came over me the other night, when I couldn't sleep, that
+perhaps what's the trouble with me is that I'm _lazy_! I believe that's
+it! I don't want to work the way Marietta does, and Mother does, and
+even Madeleine does over her dresses and parties and things. It must be
+I'm a shirk, and expect to have an easier time than most people. That
+_must_ be it. What else can it be?"
+
+The doctor made no protest against this theory, taking himself off in a
+silence most unusual with him. Lydia did not notice this; nor did she in
+the next two or three months remark that her godfather took quite
+literally and obeyed scrupulously her exhortation to leave her in peace.
+
+She was in the grasp of this new idea. It seemed to her that in phrasing
+it she had hit upon the explanation of her situation which she had been
+so long seeking, and it was with a resolve to scourge this weakness out
+of her life that she now faced the future.
+
+She found a satisfaction in the sweeping manner in which this new maxim
+could be applied to all the hesitations that had confused her. All her
+meditations heretofore had brought her nothing but uncertainty, but this
+new catchword of incessant activity drove her forward too resistlessly
+to allow any reflections as to whether she were going in the right
+direction. She yielded herself absolutely to that ideal of conduct which
+had been urged upon her all her life, and she found, as so many others
+find, oblivion to the problems of the spirit in this resolute refusal to
+recognize the spirit. It was perhaps during these next months of her
+life that she most nearly approximated the Endbury notion of what she
+should be.
+
+She had yielded to Paul on the subject of the cook not only because of
+her timid distrust of her own inexperienced judgment but because of her
+intense reaction from the usual Endbury motto of "Husbands, hands off!"
+She had wanted Paul to be interested in the details of the house as she
+hoped to know and be interested in what concerned him, and when he
+showed his interest in a request she could not refuse it. She hoped that
+she had made a good beginning for the habit of taking counsel with each
+other on all matters. But she thought and hoped and reflected very
+little during these days. She was enormously, incredibly busy, and on
+the whole, she hoped, successfully so. The receptions, at least, went
+off very well, everybody said.
+
+Dr. Melton did not see his goddaughter again until he came with Mrs.
+Sandworth to the last of these events. She was looking singularly
+handsome at that time, her color high, her eyes very large and dark,
+almost black, so dilated were the pupils. With the nicety of observation
+of a man who has lived much among women, the doctor noticed that her
+costume, while effective, was not adjusted with the exquisite feeling
+for finish that always pervaded the toilets of her mother and sister.
+Lydia was trying with all her might to make herself over, but with the
+best will in the world she could not attain the prayerful concentration
+on the process of attiring herself, characteristic of the other women of
+her family.
+
+"She forgot to put the barrette in her back hair," murmured Mrs.
+Sandworth mournfully, as she and her brother emerged from the hand-shake
+of the last of the ladies assisting in receiving, "and there are two
+hooks of her cuff unfastened, and her collar's crooked. But I don't dare
+breathe a word to her about it. Since that time before her marriage when
+she--"
+
+"Yes, yes, yes," her brother cut her short; "don't bring up that tragic
+episode again. I'd succeeded in forgetting it."
+
+"You can call it tragic if you like," commented Mrs. Sandworth, looking
+about for an escape from the stranded isolation of guests who have just
+been passed along from the receiving line; "but what it was all about
+was more than I ever could--" Her eyes fell again on Lydia, and she lost
+herself in a sweet passion of admiration and pride. "Oh, isn't she the
+loveliest thing that ever drew the breath of life! Was there ever
+anybody else that could look so as though--as though they still had dew
+on them!"
+
+She went on, with her bold inconsequence: "There is a queer streak in
+her. Sometimes I think she doesn't care--" She stopped to gaze at a
+striking costume just entering the room.
+
+"What doesn't she care about?" asked the doctor.
+
+Mrs. Sandworth was concentrating on sartorial details as much of her
+mind as was ever under control at one time, and, called upon for a
+development of her theory, was even more vague than usual. "Oh, I don't
+know--about what everybody cares about."
+
+"She's likely to learn, if it's at all catching," conjectured the doctor
+grimly, looking around the large, handsome room. An impalpable effluvium
+was in the air, composed of the scent of flowers, the odor of delicate
+food, the sounds of a discreetly small orchestra behind palms in the
+hallway, the rustling of silks, and the pleasurable excitement of the
+crowd of prosperous-looking women, pleasantly elated by the opportunity
+for exhibiting their best toilets.
+
+"To think of its being our little Lydia who's the center of all this!"
+murmured Mrs. Sandworth, her loving eyes glistening with affectionate
+pride. "It really is a splendid scene, isn't it, Marius?"
+
+"If they were all gagged, it might be. Lord! how they yell!"
+
+"Oh, at a _reception_!" Mrs. Sandworth's accent denoted that the word
+was an explanation. "People have to, to make themselves heard."
+
+"And why should they be so eager to accomplish that?" inquired the
+doctor. "Listen!"
+
+Standing as they were, tightly pressed in between a number of different
+groups, their ears were assaulted by a disjointed mass of stentorian
+conversation that gave a singular illusion as if it all came from one
+inconceivably voluble source, the individuality of the voices being lost
+in the screaming enunciation which, as Mrs. Sandworth had pointed out,
+was a prerequisite of self-expression under the circumstances.
+
+They heard: "--_For over a month and the sleeves were too see you again
+at Mrs. Elliott's I'm pouring there from four I've got to dismiss one
+with little plum-colored bows all along five dollars a week and the
+washing out, and still impossible! I was there myself all the time and
+they neither of thirty-five cents a pound for the most ordinary ferns
+and red carnations was all they had, and we thought it rather skimpy
+under the brought up in one big braid and caught down with at the
+Peterson's they were pink and white with_--"
+
+"_Oh, no, Madeleine! that was at the Burlingame's_." Mrs. Sandworth took
+a running jump into the din and sank from her brother's sight,
+vociferating: "_The Petersons had them of old-gold, don't you remember,
+with little_--"
+
+The doctor, worming his way desperately through the masses of
+femininity, and resisting all attempts to engage him in the vocal fray,
+emerged at length into the darkened hall where the air was, as he told
+himself in a frenzied flight of the imagination, less like a combination
+of a menagerie and a perfume shop. Here, in a quiet corner, sat Lydia's
+father, alone. He held in one hand a large platter piled high with
+wafer-like sandwiches, which he was consuming at a Gargantuan rate, and
+as he ate he smiled to himself.
+
+"Well, Mr. Ogre," said the doctor, sitting down beside him with a gasp
+of relief; "let a wave-worn mariner into your den, will you?"
+
+Provided with an auditor, Judge Emery's smile broke into an open laugh.
+He waved the platter toward the uproar in the next rooms: "A boiler
+factory ain't in it with woman, lovely woman, is it?" he put it to his
+old friend.
+
+"Gracious powers! There's nothing to laugh at in that exhibition!" the
+doctor reproved him, with an acrimonious savagery. "I don't know which
+makes me sicker; to stay in there and listen to them, or come out here
+and find you thinking they're _funny_!"
+
+"They _are_ funny!" insisted the Judge tranquilly. "I stood by the door
+and listened to the scraps of talk I could catch, till I thought I
+should have a fit. I never heard anything funnier on the stage."
+
+"Look-y here, Nat," the doctor stared up at him angrily, "they're not
+monkeys in a zoo, to be looked at only on holidays and then laughed at!
+They're the other half of a whole that we're half of, and don't you
+forget it! Why in the world should you think it funny for them to do
+this tomfool trick all winter and have nervous prostration all summer to
+pay for it? You'd lock up a _man_ as a dangerous lunatic if he spent his
+life so. What they're like, and what they do with their time and
+strength concerns us enough sight more than what the tariff is, let me
+tell you!"
+
+"I admit that what your wife is like concerns you a whole lot!" The
+Judge laughed good-naturedly in the face of the little old bachelor.
+"Don't commence jumping on the American woman now! I won't stand it!
+She's the noblest of her sex!"
+
+"Do you know why I am bald?" said Dr. Melton, rubbing his hand over his
+shining dome.
+
+"If I did, I wouldn't admit it," the Judge put up a cautious guard,
+"because I foresee that whatever I say will be used as evidence against
+me."
+
+"I've torn out all my hair in desperation at hearing such men as you
+claim to admire and respect and wish to advance the American woman. You
+don't give enough thought to her--real thought--from one year's end to
+another to know whether you think she has an immortal soul or not!"
+
+"Oh, you can't get anywhere, trying to reason about those sort of
+things. You have to take souls for granted. Besides, I give her as fair
+a deal in that respect as I give myself," protested Lydia's father
+reasonably, smiling and eating.
+
+"There's something in _that_, now!" cried his interlocutor, with an odd
+Celtic lilt which sometimes invaded his speech; "but she _has_ an
+immortal soul, and I'm by no means sure that yours is still inside you."
+
+The Judge stood up, brushed the crumbs of his stolen feast from his
+well-fitting broadcloth, and smiled down indulgently at the unquiet
+little doctor. "She's all right, Melton, the American woman, and you're
+an unconscionably tiresome old fanatic. That's what _you_ are! Come
+along and have a glass of punch with me. Lydia's cook has a genius for
+punch--and for sandwiches!" he added reflectively, setting down the
+empty platter.
+
+Dr. Melton apparently was off on another tangent of excitability. "Did
+you ever see her?" he demanded with a fiercely significant accent.
+
+The Judge made a humorous wry mouth. "Yes, I have; but what concern is a
+cook's moral character to her employer any more than an engineer's to
+the railroad--"
+
+"Well, it mightn't hurt the railroad any if it took more cognizance of
+its engineers' morals--" began the doctor dryly.
+
+The Judge cut him short with a great laugh. "Oh, Melton! Melton! You
+bilious sophomore! Take a vacation from finding everything so damn
+tragic. Take a drink on me. You're all right! Everybody's all right!"
+
+The doctor nodded. "And the reception is the success of the season," he
+said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+AN EVENING'S ENTERTAINMENT
+
+
+The dinner parties, so Paul told Lydia one evening a few days later,
+would certainly be as successful and with but little more trouble. "Just
+think of the dinners Ellen's been giving us for the last two months! I
+don't believe there's another such cook in Ohio--within our purse, of
+course."
+
+Lydia did not visibly respond to this enthusiasm. Indeed, she walked
+away from the last half of it, and leaned out of a window to look up at
+the stars. When she came back to take up the tiny dress on which she was
+sewing, she said: "I don't think I can stand more than this one dinner
+party, Paul. I'm sorry, but I don't feel at all well, and this dreadful
+nausea troubles me a good deal."
+
+"Well, you look lovelier than ever before in your life," Paul reassured
+her tenderly, and felt a moment's pique that her face did not entirely
+clear at this all-important announcement. "Come, let's go over to the
+Derby's for a game of bridge, will you, Lydia?"
+
+This conversation took place on a Tuesday late in May. The dinner party
+was set for Thursday. On Wednesday morning, after Paul's usual early
+departure, Lydia went to her writing desk to send a note to Madeleine
+Hollister. Paul had intimated that she and Madeleine were seeing less of
+each other than he had expected from their girlhood acquaintance, and
+Lydia, in her anxiety to induce Paul to talk over with her and plan with
+her the growth of their home life, was eager to adopt every casual
+suggestion he threw out. She began, therefore, a cordial invitation to
+Madeleine to spend several days with them. She would try again to be
+more intimate with her husband's sister.
+
+She had not inherited her mother's housekeeping eye, and was never
+extremely observant of details. Being more than usually preoccupied this
+morning, she had no suspicion that someone else had been using the
+conveniences for writing on her desk until she turned over the sheet of
+paper on which she had begun her note, and saw with surprise that the
+other side was already covered with a coarse handwriting, unfamiliar to
+her.
+
+As she looked at this in the blankest astonishment, a phrase leaped out
+at her comprehension, like a serpent striking. And then another. And
+another.
+
+She tried to push back her chair to escape, but she was like a person
+paralyzed.
+
+With returning strength to move came an overwhelming wave of nausea. She
+crept up to her own room and lay motionless and soundless for hour after
+hour, until presently it was noon, and the pleasant tinkling of gongs
+announced that lunch was served.
+
+Lydia rose, and made her way down the stairs to the well-ordered table,
+set with the daintiest of perfectly prepared food, and stood, holding on
+to the back of a chair, while she rang the bell. The little second girl
+answered it--one of the flitting, worthless, temporary occupants of that
+position.
+
+"Tell Ellen to come here," said her mistress.
+
+At the appearance of the cook, Lydia's white face went a little whiter.
+"Did you use my writing desk last evening?" she asked.
+
+Ellen looked up, her large, square-jawed face like a mask through which
+her eyes probed her mistress' expression. "Yes, Mrs. Hollister; I did,"
+she said in the admirable "servant's manner" she possessed to
+perfection. "I ought to ask your pardon for doing it without permission,
+but someone was wanting Mr. Hollister on the telephone, and I thought
+best to sit within hearing of the bell until you and Mr. Hollister
+should return, and as--"
+
+"You left part of your letter to Patsy O'Hern," said Lydia, and sat
+down suddenly, as though her strength were spent.
+
+The woman opposite her flushed a purplish red. There was a long silence.
+Lydia looked at her servant with a face before which Ellen finally
+lowered her eyes.
+
+"I am sure, Mrs. Hollister, if you don't think I'm worth the place, and
+if you think you can manage without me to-morrow night, I'll go this
+minute," she said coolly.
+
+Lydia did not remove her eyes from the other's flushed face. "You must
+go far away from Bellevue," she said. "You must not take a place
+anywhere near here."
+
+Ellen looked up quickly, and down again. The color slowly died out of
+her face. After a sullen silence, "Yes," she said.
+
+"That is all," said Lydia.
+
+                 *       *       *       *       *
+
+Paul found his wife that evening still very white. She explained Ellen's
+disappearance with a dry brevity. "That we should have continued to give
+that--that awful--to give her opportunity to work upon a boy of--" she
+ended brokenly. "Suppose he had been my brother!"
+
+Paul was aghast. "But, my _dear_! To-morrow is the night of the dinner!
+Couldn't you have put off a few days this sudden fit of--"
+
+Lydia broke from her white stillness with a wild outcry. She flung
+herself on her husband, pressing her hands on his mouth and crying out
+fiercely: "No, no, Paul! Not that! I can't bear to have you say that! I
+hoped--I hoped you wouldn't think of--"
+
+Paul was fresh from an interview with Dr. Melton, and in his ears rang
+innumerable cautions against excitement or violent emotions. With his
+usual competent grasp on the essentials of a situation that he could not
+understand at all, he put aside for the time his exasperated
+apprehensions about the next day's event, and picking Lydia up bodily he
+carried her to a couch, closing her lips with gentle hands and soothing
+her with caresses, like a frightened child.
+
+"Oh, you are good to me!" she murmured finally, quieted. "I must try
+not to get so excited. But, Paul--I _can't_ tell you--about--about that
+letter--and later, when I saw Ellen, it was as though we fought hand to
+hand for Patsy, though she never--"
+
+"There, there, dearest! Don't talk about it--just rest. You've worked
+yourself into a perfect fever." If there was latent in the indulgent
+accent of this speech the coda, "All about nothing," it escaped Lydia's
+ear. She only knew that the long nightmare of her lonely, horrified day
+was over. She clung to her husband, and thanked heaven for his pure,
+clean manliness.
+
+But in a vastly different way the next day was almost as much of a
+nightmare. Lydia's father and mother were temporarily out of town and
+their at least fairly satisfactory cook was enjoying her vacation at an
+undiscoverable address. Lydia was cut off from asking her sister to come
+to her aid by the fact that Paul had prevailed upon her to omit Marietta
+and her husband from her guests. "If you won't give but one, we've just
+_got_ to invite the important ones," he had said. "Your sister can take
+dinner with us any day, and you know her husband _isn't_ the most--"
+
+Lydia had picked up in the school of necessity a fair knowledge of
+cooking, for which she had discovered in herself quite a liking; but she
+had been too constantly in social demand to have the leisure for
+advancing far into culinary lore, and she now found herself dismayed
+before the elaborate menu that Ellen had planned, for which the
+materials were gathered together. She was still shaken with the emotions
+of the day before, and subject to sudden giddy, sick turns, which,
+although lasting but an instant, left her enormously fatigued.
+
+She went furiously at the task before her, beginning by simplifying the
+dinner as much as she dared and could with the materials at hand, and
+struggling with the dishes she was obliged to retain. For years
+afterward, the sight of chicken salad affected her to acute nausea. The
+inexperienced and careless little second girl lost her head in the
+crisis, and had to be repeatedly calmed and assured that all that would
+be asked of her would be to serve the dinner to the waiters for whom
+Lydia had arranged hastily by telephone with Endbury's leading caterer.
+Ellen had planned to serve the meal with the help of a waitress friend
+or two, without other outside help; a feature of the occasion that had
+met with Paul's hearty approval. He told Lydia that those palpably
+hired-for-the-occasion nigger waiters were very bad form, and belonged
+to a phase of Endbury's social gaucheries as outgrown now as charade
+parties. But now, of course, nothing else was possible.
+
+In the intervals of cooking, Lydia left her makeshift help in the
+kitchen, to see that nothing burned, and in a frenzy of activity flew at
+some of the manifold things to be done to prepare the house for the
+festivity. She swept and wiped up herself the expansive floors of the
+two large parlors, set the rooms in order, dusted the innumerable
+wedding present knickknacks, cleaned the stairs, wiped free from dust
+the carved balustrades, ordered the bedrooms that were to serve as
+dressing rooms in the evening, answered the 'phone a thousand times,
+arranged flowers in the vases, received a reportorial call from Miss
+Burgess, gave cut glass and china its final polish, laid out Paul's
+evening clothes and arranged her own toilet ready--it was five o'clock!
+There were innumerable other tasks to accomplish, but she dared no
+longer put off setting the table.
+
+It was to be a large dinner--large, that is, for Endbury--of twenty
+covers, and Lydia had never prepared a table for so many guests. The
+number of objects necessary for the conventional setting of a dinner
+table appalled her. She was so tired, and her attention was so fixed on
+the complicated processes going on uncertainly in the kitchen, that her
+brain reeled over the vast quantity of knives and forks and plates and
+glasses needed to convey food to twenty mouths on a festal occasion.
+They persistently eluded her attempts to marshal them into order. She
+discovered that she had put forks for the soup--that in some
+inexplicable way at the plate destined for an important guest there was
+a large kitchen spoon of iron--a wild sort of whimsical humor rose in
+her from the ferment of utter fatigue and anxiety. When Paul came in,
+looking very grave, she told him with a wavering laugh, "If I tried as
+hard for ten minutes to go to Heaven as I've tried all day to have this
+dinner right, I'd certainly have a front seat in the angel choir. If
+anybody here to-night is not satisfied, it'll be because he's harder to
+please than St. Peter himself."
+
+"My Aunt Alexandra will be here," said Paul, the humorous side of her
+speech escaping him.
+
+Lydia set down a tray of glasses, and broke into open, shaking,
+hysterical laughter. Paul surveyed her grimly. Her excitement had
+flushed her cheeks and darkened her eyes, and her sudden, apparently
+light-hearted, mirth put the finishing touch to a picture that could
+seem to her husband nothing but a care-free, not to say childish,
+attitude toward a situation of grave concern to him and his prospects
+and ambitions in the world. His inborn and highly cultivated regard for
+competence and success in any enterprise undertaken, drowned out, as was
+by no means infrequent with him, any judicial inquiry into the innate
+importance of the enterprise. He had an instant of bitter impatience
+with Lydia. He felt that he had a right to hold her to account for the
+outcome of events. If she were well enough to have rosy cheeks and to
+laugh at nothing, she was well enough to have satisfactory results
+expected from her efforts.
+
+"I hope very much that everything will go well," he said curtly, turning
+away. "Our first dinner party means a good deal."
+
+But everything did not go well. Indeed, it is scarcely too much to say
+that nothing went well. From the over-peppered soup (Lydia had forgotten
+to caution her rattle-brained assistant that she had already seasoned
+the bouillon) to the salad which, although excellent, gave out frankly,
+beyond any possibility of disguise, while five people were still
+unserved, the meal was a long procession of mishaps. Paul took up
+sorrily his wife's rather hysterical note of self-mockery, and laughed
+and joked over the varied eccentricities of the pretentious menu. But
+there was no laughter in his heart.
+
+Never before, in all his life, from babyhood up, had he been forced to
+know the acrid taste of failure, and the dose was not sweetened by his
+intense consciousness that he was not in any way responsible. No such
+fiasco had ever resulted from anything he _had_ been responsible for, he
+thought fiercely to himself, leaning forward smilingly to talk to the
+president of the street-railway company, who, having nothing in the
+shape of silverware left before his place but a knife and spoon, was
+eating his salad with the latter implement. "Lydia has no right to act
+so," he thought.
+
+The hostess gave the effect of flushed, bright-eyed animation usual with
+her on exciting occasions.
+
+"Your wife is a beauty," said the street-railway magnate, looking down
+the disorganized table toward her.
+
+Paul received this assurance with the proper enthusiastic assent, but
+something else gleamed hotly in his face as he looked at her. "I have
+_some_ rights," thought the young husband. "Lydia owes me something!" He
+never before had been moved to pity for himself.
+
+Lydia seemed to herself to be in an endless bad dream. The exhausting
+efforts of the day had reduced her to a sort of coma of fatigue through
+which she felt but dully the successive stabs of the ill-served,
+unsuccessful dinner. At times, the table, the guests, the room itself,
+wavered before her, and she clutched at her chair to keep her balance.
+She did not know that she was laughing and talking gaily and eating
+nothing. She was only conscious of an intense longing for the end of
+things, and darkness and quiet.
+
+After the meal the company moved into the double parlor. The plan had
+been to serve coffee there, but as people stood about waiting and this
+did not appear, Paul drew Lydia to one side to ask her about it. She
+looked at him with bright, blank eyes, and spoke in an expressionless
+voice: "The grocery boy forgot to deliver the coffee," she said. "There
+isn't any, I remember now."
+
+He turned away silently, and the later part of the entertainment began.
+
+There was to be music, one of the guests being Endbury's favorite
+amateur soprano, another a pianist much thought of. The singer took her
+place by the piano, assuming carefully the correct position. Lydia
+watched her balance on the balls of her feet, lean forward a little,
+throw up her chest and draw in her abdomen. As the preliminary chords of
+the accompaniment sounded, she was almost visibly concentrating her
+thoughts on the tension of her vocal chords, on the position of the soft
+palate and the resonance of the nasal cavities. The thoughts of her
+auditors followed her own. It came to Lydia some time after the
+performance was over that the words of the song told of love and life
+and tragic betrayal.
+
+A near-by guest leaned to her and said, during the hand-clapping: "I
+couldn't make out what it was all about--never can understand a
+song--but, say! can't she put it all over the soprano that sings in the
+First Methodist."
+
+His hostess gave the speaker a rather disconcerting stare, hardly
+explained, he thought, by the enigmatical statement that came after it:
+"Why, that is how we are living, all of us!"
+
+The pianist was an old German, considered eccentric by Endbury. He had a
+social position on account of his son, a prosperous German-American
+manufacturer of buggies, and was invited because of his readiness to
+play on any occasion. The old man looked about him at the company with a
+fatherly smile, and, sitting down to his instrument, waited pointedly
+until all the cheerful hum of conversation had died away. The room was
+profoundly silent as he brought his hands down on the keys in a
+startling, thrilling chord. Lydia's heart began to beat fast. She felt a
+chill run among the roots of her hair. She was so moved she could have
+wept aloud, and yet, almost at once, as the musician passed on to the
+rich elaboration of his theme, she lost herself in a groping
+bewilderment. She had heard so little music! Her straining attention
+mocked her with its futility.
+
+She and Paul had been married for eight months, but they had found no
+time for the serious study of music from which she had hoped so much.
+When Paul was at home for an evening he was too tired and worn for
+anything very deep, he said, and preferred to anything else the lighter
+pieces of Nevin. She now gave ear despairingly to the mighty utterance
+of a master, catching only now and then a tantalizing glimpse of what it
+might mean to her. At times, there emerged from the glorious tumult of
+sound some grave, earnest chord, some quick, piercing melody, some
+exquisite sudden cadence, which reached her heart intelligibly; but
+through most of it she felt herself to be listening with heartsick
+yearning to a lovely message in an unknown tongue. Her feeling of
+desolate exile from a realm of beauty she longed to enter, was
+intensified, as was natural in so sensitive a nature, by the strange
+power of music to heighten in its listeners whatever is, for the time,
+their predominant emotion. She felt like crying out, like beating her
+hands against the prison bars suddenly revealed to her. She was almost
+intolerably affected before the end of the selection.
+
+"That's an awfully long piece for anybody to learn by heart!" commented
+her neighbor admiringly, as the old pianist finished, and stood up
+wiping his forehead. "Say, Mr. Burkhardt, what's the name of that
+selection?" he went on, leaning forward.
+
+The old German turned toward him, and answered gravely: "That is the
+feerst mofement of Beethoven's Opus Von Hundred and Elefen."
+
+"Oh, it is, is it?" said Lydia's guest, with a facetious intonation.
+"All of that?"
+
+After that the soprano sang again, someone else sang a humorous negro
+song, there was more piano music, rendered by the prosperous son of the
+old pianist, who played dashingly some bright comic-opera airs. The
+furniture was pushed back and a few dancers whirled over the costly,
+hardwood waxed floors, which Lydia had cleaned that morning. She felt
+vaguely that everyone was being most kind and that her good-natured
+guests were trying to make up for the failure of the dinner by unusual
+efforts to have the evening pass off well. She was very grateful for
+this humane disposition of theirs. It was the bright spot of the
+experience.
+
+But Paul, who also saw the kindly efforts of his guests, felt that this
+was the last intolerable dagger-thrust. Their amused compassion
+suffocated him. He wanted people to envy him, not pity him, he thought
+in mortified chagrin.
+
+After an eternity, the hour of departure arrived. As the door shut out
+the last of the smiling, lying guests, the host and hostess turned to
+face each other.
+
+Paul spoke first, in an even, restrained tone: "You would better go to
+bed, Lydia; you must be very tired."
+
+With this, he turned away to shut up the house. He had determined to
+preserve at all costs the appearance of the indulgent, non-critical,
+over-patient husband that he intensely felt himself to be. No force, he
+thought grimly, shutting his jaws hard, should drag from him a word of
+his real sentiments. Fanned by the wind of this virtuous resolution, his
+sentiments grew hotter and hotter as he walked about, locking doors and
+windows, and reviewing bitterly the events of the evening. If he was to
+restrain himself from saying anything, he would at least allow himself
+the privilege of feeling all that was possible to a man so deeply
+injured.
+
+Lydia sat quietly waiting for him to finish, her face in her hands,
+conscious of nothing but fatigue, in her ears a wild echo of the
+inexplicable, haunting Beethoven chords.
+
+Suddenly she started and raised her head, her face transfigured. Her
+eyes shone, a smile was on her lips like that of someone who hears from
+afar the sound of a beloved voice. She made a gesture of yearning toward
+her husband. "Oh, Paul--Paul!" she cried to him softly, in a tremulous
+voice of wonder.
+
+He turned, the light for the first time on his black, loveless face.
+"What is it?" he enunciated distinctly, looking at her hard.
+
+Before his eyes Lydia shrank back. She put up her hands instinctively to
+hide her face from him. Finally, "Nothing--nothing--" she murmured.
+
+Without comment, Paul went back to his conscientious round of the house.
+
+Lydia had felt for the first time the quickening to life of her child.
+And during all that day, until then, she had forgotten that she was to
+know motherhood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+AN ELEMENT OF SOLIDITY
+
+
+Lydia dated the estrangement from Marietta, which grew so rapidly during
+the next year, from the conversation on the day after the dinner party.
+She was cruelly wounded by her sister's attack on her, but she could
+never remember the scene without one of her involuntary laughs so
+disconcerting to Paul, who only laughed when he felt gay, certainly at
+nothing which affected him seriously. But Lydia's sense of humor was so
+tickled at the grotesque contrast between Marietta's injured conception
+of the brilliant social event from which she had been excluded and the
+leaden fiasco which it had really been, that even at the time, in the
+midst of denying hotly her sister's charges of snobbishness and social
+ambition, she was unable to keep back a shaky laugh or two as she cried
+out: "Oh, Etta! If you could know how things went, you'd be too thankful
+to have escaped it. It was awful beyond words!"
+
+Marietta answered her by handing her with a grim silence a copy of that
+morning's paper, open at _Society Notes_. Loyal Flora Burgess had
+lavished on "Miss Lydia's" first dinner party her entire vocabulary of
+deferential, not to say reverential, encomiums. The "function had
+inaugurated a new era of cosmopolitan amplitude of social life in
+Endbury," was the ending of the lengthy paragraph that described the
+table decorations, the menu, the costume of the hostess, the names of
+the music-makers afterward.
+
+Lydia burst into a hysterical laugh. "Flora Burgess is too killing!" she
+cried. "She was here in the afternoon to get details, and I just let her
+wander around and see what she could make out. I was too busy to pay any
+attention to her--Oh, Etta! I was dead and buried with fatigue before
+the people even began to come. I can't even remember much about it
+except that every single thing was wrong. That about 'cosmopolitan
+amplitude--' Oh, isn't Flora too funny!--means having music after
+dinner, I suppose. I don't know what else."
+
+"Of course," said Marietta, rising to go, "it doesn't make any
+difference what it was really like! Only the people that were there know
+that. The report in the paper--"
+
+"Oh, Marietta, what a thing to say--that it's all pretense, every
+bit--and not--"
+
+Marietta went on steadily and mordantly: "I don't know how you feel
+about it, but _I_ shouldn't be very easy in my mind to have my only
+sister's name not on the list of guests at my most exclusive social
+function."
+
+Dr. Melton, who made Lydia a professional call that morning, found her
+with reddened eyes, slowly washing and putting away innumerable dirty
+dishes. She told him that the second girl, apparently overcome by the
+events of the day before, had disappeared during the night. Dr. Melton
+thrust out his lips and said nothing, but he took off his coat, put on
+an apron, and, pushing his patient away from the dishpan, attacked a
+huge pile of sticky plates. He worked rapidly and silently, with a
+surgeon's deftness. Lydia sat quiet for some time, looking at him.
+Finally, "I hadn't been crying because of dirty dishes," she told him;
+"I'm not such a child as that. Marietta has been here. She said some
+things pretty hard to bear about her not having been invited to that
+awful dinner party. I didn't know what she was talking about a good deal
+of the time--it was all about what a snob and traitor to my family I was
+growing to be."
+
+"You mustn't blame Marietta too much," said the doctor, rinsing and
+beginning to dry the plates with what seemed to Lydia's fatigued languor
+really miraculous speed. "It's true that she watches your social advance
+with the calm disinterestedness of a cat watching somebody pour cream
+out of a jug. She wants her saucerful. But look here. Did I ever tell
+you about the man Montaigne speaks of who spent all his life to acquire
+the skill necessary to throw a grain of millet through the eye of a
+needle? Well, that man was proud of it, but poor Marietta's haunted by
+doubts as to whether in her case it's been worth while. It makes her
+naturally inclined to be snappy."
+
+He was so used to delighting in Lydia's understanding of his perversely
+obscure figures of speech that he turned about, surprised to hear no
+appreciative comment. She was looking away with troubled eyes.
+
+"Paul will think I ought not to have let Marietta talk to me like
+that--that I ought to have resented it. I never can remember to resent
+things."
+
+The doctor began setting out polished water glasses on a tray. "It is
+the glory of a man to pass by an offense," he quoted. "Ah, don't you
+suppose if we knew all about things we'd feel as relieved at not having
+resented an injury as if we had held our hands from striking a blind man
+who had inadvertently run against us?"
+
+There was no response. It was the second time that one of his metaphors,
+far-fetched as he loved them, but usually intelligible to Lydia, had
+missed fire. He turned on her sharply. "What are you thinking about?" he
+asked.
+
+She raised her tragic eyes to his. "About the mashed potatoes last
+night--they didn't have a bit of salt in them--they were too nasty
+for--"
+
+"Oh, pshaw! It makes no difference whether your dinner party was a
+success or not! You know that as well as I do. A dinner party is a relic
+of the Dark Ages, anyhow--if not of the Stone Age! As a physician, I
+shudder to see people sitting down to gorge themselves on the richest
+possible food, all carefully rendered extra palatable in order that they
+may put upon their bodies the burden of throwing off an enormous amount
+of superfluous food. A hundred years from now people will be as ashamed
+of us for our piggishness as we are of our eighteenth-century forbears
+for their wine-swilling to the detriment of their descendants. A dinner
+party of to-day bears no more relation to a rational gathering of
+rational people for the purpose of rational social intercourse than--"
+
+He had run on with his usual astonishing loquacity without drawing
+breath, overwhelming Lydia with a fresh flood of words when she tried to
+break in; but she now sprang up and motioned him peremptorily to
+silence.
+
+"Please, please, Godfather, don't! I asked you not to unsettle
+me--you're not kind to do it! You're not kind! I must think it's
+important and, and--the necessary thing to do. I _must_!" She put her
+hands over her eyes as she spoke. She was trying to shut out a vision of
+Paul's embittered face of wrathful chagrin. "That's the trouble with
+me," she went on. "Something in me makes it hard for me to think it
+important enough to give up everything else for it--and I--"
+
+"Why '_must_' you?" asked the doctor bluntly, crumpling his damp
+dishcloth into a ball.
+
+Lydia looked at him and saw Paul so evidently that the doctor saw with
+her. "I must! I _must_!" she only repeated.
+
+Dr. Melton opened his mouth wide, closed it again with a snap, and threw
+the tightly wadded ball in his hand passionately upon the floor with the
+gesture of an angry child. Lydia was standing now, looking down at the
+red-faced little man as he peered up at her after his silent outbreak.
+His attitude of fury so contrasted with the pacific white apron which
+enveloped him, that she broke out into a laugh. Even as she laughed and
+turned away to answer a knock at the door, she was acutely thankful that
+it was not with Paul that she had been set upon by that swiftly mobile
+change of humor, that it was not at Paul that she had launched that
+disrespectful mirth.
+
+The person who knocked proved to be a very large, rosy-cheeked female,
+who might be a big, overgrown child or a preposterously immature woman
+for all Lydia, looking at her in perplexity, could make out. She felt no
+thrill of premonition as this individual advanced into the kitchen, a
+pair of immense red hands folded before her.
+
+"I'm Anastasia O'Hern, ma'am," she announced with a thick accent of
+County Clare and a self-confident, good-humored smile, "though mostly
+I'm called 'Stashie--and I'm just over from th' old country to my Aunt
+Bridgie that washed for you till the rheumatism got her, and when she
+told me about what you'd done for her and Patsy--how you'd sent off that
+ould divil where she couldn't torment Patsy no more, and him as glad of
+it as Aunt Bridgie herself, just like she knew he would be, and what an
+awful time you do be havin' with gurrls, and a baby comin', I says to
+myself and to Aunt Bridgie, 'There's the lady I'm goin' to worrk for if
+she'll lave me do ut,' and Aunt Bridgie was readin' to me in the paper
+about your gran' dinner party last night and I says to her and to
+myself, 'There'll be a main lot of dishes to be washed th' day and I'd
+better step over and begin.'"
+
+She pulled off the shawl that had covered her head of flaming hair, and
+smiled broadly at her two interlocutors, who remained motionless,
+staring at her in an ecstasy of astonishment.
+
+As she looked into Lydia's pale face and reddened eyes, the smile died
+away. She clasped her big hands with a pitying gesture, and cried out a
+Gaelic exclamation of compassion with a much-moved accent; then, "It's
+time I was here," she told herself. She wiped her eyes, passed the back
+of her hand over her nose with a sniff, picked up the dishcloth from the
+floor, and advanced upon a pile of dirty silver. Her massive bulk shook
+the floor.
+
+"I don't know no more about housework than Casey's pig," she told them
+cheerfully, "but Aunt Bridgie says in America they don't none of the
+gurrls know nothing. They just hold their jobs because their ladies know
+they couldn't do no better to change, and maybe I can learn. I want to
+help."
+
+She emptied the silver into the dishwater with a splash, and set to
+work, turning her broad face to them to say familiarly over her
+shoulder to Lydia, "Now, just you go and lie down and send the little
+ould gentleman about his business. You need to be quiet--for the sake of
+the one that's coming; and don't you forget I'm here. I'm--_here_!"
+
+Dr. Melton drew Lydia away silently, and not until they had put two
+rooms between them and the kitchen did they dare face each other. With
+that first interchange of looks came peals of laughter--Lydia's light,
+ringing laughter--to hear which the doctor offered up heartfelt
+thanksgivings.
+
+"That is your fate, Lydia," he said finally, wiping his eyes.
+
+"Don't you just love her?" Lydia cried. "Isn't she the most _human_
+thing!"
+
+"Do you remember Maeterlinck's theory that every soul summons--"
+
+Lydia interrupted to say with a wry, humorous mouth, "You know I don't
+know anything. Don't ask me if I remember things."
+
+"Well, Maeterlinck has one of his fanciful theories that everybody calls
+to him from the unknown those elements that he most needs, which are
+most in harmony with--"
+
+"I caught a good solid element that time," cried Lydia, laughing again.
+
+"She's embodied Loyalty," said the doctor. "It breathes from every
+pore."
+
+"She's going to smash my cut glass and china something awful," Lydia
+foretold.
+
+Dr. Melton took his godchild by the shoulders and shook her. "Now, Lydia
+Emery, you listen to me! I don't often issue an absolute command, if I
+am your physician, but I do now. You _let_ her smash your china and cut
+glass, and all the rest of your devastating trash she can lay her hands
+on, rather than lose her--until after September, anyhow! It's a direct
+reward of virtue for your having shipped the 'ould divil'!"
+
+Lydia's face clouded. "I'm afraid Paul won't think her much of a
+substitute for Ellen," she murmured, "and we'll have to find a cook
+somehow even if this one learns enough to be second girl."
+
+"Second girl!" ejaculated the doctor. "She's a human being with a
+capacity for loyalty."
+
+"She's evidently awfully incompetent--"
+
+The doctor snorted. "Competence--I loathe the word! It's used now to
+cover all imaginable sins, as folks used to excuse all manner of
+rascality in a good swordsman. We're beyond the frontier period now when
+competence was a matter of life and death. We ought to begin to have
+some glimmering realization that there are other--"
+
+"_Oh_, what a hand for talk!" said Lydia.
+
+The doctor rejoiced at her laughing impatience. He thought to himself,
+as he looked at her standing in the doorway and waving good-by to him,
+that she seemed a very different creature from the drooping and
+tearful--he interrupted his chain of thought as he boarded his car, to
+exclaim, "May she live long, that heavy-handed, vivifying Celt!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+THE VOICES IN THE WOOD
+
+
+Lydia had not been mistaken in her premonition of Paul's attitude toward
+the new maid. He found her quite unendurable, but the direful stories
+told by their Bellevue acquaintances about the literal impossibility of
+keeping servants during the hot season induced him to postpone his wrath
+against the awkward, irreverent, too familiar Irishwoman until after
+Lydia should feel more herself. Paul's wrath lost nothing by keeping.
+
+To Lydia, on the contrary, Anastasia's loyalty and devotion were
+inexpressibly comforting during the trying days of that summer. Her
+servant's loving heart radiated warmth and cheer throughout all her
+life. One day, when her mother protested against 'Stashie's habit of
+familiar conversation with the family (they had all soon adopted the
+Irish diminutive of her name), Lydia said: "I can not be too thankful
+for 'Stashie's love and kindness."
+
+Mrs. Emery was outraged. "Good gracious, Lydia! What things you do say."
+
+"Why not? Because she hasn't been to college? Neither have I. She's as
+well educated as I am, and a great deal better woman."
+
+"Why, what are you talking about? She can't read!"
+
+"I don't," said Lydia. "That's worse."
+
+Her mother turned the conversation, thinking she would be glad when this
+period of high-strung nerves and fancies should be over. She told Dr.
+Melton that it seemed to her that "Lydia took it very hard," and she
+supposed they couldn't expect her to be herself until after September.
+
+The doctor answered: "Oh, there's a great deal of nonsense about that
+kind of talk. A normal woman--and, thank Heaven, Lydia's that to the
+last degree--has the whole universe back of her. Lydia's always balanced
+on a hair trigger, it's true, but she _is_ balanced! And now all nature
+is rallying to her like an army with banners."
+
+"Ah, you never went through it yourself!" Mrs. Emery retreated to the
+safe stronghold of matronhood. "You don't know! I had strange fancies,
+like Lydia's. Women always do."
+
+Another one of Lydia's fancies of that summer drove her to a strange
+disregard of caste rules. It came through a sudden impulse of compassion
+one hot midsummer day when Miss Burgess hobbled up the driveway in the
+hope of gleaning some Bellevue society notes.
+
+"It's a terrible time of year, Miss Lydia," she said, sinking into a
+chair with a long, quavering sigh. "One drops from thirty and sometimes
+forty dollars a week to twenty or less; and it's so hard on one's feet,
+being on them in hot weather. I assure you mine ache like the toothache.
+And expenses are as high as in winter, or worse, when you have an
+invalid to look out for. Out here in breezy Bellevue you've no
+conception how hot it is on Main Street. And Mother _feels_ the heat!"
+
+All this she said, not complainingly, but in her usual twittering manner
+of imparting information, as though it were an incident of a
+five-o'clock tea, but Lydia felt a pang of remorse for her usual
+thoughtless attitude of exasperated hilarity over Miss Burgess'
+peculiarities. She noticed that the kind, vacuous face was beginning to
+look more than middle-aged, and that the scanty hair above it was
+whitening rapidly.
+
+"Why, bring your mother out here for the day, why don't you, any time!"
+she said impulsively. "I can't have any social engagements, you know,
+the way I am, and Paul's away a good deal of the time, and 'Stashie and
+I can get you tea and eggs and toast, at least. I'd love to have her.
+Now, any morning that threatens heat, just you telephone you're both
+coming to spend the day."
+
+She felt quite strange at the thought that she had never seen the
+mother of this devoted, unselfish, affectionate, lifelong acquaintance.
+
+But Miss Burgess, though moved almost to tears at Lydia's "kind
+thoughtfulness," clung steadfastly to her standards. She had always
+known that she must not presume on her "exceptional opportunities for
+acquaintance with Endbury's social leaders," she told Lydia, nor take
+advantage of any inadvertent kindness of theirs. Her mother would be the
+first one to blame her if she did; her mother knew the world very well.
+She went away, murmuring broken thanks and protestations of devotion.
+
+Lydia looked after her, disappointed. She had been quite stirred by the
+hope of giving some pleasure. There was little to break the long,
+lonely, monotonous expectancy of her life. And yet nothing surprised
+those who knew her better than her equable physical poise during this
+time of trial and discomfort. Everyone had expected so high-strung a
+creature to be "half-wild with nerves." But Lydia, although she
+continued to say occasional disconcerting things, seemed on the whole to
+be gaining maturity and firmness of purpose. Paul was away a great deal
+that summer and she had many long, solitary hours to pass--a singular
+contrast to the feverish hurry of the winter "season." Her old habit of
+involuntary questioning scrutiny came back and it is possible that her
+motto of "action at all costs" was passed under a closer mental review
+than during the winter; but though she went frequently to see her
+godfather and Mrs. Sandworth, she did not break her silence on whatever
+thoughts were occupying her mind, except in one brief, questioning
+explosion. This was on the occasion of her last visit to Endbury before
+her confinement, a few days after her call from Flora Burgess. It had
+occurred to her that they might know something about the reporter's
+family and she stopped in after her shopping to inquire.
+
+She found her aunt and her godfather sitting in the deeply shaded, old
+grape arbor in their back yard; Dr. Melton with a book, as always, Mrs.
+Sandworth ungirdled and expansive, tinkling an ice-filled cup and crying
+out upon the weather.
+
+"Sit down, Lydia, for mercy's sake, and cool off. Yes; we know all about
+her; she's a patient of Marius'. Have some lemonade! Isn't it fearful!
+And Marius keeps reading improving books! It makes me so much hotter!
+She's English, you know."
+
+Dr. Melton looked up from his book to remark, with his usual judicial
+moderation, "I could strangle that old harridan with joy. She has been
+one of the most pernicious influences the women of this town have ever
+had."
+
+"Flora Burgess' mother? Why, I never heard of her in the world until the
+other day."
+
+"You can't smell sewer gas," said the doctor briefly.
+
+Mrs. Sandworth laughed. "Marius almost killed himself last winter to
+pull her through pneumonia. He worked over her night and day. Oh, Marius
+is a great deal better than he talks--strangle--!"
+
+"I'm a fool, if that's what you mean," said the doctor.
+
+"What is the matter with Flora Burgess' mother?" asked Lydia.
+
+"She's been a plague spot in this town for years--that
+lower-middle-class old Briton, with her beastly ideas of caste--ever
+since she began sending out her daughter to preach her damnable gospel
+to defenseless Endbury homes."
+
+"Marius--my _dear_!" chided Mrs. Sandworth--"The Gospel--damnable! You
+forget yourself!"
+
+The doctor did not laugh. "They're the ones," he went on, "who first
+started this idiotic idea of there being a social stigma attached to
+living in any but just such parts of town."
+
+"You live in just such a part of town yourself," said Lydia.
+
+"My good-for-nothing, pretentious, fashionable patients wouldn't come to
+me if I didn't."
+
+"Why do you have to have that kind of patients?"
+
+Occasionally, of late, with her godfather, Lydia had displayed a
+certain uncompromising directness, rather out of character with her
+usual gentleness, which the doctor found very disconcerting. He was
+silent now.
+
+Mrs. Sandworth's greater simplicity saw no difficulties in the way of an
+answer. "Because, Lydia, he's one of the Kentucky Meltons, and because,
+as I said, he talks a great deal worse than he is."
+
+"Because I am a fool," said the doctor again. This time he flushed as he
+spoke.
+
+"He doesn't like things common around him," went on Mrs. Sandworth, "any
+more than any gentleman does. And as for strangling old Mrs. Burgess,
+what good would that do? It can't be she who's influencing Endbury,
+because all it's trying to do is to be just like every other town in
+Ohio."
+
+"In the Union!" amended Dr. Melton grimly. He subsided after this into
+one of his fidgety, grimacing, finger-nail-gnawing reveries. He was
+wondering whether he dared tell Lydia of a talk he had had that morning
+with her father. After a look at Lydia's flushed, tired face, he decided
+that he would better not; but as the two women fell into a discussion of
+the layette, the conversation, Mr. Emery's nervous voice, his sharp,
+impatient gestures, came back to him vividly. He looked graver and
+graver, as he did after each visit to his old friend, and after each
+fruitless exhortation to "go slow and rest more." Mr. Emery was in the
+midst of a very important trial and, as he had very reasonably reminded
+his physician, this was not a good time to relax his grasp on things.
+"Now I'm back in practice, in competition with younger men, I _can't_
+sag back! It's absurd to ask it of me."
+
+"You were a fool to go back into practice at your age."
+
+"A fool! I've doubled my income."
+
+"Yes; and your arteries--look here, suppose you were dead. The bar would
+get along without you, wouldn't it?"
+
+"But I'm not dead," the other truthfully opposed to this fallacious
+supposition, and turned again to his papers.
+
+The doctor shut his medicine case with a spiteful snap. "Don't fool
+yourself that it's devotion to the common weal that drives you ahead!
+Don't make a pretty picture of yourself as working to the last in heroic
+service of your fellow-man! You know, as I know, that if you dropped out
+this minute, American jurisprudence would continue on its triumphant,
+misguided way quite as energetically as now."
+
+Mr. Emery looked up, dropping for once the mask of humorous tolerance
+with which he was accustomed to hide any real preoccupation of his own.
+"Look here, Melton, I'm too nervous to stand much fooling these days. If
+you want to know the reason why I'm going on, I'll tell you. I've got
+to. I need the money."
+
+"Gracious powers! Did you get caught in that B. and R. slump?"
+
+The Judge smiled a little bitterly. "No; I haven't lost any money--for a
+very good reason. I never was ahead enough to have any to lose. Haven't
+you any idea of what the cost of living the way we do--"
+
+Dr. Melton interrupted him, wild-eyed: "Why, Nat Emery! You have
+yourself and your wife to feed and clothe and shelter--and you tell me
+that costs so much that you can't stop working when there's--"
+
+"Oh, go away, Melton; you make me tired!" The Judge made a weary gesture
+of dismissal. "You're always talking like a child, or a preacher, about
+how things _might_ be! You know what an establishment like ours costs to
+keep up, as well as I do. I'm in it--we've sort of gradually got in
+deeper and deeper, the way folks do--and it would take a thousand times
+more out of me to break loose than to go on. You're an old fuss, anyhow.
+I'm all right. Only for the Lord's sake leave me quiet now."
+
+The doctor shivered and put his hand over his eyes as he remembered how,
+to his physician's eye, the increasing ill health of his old friend
+gleamed lividly from his white face.
+
+Mrs. Sandworth brought him back to the present with an astonished "Good
+gracious! how anybody can even _pretend_ to shiver on a day like this!"
+She added: "Look here, Marius, are you going to sit there and moon all
+the afternoon? Here's Lydia going already."
+
+Seasoned to his eccentricities as she was, she was startled by his
+answer. "Julia," he said solemnly, "did you ever consider how many kinds
+of murder aren't mentioned in the statute books?"
+
+"Marius! What ideas! Remember Lydia!"
+
+"Oh, I remember Lydia!" he said soberly. He went to lay a hand fondly on
+her shoulder. "Are you really going, my dear? I'll walk along to the
+waiting-room with you."
+
+"Don't talk her to death!" cried Mrs. Sandworth after them.
+
+"I won't say a word," he answered.
+
+It was a promise that he almost literally kept. He was in one of the
+exaggeratedly humble moods which alternated with his florid, talkative,
+cock-sure periods.
+
+Lydia, too, was quite thoughtful and subdued. They descended in a
+complete silence the dusty street, blazing in the late afternoon sun,
+and passed into the inferno of a crowded city square in midsummer. As
+they stood before the waiting-room, Lydia asked suddenly: "Godfather,
+how can we, any of us, do any better?"
+
+"God knows!" he said, with a gesture of impotence, and went his way.
+
+Lydia entered the waiting-room and went to ask a man in uniform when the
+next car left for Bellevue.
+
+"There's been an accident in the power-house, lady," he told her, "and
+that line ain't runnin'."
+
+Lydia gave an exclamation of dismay. "But I must get back to Bellevue
+to-night!"
+
+Paul was out of town, but she knew the agonies of anxiety 'Stashie would
+suffer if she did not appear. "Oh, but I can telephone," she reminded
+herself.
+
+"You kin get out there if you don't mind takin' the long way around,"
+the man explained with a friendly interest. "If you take the Garfield
+line and change at Ironton to the Onteora branch, it'll bring you back
+on the other side of Bellevue, and Bellevue ain't so big but what it
+won't be a very long walk to where you live."
+
+Lydia thanked him, touched, as she so often was, with the kind and, to
+her, welcome absence of impersonality in working people; and, assuring
+herself that she had time enough to eat something before her car's
+departure, betook herself to a dairy lunch-room where she ate a
+conscientiously substantial supper. The heat of the day had left her
+little appetite; but to "take care of herself" now seemed at last one of
+the worth-while things to do which she had always had so eager a
+longing.
+
+At seven o'clock she took the trolley pointed out to her by her friend,
+the starter, who noticed and remembered her when she returned to the
+waiting-room. The evening rush was over, and for some time she was the
+only passenger. Then a very tired-looking, middle-aged man, an
+accountant perhaps, in a shabby alpaca coat, boarded the car and sank at
+once into a restless doze, his heat-paled face nodding about like a
+broken-necked doll's. Lydia herself felt heavy on her the death-like
+fatigue which the last weeks had brought to her, but she was not sleepy.
+She looked out intently at the flat, fertile, kindly country, gradually
+darkening in the summer twilight. She was very fond of her home
+landscape. She had not taken so considerable a journey on a trolley for
+a long time--perhaps not since the trip to the Mallory house-party. That
+was a long time ago.
+
+At the edge of thick woods the car came to a sudden stop. The lights
+went out. The conductor disappeared, twitched at the trolley, and went
+around for a consultation with the motorman, who had at once
+philosophically pulled off his worn glove and sat down on the step.
+"Power's off!" he called back casually into the car to the accountant,
+who had started up wildly, with the idea, apparently, that he had been
+carried past his station. "We've got to wait till they turn her on
+again."
+
+"How long'll that be?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. The whole system is on the bum to-day. Maybe half an
+hour; maybe more. Better take another nap."
+
+The accountant looked around the car, encountered Lydia's eyes, and
+smiled sheepishly. After a time of silent waiting, enlivened only by the
+murmur of the conversation between the motorman and the conductor
+outside, the gray-haired man suggested to Lydia that it would be cooler
+out under the trees, and if she would like to go he would be glad to
+help her. When he had her established on a grassy bank he forbore
+further talk, and sat so still that, as the quiet moments slipped by,
+Lydia almost forgot him.
+
+It was singularly pleasant there, with the rustling blackness of the
+wood behind them, and before them the sweep of the open farming country,
+shimmering faintly in the light of the stars now beginning to show in
+the great unbroken arch of the heavens.
+
+Here the talk of the two men on the steps of the car was distinctly
+audible, and Lydia, with much interest, pieced together a character and
+life-history for each out of their desultory, friendly chat; but
+presently they too fell silent, listening to the stir of the night
+breezes in the forest. Lydia leaned her head against a tree and closed
+her eyes.
+
+She never knew if it were from a doze, or but from a reverie that she
+was aroused by a sudden thrilling sound back of her--the clear, deep
+voice of a distant 'cello. Her heart began to beat faster, as it always
+did at the sound of music, and she sat up amazed, looking back into the
+intense blackness of the wood. And then, like a waking dream, came a
+flood of melody from what seemed to her an angel choir--fresh young
+voices, throbbing and proclaiming through the summer night some joyous,
+ever-ascending message. Lydia felt her pulses loud at her temples.
+Almost a faintness of pleasure came over her. There was something
+ineffably sweet about the disembodied voices sending their triumphant
+chant up to the stars.
+
+The sound stopped as suddenly as it began. The motorman stirred and
+drew a long breath. "They do fine, don't they?" he said. "My oldest
+girl's learning to sing alto with them."
+
+"He ain't musical himself, is he?" asked the conductor.
+
+"No; _he_ ain't. It's some Dutch friends that does the playing. But he
+got the whole thing up, and runs the children. It's a nawful good thing
+for _them_, let me tell you."
+
+"What'd he do it for, I wonder," queried the conductor idly.
+
+"Aw, I don't know. He's kind o' funny, anyhow. Said he wanted to teach
+young folks how to enjoy 'emselves without spending money. That kind of
+talk hits their _folks_ in the right spot, you bet. He owns a slice of
+this farm, you know, and he's given some of the younger kids pieces of
+ground for gardens, and he's got up a night class in carpentering for
+young fellows that work in town all day. He's a crack-a-jack of a
+carpenter himself."
+
+"He'll run into the unions if he don't look out," prophesied the
+conductor.
+
+"I guess likely," assented the motorman. "They got after Dielman the
+other day, did you hear, because he--" The talk drifted to gossip of the
+world of work-people.
+
+It stopped short as the 'cello again sent out its rich, vibrant
+introduction to the peal of full-throated joy. There seemed to be no
+other sound in all the enchanted, starlit world than this fervid
+harmony.
+
+This time it did not stop, but went on and on, swelling and dying away
+and bursting out again into new ecstasies. In one of the pauses, when
+nothing but the 'cello's chant came to her ears, Lydia suddenly heard
+mingling with it the sweet, faint voice of a little stream whispering
+vaguely, near her. It sounded almost like rain on autumn leaves. The
+lights in the car flared up, blinding white, but the two men on the step
+did not stir. The conductor sat with his arms folded on his knees, his
+head on his arms. The motorman leaned against the end of the car. When
+the music finally died, after one long, ringing, exultant shout, no one
+moved for a time.
+
+Then the motorman stood up, drawing on his glove.
+
+"Quite a concert!" said the conductor, starting for the back platform.
+
+"They do _fine_!" repeated the motorman.
+
+The accountant came forward from the shadow and helped Lydia up the
+steps. There were traces of tears on his tired face.
+
+                 *       *       *       *       *
+
+In September, when her mother leaned over her to say in a joyful,
+trembling voice, "Oh, Lydia, it's a girl, a darling little girl!" Lydia
+opened her white lips to say, "She is Ariadne."
+
+"What did you say?" asked her mother.
+
+"We must see that she has the clue," said Lydia faintly.
+
+Mrs. Emery tiptoed to the doctor. "Keep her very quiet," she whispered;
+"she is a little out of her head."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+FOR ARIADNE'S SAKE
+
+
+Little Ariadne was six months old before Lydia could begin to make the
+slightest effort to resume the social routine of her life. This was not
+at all on account of ill health, for she had recovered her strength
+rapidly and completely, and, like a good many normal women, had found
+maternity a solvent of various slight physical disorders of her
+girlhood. She felt now a more assured physical poise than ever before,
+and could not attribute her disappearance from Endbury social life to
+weakness. The fact was that Dr. Melton had upheld her in her wish to
+nurse her baby herself, which limited her to very short absences from
+the house and to a very quiet life within doors. She also discovered
+that the servant problem was by no means simplified by the new member of
+the family. "Girls" had always been unwilling to come out to Bellevue
+because of the distance from their friends and followers, and they now
+put forth another universally recognized obstacle in the phrase, "I
+never work out where there is a baby. They make so much dirt." Anastasia
+O'Hern was there, to be sure--heavy-handed, warm-hearted 'Stashie, who
+took the new little girl to her loyal spinster heart and wept tears of
+joy over her safe arrival; but 'Stashie had proved, as Paul predicted
+from the first time he saw her, incorrigibly rattle-headed and
+loose-ended. She had learned to prepare a number of simple, homely
+dishes, quite enough to supply the actual needs of the everyday
+household, and what she cooked was unusually palatable. She had the
+Celtic feeling for savoriness. She had also managed, under Lydia's
+zealous tuition, to overcome the Celtic tolerance for dirt, and thanks
+to her square, powerful body, as strong as a ditch-digger's, she made
+light work of keeping the house in a most gratifying state of
+cleanliness.
+
+But there were gaps in her equipment that were not to be filled by any
+amount of tuition. In the first place, as Paul said of her, she was as
+much like the traditional trim maid as a hippopotamus is like a gazelle.
+Furthermore, as Dr. Melton summed up the matter in answer to one of
+Paul's outbreaks against her, she was utterly incapable of comprehending
+that satisfied vanity is the vital element in human life. For anything
+that pertained to the appearance of things, 'Stashie was deaf, dumb and
+blind. She would as soon as not put one of her savory stews on the table
+in an earthen crock, and she never could be trusted to set the table
+properly. There were always some kitchen spoons among the silver, and
+the dishes looked, as Paul said, "as though she had stood off and thrown
+them at a bull's-eye in the middle of the table." Moreover, she herself
+could not emancipate herself from the ideas of toilet gleaned in the
+little one-room cabin in County Clare. She was passionately devoted to
+Lydia, and took with the humblest gratitude any hints about the care of
+her person, but it was like trying to make a color-blind person into a
+painter! Anastasia could only love on her knees, and serve, and
+sympathize and cherish; she could not remember to comb her hair, or to
+put on a clean apron when she opened the door, even if it were Madame
+Hollister herself who rang. She had once opened to that important
+personage attired in a calico wrapper, a sweater, and a pair of rubber
+boots, having just come in from emptying the ashes--one of the heavy
+tasks, outside her regular work, which she took upon her strong, willing
+self. "But I was clane, and I got her into the house in two minutes from
+the time she rang, the poor old soul!" she protested to Lydia, who, at
+Paul's instance, had taken her to task.
+
+Lydia explained, "But Mr. Hollister's aunt is a person who would rather
+wait half an hour in the cold than see you without an apron."
+
+To which 'Stashie exclaimed, in awestruck wonder before the mysteries of
+creation, "Folks do be the beatin'est, don't they now, Mis' Hollister!"
+
+"And you must not speak of Mr. Hollister's aunt as a 'poor old soul,'"
+explained Lydia, apprehensive of Paul's wrath if he ever chanced to hear
+such a characterization.
+
+"But she is that," protested 'Stashie. "Anybody that's her age and
+hobbles around so crippled up with the rheumatism--my heart bleeds for
+'em."
+
+"She is very rich--" began Lydia, but after a moment's hesitation she
+had not continued her lesson in social value. She often found that
+'Stashie's questions brought her to a standstill.
+
+There was something lacking in the Irishwoman's mental outfit, namely,
+the capacity even to conceive that ideal of impersonal self-effacement,
+which, as Paul said truthfully, is the everywhere accepted standard for
+servants. Her loquacity was a never-ending joke to Madeleine Lowder and
+her husband, who were exulting in a couple of deft, silent, expensive
+Japanese "boys" and who, since Madeleine frankly expressed her horror at
+the bother of having children, seemed likely to continue ignorant,
+except at comfortable second-hand, of harassing domestic difficulties.
+
+If Lydia had not been in such dire need of another pair of hands than
+her own slender ones, or if the supply from Endbury intelligence offices
+had been a whit less unreliable and uncertain, she would not have felt
+justified in retaining the burly, uncouth Celt, in spite of her own
+affection, so intensely did Paul dislike her. As it was, she felt guilty
+for her presence and miserably responsible for her homeliness of
+conduct. 'Stashie was a constant point of friction between husband and
+wife, and Lydia was trying with desperate ingenuity to avoid points of
+friction by some other method than the usual Endbury one of divided
+interests. Many times she lay awake at night, convinced that her duty
+was to dismiss Anastasia; only to rise in the morning equally convinced
+that things without her would be in the long run even harder and more
+disagreeable for Paul than they were now. The upshot of the matter was
+that she herself was a very incompetent person, she was remorsefully
+sure of that; although her mother and Marietta and Paul's aunt all told
+her that she need expect nothing during the first year of a baby's life
+but one wretched round of domestic confusion.
+
+Lydia did not find it so. She was immensely occupied, it is true, for
+though Ariadne was a strong, healthy child, who spent most of her time,
+her grandmother complained, in sleeping, to Lydia's more intimate
+contact with the situation there seemed to be more things to be done for
+the baby, in addition to the usual cares of housekeeping, than could
+possibly be crowded into twenty-four hours. And yet she was happier
+during those six months than ever before in her life; happier than she
+had ever dreamed anyone could be. She stepped about incessantly from one
+task to another and was very tired at night, but there was no nervous
+strain on her, and she had no moments of blasting skepticism as to the
+value of her labors.
+
+Everything she did, even the most menial tasks connected with the baby,
+was dignified, to her mind, by its usefulness; and she so systematized
+and organized her busy days that she was always ahead of her work. Paul
+was obliged to alter his judgment of her as impractical and
+incapable--although of course the dearest and sweetest of little
+wives--for nothing could have been more competent than the way she
+managed her baby and her simple housekeeping. Indeed, there came to the
+young husband's mind not infrequently, and always with a slight aroma of
+bitterness, the conviction that Lydia was perfectly able to do whatever
+she really wished to do and considered important; and that previous
+conditions must have been due to her unwillingness to set herself
+seriously at the problems before her. It was a new theory about his
+wife's character, which the intelligent young man laid by on a mental
+shelf for future use after this period of intense domesticity should be
+past.
+
+At present, he accepted thankfully his clean house and his savory food,
+was not too much put out by 'Stashie's eccentricities, since there was
+no one but the immediate families to see them, and rejoiced with a
+whimsical tenderness in Lydia's passion of satisfaction with her baby.
+He saw so little of the droll, sleeping, eating little mite that he
+could not as yet take it very seriously as his baby. But it was, on the
+whole, a happy half-year for him too. He was much moved and pleased by
+Lydia's joy. He had meant to make his wife happy.
+
+Lydia herself was transported by the mere physical intoxication of new
+motherhood, a potion more exciting, so her much experienced physician
+said, than any wine ever fermented. She hung over her sleeping baby,
+poring upon the exquisite fineness of the skin, upon the rosy little
+mouth, still sucking comically at an imaginary meal, upon the dimpled,
+fragile hands, upon the peaceful relaxation of the body, till the very
+trusting, appealing essence of babyhood flooded her senses like a strong
+drug; and when the child was awake, and she could bathe the much creased
+little body, and handle the soft arms, and drop passionate kisses on the
+satin-smooth skin, and rub her cheek on the downy head, she found
+herself sometimes trembling and dizzy with emotion. She felt constantly
+buoyed up by a deep trust and belief in life which she had not known
+before. The huge and steadying continuity of existence was revealed to
+her in those days. It was a revelation that was never to leave her. She
+outgrew definitely the sense of the fragmentary futility of living which
+had always been, inarticulate, unvoiced, but intensely felt, the torment
+of her earlier life.
+
+It grieved her generous heart and her aspiration to share all with her
+husband that the exigences of his busy life deprived him of any
+knowledge of this newly-opened well of sweet waters, that he had
+nothing from his parenthood but an amused, half shame-faced pride in
+points about the baby which, he was informed, were creditable.
+
+At a faint hint of this feeling on Lydia's part, her sister-in-law broke
+into her good-natured laughter at Lydia's notions. "What can a man know
+about a baby?" she cried conclusively.
+
+"Why, I didn't know about one till Ariadne came. I learned on her.
+What's to hinder a man's doing the same thing?"
+
+Madeleine was so much amused by this fantastic idea that she repeated it
+to Dr. Melton, who came in just then.
+
+"Don't it take _Lydia_!" she appealed to him.
+
+The doctor considered the lovely, fair-haired creature in silence for a
+moment before answering. Then, "Yes; of course you're right," he
+assented. "It's a strictly feminine monopoly. It's as true that all men
+are incapable of understanding the significance of a baby in the
+universe and in their own lives, as it is true that all women love
+babies and desire them." His tone was full of a heavy significance. He
+could never keep his temper with Paul's sister.
+
+Madeleine received this without a quiver. She neither blushed nor looked
+in the least abashed, but there was an unnecessary firmness in her voice
+as she answered, looking him steadily in the eye: "Exactly! That's just
+what I've been telling Lydia." She often said that she was the only
+woman in Endbury who wasn't afraid of that impertinent little doctor.
+
+After Madeleine had gone away, Lydia looked at her godfather with
+shining eyes. "I am living! I am living!" she told him, holding up the
+baby to him with a gesture infinitely significant; "and I like it as
+well as I thought I should!"
+
+"Most people do," he informed her, "when they get a peck at it. It
+generally takes something cataclysmic, too, to tear them loose from
+their squirrel-cages--like babies, or getting converted."
+
+If he thought that early married life could also be classed among these
+beneficently uprooting agencies, he kept his thoughts to himself.
+Lydia's marriage had been eminently free from disagreeable shocks or
+surprises, and amply deserved to be called successful in the usual
+reasonable and moderate application of that adjective to matrimony; but
+there had been nothing in it, certainly, to destroy even temporarily
+anyone's grasp on what are known as the realities of life.
+
+The doctor considered, and added to his last speech: "Getting converted
+is surer. Babies grow up!"
+
+Lydia felt that her godfather was right, and that babies gave one only a
+short respite, when, toward spring, she observed in all the inhabitants
+of her world repeated signs of uneasy dissatisfaction with her
+"submergence in domesticity," as Mrs. Emery put it in a family council.
+Her father inquired mildly, one day in March, with the touchingly vague
+interest he took in his children's affairs, if it weren't about time she
+returned a few calls and accepted some invitations, and began "to live
+_like_ folks again." "Ariadne isn't the first baby in the world," he
+concluded.
+
+"She's the first one _I_ ever had," Lydia reminded him, with the
+humorous smile that was so like his own.
+
+"Well, you mustn't forget, as so many young mothers do, that you're a
+member of society and a wife, as well as a wet-nurse," he said.
+
+Marietta had never resumed an easy or genial intercourse with the
+Hollisters since the affair of the dinner party, but she came to call at
+not infrequent intervals, and Paul's sister dropped in often, to "keep
+an eye on Lydia," as she told her husband. She had an affection for her
+sister-in-law, in spite of an exasperated amusement over her liability
+to break out with new ideas at unexpected moments. Both these ladies
+were loud in their exhortations to Lydia not to let maternity be in her
+life the encumbering, unbeautifying, too lengthy episode it was to women
+with less force of character than their own. "You do get so _out_ of
+things," Madeleine told her with her usual breathless italicizing, "if
+you stay away too long. You just never can catch up! There's a
+behind-the-timesy _smell_ about your clothes--honest, there is--if you
+let them go too long."
+
+Marietta added her quota of experienced wisdom to the discussion. "If
+you just hang over a baby all the time, you get morbid, and queer, and
+different."
+
+Madeleine had laughed, and summed up the matter with a terse, "Worse
+than that! You get left!"
+
+Lydia's elder brother, George, the rich one, who lived in Cleveland and
+manufactured rakes and hoes, wrote her one of his rare letters to the
+same effect. Lydia thought it likely that he had been moved to this
+unusual show of interest in her affairs by proddings from her mother and
+Marietta. If this surmise was correct, and if a similar request had been
+sent to Henry, the other member of the Emery family, the one who had
+married the grocer's daughter, the appeal had a strikingly different
+effect. From Oregon came an impetuous, slangily-worded exhortation to
+Lydia not to make a fool of herself and miss the best of life to live up
+to the tommyrot standard of old dry-as-dust Endbury. The Emerys heard
+but seldom from this erring son, and Lydia, who had been but a child
+when he left home, had never before received a letter from him. He wrote
+from a fruit farm in Oregon, the description of which, on the
+grandiloquent letter-head, gave an impression of ampleness and
+prosperity which was not contradicted by the full-blooded satisfaction
+in life which breathed from every line of the breezy, good-natured
+letter.
+
+The incident stirred Lydia's imagination. It spoke of a wider
+horizon--of a fresher air than that about her. She tried to remember the
+loud-talking, much-laughing, easy-going young man as she had seen him
+last. They were too far apart in years to have had much companionship,
+but there had been between them an unspoken affection which had never
+died. People always said that George and Marietta were alike and Lydia
+and Harry. To this Mrs. Emery always protested that Lydia wasn't in the
+_least_ like Henry, and she didn't know what people were talking about;
+but the remark gave a secret pleasure to Lydia. She, too, was very fond
+of laughing, and her brother's vein of light-hearted nonsense had been a
+great delight to her. It was not present in any of the rest of the
+family, and certainly did not show itself in her at this period of her
+life.
+
+During this time Paul's attention was concentrated on bringing about a
+reallotment of American Electric territory in the Middle West, an
+arrangement that would add several busy cities to his district and make
+a decided difference in his salary and commissions. He worked early and
+late in the Endbury office, and made many trips into all parts of the
+field, to gather data conclusive of the value of his scheme. Lydia had
+tried hard to get from him information enough to understand what it was
+all about, but he put her off with vague, fatigued assurances that it
+was too complicated for her to grasp, or for him to go over without his
+papers; that it would take him too long to explain, and that, anyhow,
+she could be sure of one thing--it was all straight, clean business,
+designed entirely to give the public better service and more work from
+everybody all 'round. Lydia did not doubt this. It was always a great
+source of satisfaction to her to feel secure and unshaken trust in her
+father's and her husband's business integrity, and she was sorry for
+Marietta, who could not, she feared, count among her spiritual
+possessions any such faith in Ralph. It was, on the other hand, one of
+her most unresigned regrets, that she was not allowed to share in these
+ideals for public service of her husband and father--these ideals so
+distantly glimpsed by her, and perhaps not very consciously felt by
+them. It was not that they refused to answer any one of her questions,
+but they were so little in the habit of articulating this phase of their
+activities that their tongues balked stubbornly before her ignorant and
+fumbling attempts to enter this inner chamber.
+
+"Oh, it's all right, Lydia! Just you trust me!" Paul would cry, with a
+hint of vexation in his voice, as if he felt that questions could mean
+only suspicion.
+
+Lydia's tentative efforts to construct a bridge between her world and
+his met constantly with this ill success. She had had so little training
+in bridge-building, she thought sadly.
+
+One evening that spring, such a futile attempt of hers was interrupted
+by the son of one of their neighbors, a lad of eighteen, who had just
+been given a subordinate position in his father's business. As he
+strolled up to their veranda steps, Lydia looked up from the dress she
+was enlarging for the rapidly growing baby and reflected that
+astonishingly rapid growth is the law of all healthy youth. The tall boy
+looked almost ludicrous to her in his ultra-correct man's outfit, so
+vividly did she recall him, three or four years before, in short
+trousers and round-collared shirt-waist. His smooth, rosy face had still
+the downy bloom of adolescence.
+
+"Howd' do, Walter!" said Paul, glancing up from a pile of blue-prints
+over which he had been straining his eyes in the fading evening light.
+
+"Evening," answered the boy, nodding and sitting down on the top step
+with one knee up. "D'you mind if I smoke, Mrs. Hollister?"
+
+"Not at all," she answered gravely, tickled by the elaborate
+carelessness with which he handled his new pipe.
+
+"What you working on, Hollister?" he went on with the manner of one old
+business man to another.
+
+Lydia hid a smile. She found him delicious. She began to think how she
+could make Dr. Melton laugh with her account of Walter the Man.
+
+"The lay-out of the new power-house--Elliott-Gridley works in Urbana,"
+answered Paul, in a straightforward, reasonable tone, a little absent.
+
+Lydia stopped smiling. It was a tone he had never used to answer any
+business question she had ever put to him. "I'm figuring on their
+generators," he went on in explanation.
+
+"Big contract?" asked Walter.
+
+"Two thousand kilowatt turbo generator," answered Paul.
+
+The other whistled. "Whew! I didn't know they had the cash!"
+
+"They haven't," said Paul briefly.
+
+"Oh, chattel-mortgage?" surmised the other.
+
+"Lease-contract," Paul corrected. "That doesn't have to be recorded."
+
+"What's the matter with recording it?"
+
+"Afraid of their credit. They don't want Dunn's sending all over
+creation that they've put chattel-mortgages on their equipment, do
+they?"
+
+"No; sure! I see." The boy grasped instantly, with a quick nod, the
+other's meaning. "Well, that's _one_ way of gettin' 'round it!" he added
+admiringly after an instant's pause.
+
+Lydia had laid down her work and was looking intently at her two
+companions. At this she gave a stifled exclamation which made the boy
+turn his head. "Say, Mrs. Hollister, aren't you looking kind of pale
+this evening?" he asked. "These first hot nights do take it out of a
+person, don't they? Mr. Hollister ought to take you to Put-in-Bay for a
+holiday. Momma'd take care of the baby for you and welcome. She's crazy
+about babies." He was again the overgrown school-boy that Lydia knew.
+The conversation drifted to indifferent topics. Lydia did not take her
+usual share in it, and when their caller had gone Paul inquired if she
+really were exhausted by the heat.
+
+"Oh, no," she said; "you know I don't mind the heat."
+
+"You didn't say much when Walter was here, and I--"
+
+"I was thinking," Lydia broke in. "I was thinking that I couldn't
+understand a word you and Walter were saying any more than if you were
+talking Hebrew. I was thinking that that little boy knows more about
+your business than I do."
+
+Paul did not attempt to deny this, but he laughed at her dramatic
+accent. "Sure, he does! And about how to tie a four-in-hand, and what's
+the best stud to wear at the back of a collar, and where to buy socks.
+What's that to you?"
+
+Lydia looked at him with quivering, silent lips.
+
+He answered, with a little heat: "Why, look-y here, Lydia, suppose I
+were a doctor. You wouldn't expect to know how many grains of morphine
+or what d'you call 'em I was going to use in--"
+
+"But Dr. Melton _is_ a doctor, and I know lots about what he thinks of
+as he lives day after day--there are other things besides technical
+details and grains of morphine--other problems--human things--Why, for
+instance, there's one question that torments him all the time--how much
+it's right to humor people who aren't sick but think they are. He talks
+to me a great deal about such--"
+
+Paul laughed, rising and gathering up his blue-prints. "Well, I can't
+think of any problem that torments me but the everlasting one of how to
+sell more generators and motors than my competitors. Come on indoors,
+Honey; I've got to have some light if I finish going over these
+to-night."
+
+His accent was evidently intended to end the discussion, and Lydia
+allowed it to do so, although the incident was one she could not put out
+of her mind. She watched Walter going back and forth to Endbury with a
+jealousy the absurdity of which she herself realized, and she listened
+with a painful intentness to the boy's talk during his occasional idle
+sojourns on their veranda steps. Yet she had been used to hearing Paul
+talk unintelligibly to the business associates whom, from time to time,
+he brought out to the house to dine and to talk business afterward.
+Somehow, she said to herself, it's being just _Walter_ seemed to bring
+it home to her. To have that boy--and yet she liked him, too, she
+thought. She looked sometimes into his fresh, innocently keen face with
+a yearning apprehension. Paul was amused at his precocious airs, and yet
+was not without respect for his rapidly developing business capacity. He
+said once, "Walter's a real nice boy. I shouldn't mind having a son like
+that myself!"
+
+The remark startled Lydia. If she were to have a son he _would_ be like
+that, she realized. And he would grow up and marry some--she sprang up
+and caught Ariadne to her in a sudden fierce embrace.
+
+"You'll break your back lifting that heavy baby 'round so," Paul
+remonstrated with justice.
+
+For all her aversion to the set forms of "society" as understood by
+Endbury, Lydia was fond of having people about her, "to try to get
+really acquainted with them" she said, and during that summer the
+Hollister veranda in the evening became a rendezvous for their Bellevue
+neighbors. Paul rather deplored the time wasted in this unprofitable
+variety of informal social life which, in his phrase, "counted for
+nothing" but he was always glad to see Walter. "At the rate he's going
+and the way he's taking hold, he'll be a valuable business friend in a
+few years," he said prophetically to Lydia, and he assumed more and more
+the airs of a comrade with the lad.
+
+One evening when Walter came lounging over to the veranda, Lydia was
+busy indoors, but later she stepped to the door in time to hear Paul
+say, laughing: "Well, for all that, he's not so good as Wellman Phelps'
+stenographer."
+
+"How so?" asked the boy, alert for a pleasantry from his elder.
+
+"Why, Phelps carries this fellow 'round with him everywhere he goes, has
+had him for years, and twice a week all he has to do is to say: 'Say,
+Fred; write my wife, will you?'"
+
+His listener broke out into a peal of boyish laughter. "Pretty good!" he
+applauded the joke.
+
+"It's a fact," Paul went on. "Fred writes it and signs it and sends it
+off, and Phelps never has to trouble his head about it."
+
+Lydia stepped back into the darkness of the hall.
+
+When she came out later, a misty figure in white, Paul rose, saying,
+"Well, Walter, I'll leave you to Mrs. Hollister now. I've got some work
+to do before I get to bed."
+
+Lydia sat silent, looking at the boy's face, clear and untarnished in
+the moonlight. He was looking dreamily away at the lawn, dappled with
+the shadow of the slender young trees. They seemed creatures scarcely
+more sylvan than he, sprawled, like a loitering faun with his hands
+clasped behind his head. His mouth had the pure, full outlines of a
+child's.
+
+"What are you thinking about, Walter?" Lydia asked him suddenly.
+
+He started, and brought his limpid gaze to hers. "About how to
+cross-index our follow-up letter catalogue better," he answered
+promptly.
+
+"Really? Really?" She leaned toward him, urging him to frankness.
+
+He was surprised at her tone. "Why, sure!" he told her. "Why not? What
+else?"
+
+Lydia said no more.
+
+She had never felt more helplessly her remoteness from her husband's
+world than during that spring. It was a sentiment that Paul, apparently,
+did not reciprocate. In spite of his frequent absences from home and his
+detached manner about most domestic questions, he had as definite ideas
+about his wife's resumption of her social duties as had everyone else.
+"It made him uneasy," as he put it, "to be losing so many points in the
+game."
+
+"Look here, my dear," he said one evening in spring when the question
+came up; "summer's almost here, and this winter's been as good as
+dropped right out. Can't you just pick up a few threads and make a
+beginning? It'll make it easier in the fall." He added, uneasily, "We
+don't want old Lowder and Madeleine to get ahead of us entirely, you
+know. You can leave the kid with 'Stashie, can't you, once in a while?
+She ought to be able to do _that_ much, I should think." He spoke as
+though he had assigned to her the simplest possible of all domestic
+undertakings. As Lydia made no response, he said finally, before
+attacking a pile of papers, "If I'm going to earn a lot more money, what
+good'll it do us if you don't do your share? Besides, we owe it to the
+kid. You want to do your best by your little girl, don't you?"
+
+As always, Lydia responded with a helpless alacrity to that appeal.
+"Oh, yes! Oh, yes! We must do our best for her." This phrase summed up
+the religion she had at last found after so much fervent, undirected
+search. The church, as she knew it, was chiefly the social center of
+various fashionable activities which differed from ordinary fashionable
+enterprises only in being used to bring in money, which money, handed
+over to the rector, disappeared into the maw of some unknown, voracious,
+charitable institution. And beyond the church there had been no element
+in the life she knew, that was not frankly materialistic. But now, as
+the miracle of awakening consciousness took place daily in her very
+sight, and as the first dawnings of a personality began to look out of
+her child's eyes, all Lydia's vague spiritual cravings, all the groping
+tendrils of her aspirations, clung about the conviction more and more
+summing up her inner life, that she must do her best for Ariadne, must
+make the world, into which that little new soul had come, a better place
+than she herself had found it. She felt as naively and passionately that
+her child must be saved the mistakes that she had made, as though she
+were the first mother who ever sent up over her baby's head that
+pitiful, universal prayer.
+
+The matter of the social duty of the young Hollisters was finally
+compromised by Lydia's accepting a number of invitations for the latter
+part of the season, and giving a series of big receptions in May. They
+were not by a hair nor a jot nor a tittle to be distinguished from their
+predecessors of the year before. As they seemed hardly adequate, Lydia
+suggested half-heartedly that they give a dinner party, but Paul
+replied, "With 'Stashie to pour soup down people's backs and ask them
+how their baby's whooping cough is, as she passes the potatoes?"
+
+The hot weather came with the rush that was always so unexpected and so
+invariable, and another season was over. It was a busy, silent,
+thoughtful summer for Lydia. Of course (much to Lydia's distress),
+Ariadne had been weaned when her mother had been forced to leave her to
+"go out" again, and this necessitated such anxious attention to her
+diet and general regimen during the hot weather that Lydia was very
+grateful to have little to interfere with her.
+
+The General Office had accepted provisionally Paul's redistributing
+plan, and in his anxiety to prove its value he was away from home more
+even than usual. The heat was terrible, but Lydia and he both knew no
+other climate, and Lydia loved the summer as the time of year when the
+fierceness of Nature forced on all her world a reluctant adjournment of
+their usual methods of spending their lives. She was absorbed in
+Ariadne, and the slow, blazing summer days were none too long for her.
+
+The child began to develop an individuality. She was a sensitive,
+quickly-responsive little thing; exactly, so Mrs. Emery said, like Lydia
+at her age, except that she seemed to have none of Lydia's native mirth,
+but, rather, a little pensive air that made her singularly appealing to
+all who saw her, and that pierced her mother's heart with an anguish of
+protecting love.
+
+Lydia said to her godfather one day, suddenly, "I wonder if people can
+be taught how to fight?"
+
+He had one of his flashes of intuition. "The baby, you mean?"
+
+Lydia evaded the directness of this. "Oh, in general, aren't folks
+better off if they like to fight for themselves? Don't they _have_ to?"
+
+He considered the question in one of his frowning silences, so long that
+Lydia started when he spoke again. "They don't need to fight with claws
+for their food, as they used to do. Things are arranged now so that the
+physically strong, who like such a life, are the ones who choose it.
+They get food for the others. Why shouldn't the morally strong fight for
+the weaker ones and make it possible for everyone to have a chance at
+developing the best of himself without having to battle with others to
+do it?"
+
+"That's pretty vague," said Lydia.
+
+"Why, look here," said the doctor. "You don't plow the field to plant
+the wheat that makes your bread. That's a man of a coarser physical
+fiber than yours, who is strengthened by the effort, and not exhausted
+as you would be. Why shouldn't the world be so organized that somebody
+of coarser moral texture than yours should do battle with the forces of
+materialism and tragic triviality that--"
+
+"But Ariadne's growing up! She will need all that so _soon_-- and the
+world won't be organized then, you know it won't--and she's no fighter
+by instinct, any more than--" She was silent. The doctor filled in her
+incomplete sentence mentally, and found no answer to make.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+"THROUGH PITY AND TERROR EFFECTING A PURIFICATION OF THE HEART"
+
+
+One hot day in August, Ariadne slept later than usual and when she woke
+was quite unlike her usual romping, active self. Her round face was
+deeply flushed, and she lay listlessly in her little bed, repulsing with
+a feeble fretfulness every attempt to give her food. Lydia's heart
+swelled so that she was choked with its palpitations. Paul was out of
+town. She was alone in the house except for her servant. To that
+ignorant warm heart she turned with an inexpressible thankfulness. "Oh,
+'Stashie! Stashie!" she called in a voice that brought the other
+clattering breathlessly up the stairs. "The baby! Look at the baby! And
+she won't touch her bottle."
+
+The tragic change in the Irishwoman's face as she looked at their
+darling, their anguished community of feeling--there was instantly a
+bond for the two women which wonderfully ignored all the dividing
+differences between them. Lydia felt herself--as she rarely did--not
+alone. It brought a wild comfort into her tumult. "'Stashie, you
+don't--you don't think she's--_sick?_" She brought the word out with
+horrified difficulty.
+
+'Stashie was running down the back stairs. "I'm 'phonin' to th' little
+ould doctor," she called over her shoulder.
+
+Lydia ran to catch up Ariadne. The child turned from her mother with a
+moan and closed her eyes heavily. A moment later, to Lydia's terror, she
+had sunk into a stupor.
+
+The doctor found mistress and maid hanging over the baby's bed with
+white faces and trembling lips, hand in hand, like sisters. He examined
+the child silently, swiftly, looking with a face of inscrutable
+blankness at the clinical thermometer with which he had taken her
+temperature. "Just turn her so she'll lie comfortably," he told
+'Stashie, "and then you stay with her a moment. I want a talk with your
+mistress."
+
+In the hall, he cast at Lydia a glance of almost angry exhortation to
+summon her strength. "Are you fit to be a mother?" he asked harshly.
+
+"Wait a minute," said Lydia; she drew a long breath and took hold of the
+balustrade. "Yes," she answered.
+
+"Ariadne's very sick. I oughtn't to have allowed you to wean her with
+hot weather coming on. You'd better wire Paul."
+
+"Yes," she said, not blenching. "What else can I do?"
+
+"'Phone to the hospital for a trained nurse, start some water boiling to
+sterilize things, and get somebody here in a hurry to go to the nearest
+drug store for me. I'll go back to her now."
+
+"Is she--is she--dangerously--?" asked Lydia in a low, steady voice.
+
+"Yes; she is," he said unsparingly.
+
+The telegram Lydia sent her husband read: "Ariadne suddenly taken very
+sick. Dr. Melton says dangerously. He thinks she does not suffer much,
+though she seems to. When shall I expect you?"
+
+The answer she received in a few hours read: "Have two nurses. Get
+Jones, Cleveland, consultation. Impossible to leave."
+
+It was handed her as she was running up the stairs with a pitcher of hot
+water. She read it, as she did everything that day, in a dreamlike
+rapidity and quietness, and showed it to Dr. Melton without comment. He
+handed it back without a word. Later, he turned for an instant from the
+little bed to say, irrelevantly, "Peterson, of Toledo, would be better
+than Jones, if I have to have anybody. But so far, it's simple
+enough--damnably simple."
+
+He was obliged to leave for a time after this, called by a patient at
+the point of death. That seemed quite natural to Lydia. Death was thick
+in the air. He left the baby to a clear-eyed, deft-handed, impersonal
+trained nurse, on whom Lydia waited slavishly, sitting motionless in a
+corner of the room until she was sent for something, then flying
+noiselessly upon her errand.
+
+Her mother and father were out of town, and Marietta limited herself to
+telephoning frequent inquiries. She told 'Stashie to tell her sister she
+knew she would be only in the way, with two nurses in the house. Lydia
+made 'Stashie answer all the telephone calls. She felt that if she broke
+her silence, if she tried to speak--and then she could not bear to be
+out of the sight of the little figure with the flushed cheeks, moving
+her head back and forth on the pillow and gazing about with bright,
+unseeing eyes. As night came on, she began to give, in a voice not her
+own, little piteous cries of suffering, or strange delirious mockeries
+of her pretty laughter and quaint, unintelligible, prattling talk. Once,
+as the long, hot night stood still, the baby called out, quite clearly:
+"Mamma! Mamma!" It was the first time she had ever said it.
+
+Lydia sprang up and rushed toward the bed like an insane person, her
+arms outstretched, her eyes glittering. Dr. Melton did not forbid her to
+take up her child, but he said in a neutral tone, "It would be better
+for her to lie perfectly quiet."
+
+Lydia stopped short, shuddering. The doctor did not take his eyes from
+his little patient. After a moment the mother went slowly back to her
+seat. "Hand me the thermometer," said the doctor to the nurse.
+
+In the early morning came a telegram from Paul. "Wire me frequently
+baby's condition. Spare no expense in treatment."
+
+Lydia answered: "Ariadne slightly worse. Doctor says crisis in three
+days."
+
+This time she put in no extra information as to the baby's suffering,
+and her message was under ten words, like his own. She despatched him
+thereafter a bulletin every four or five hours. They ran mostly to the
+effect that Ariadne was about the same.
+
+The doctor came and went, the nurses relieved each other, the telephone
+rang for Marietta's inquiries, Flora Burgess called once a day to get
+the news from 'Stashie. Lydia was slave to the nurses, alert for the
+slightest service she could render them, divining, with a desperate
+intuition, their needs before they were formulated. 'Stashie was the
+only person who paid the least attention to her, 'Stashie the only
+phenomena to break in on the solitude that surrounded her like an
+illimitable plain. 'Stashie made her eat. 'Stashie saw to it that once
+or twice she lay down. 'Stashie combed her hair, and bathed her white
+face--most of all, 'Stashie went about with eyes that reflected
+faithfully the suffering in Lydia's own. She said very little, but as
+they passed, the two women sometimes exchanged brief words: "Niver you
+think it possible, Mis' Hollister!"
+
+"No," Lydia would answer resolutely; "it's not possible."
+
+But as the hours slowly filed past the doctor assured her bluntly that
+it would be quite possible. "There's a fighting chance," he said, "and
+nothing more." He added relentlessly, "If I hadn't been such a fool as
+to let you wean her--"
+
+There was in his manner none of his usual tenderness to his godchild.
+One would have thought he scarcely saw her. He was the physician wholly.
+Lydia was grateful to him for this. She could not have borne his
+tenderness then, but his professional concentration left her horribly
+alone.
+
+No, not alone! There was always 'Stashie--silent 'Stashie, with red
+eyes, her heart bleeding. But even 'Stashie's loyal heart could not know
+all the bitterness of Lydia's. 'Stashie's breasts did not swell and
+throb, as if in mockery. 'Stashie did not hear, over and over, "If she
+had not been weaned--"
+
+On the night and near the hour when the crisis was expected, Lydia was
+at the end of the hall, where she had installed an oil-stove. She was
+heating water needed for some of the processes of the sick room. It had
+begun to steam up in the thick, hot night air, was singing loudly, and
+would boil in an instant. She sat looking at it in her tense, trembling
+quiet. There was no light but the blue flame of the stove.
+
+Suddenly there rang loudly in her ears the question to which she had
+deafened herself with such crucifying effort--"What if Ariadne should
+die?" It was as though someone had called to her. She looked down into
+the black abyss from which she had willfully turned away her eyes, and
+saw that it was fathomless. A throe of revolt and hatred shook her. She
+bowed her head to her knees, racked by an anguish compared with which
+the torture of childbirth was nothing; and out of this deadly pain came
+forth, as in childbirth, something alive--a vision as swift, as passing
+as a glimpse into the gates of Paradise; a blinding certainty of
+immensity, of the hugeness of the whole of which she and Ariadne were a
+part; of the sacredness of life, which was to be lived sacredly, even
+if-- She raised her head, living a more exalted instant than she had
+ever dreamed she would know.
+
+The water broke into quick, dancing bubbles. In a period of time
+incalculably short, transfiguration had come to her.
+
+The door at the other end of the hall opened and Dr. Melton's light,
+uneven footstep echoed back of her. She did not turn. He laid a hand on
+her shoulder. It was trembling, and with a wonderful consciousness of
+endless courage she turned to comfort him. His lips were twitching so
+that for an instant he could not speak. Then, "She'll pull through. I'm
+pretty sure now, she'll--" he got out and leaned against the wall.
+
+Lydia took him into a protecting embrace as though it were his baby who
+had turned back from the gates of death. She had come into a larger
+heritage. She was mother to all that suffered. Looking down on the head
+which, for an instant, lay on her bosom, she noticed how white the hair
+was. He was an old man, her godfather, he had been on a long strain--.
+He looked up at her. And then in an instant it was over. He had mastered
+himself and had grasped the handle of the basin.
+
+"How long has this been boiling?" he asked.
+
+Lydia pointed to her watch, hanging on the wall. "Three minutes by
+that," she said. "May I leave to tell 'Stashie?"
+
+The doctor nodded absently.
+
+Neither spoke of Paul.
+
+Lydia hurried across the dark, silent house with swift sureness. The
+happiness she was about to confer cast a radiance upon her. She touched
+the door to the servant's room, and ran her fingers lightly over it to
+find the knob. Faint as the noise was, it was answered instantly by a
+stir inside. There was a thud of bare feet and a quick rush. Lydia felt
+the door swing open before her in the darkness and spoke quickly to the
+trembling, breathing form she divined there, "The doctor says she's
+safe."
+
+Strong arms were about her, hot tears not her own rained down on her
+face. Before she knew it, she was swept to her knees, where, locked in
+the other's close embrace, she felt the big heart thump loud against her
+own and heard go up above her head a wild "Oh, God! Oh, Mary Mother! Oh,
+Christ! Oh, Mary Mother! Glory be to God! Hail, Mary, Mother of God!
+Thanks be to God! Thanks be--"
+
+Kneeling there in the blackness, with her servant's arms around her,
+Lydia thought it the first prayer she had ever heard.
+
+                 *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ariadne grew well with the miraculous rapidity of children, and when
+Paul came back was almost herself again, if a little thinner.
+
+It was upon Lydia that Paul's eyes fastened, Lydia very white, her face
+almost translucent, her starry eyes contradicting the tremor of her
+lips. He drew her to him, crying out: "Why, Lydia darling, you look as
+though you'd been drawn through a knot-hole! This has been enough sight
+harder on you than on the baby! What in the world wore _you_ out so? I
+thought you had two nurses!"
+
+He looked closely into her face, seeing more changes: "Why, you poor,
+poor, poor thing!" he said compassionately. "You look positively years
+older."
+
+"Oh, I am that," she told him, seeming to speak, oddly enough, he
+thought, exultantly.
+
+"You just shouldn't allow yourself to get so wrought up over Ariadne,"
+he expostulated affectionately. "You'll wear yourself out! What earthly
+good did it do the baby? Sickness is a matter for professionals, I tell
+you what! You had the two nurses and your precious old Dr. Melton that
+you swear by! What more could be done? That's the reason I didn't come
+back. I knew well enough that there wasn't an earthly thing I could do
+to help."
+
+Lydia looked at him so strangely that he noticed it. "Oh, of course I
+could have been company for you. But that was the _only_ thing! Getting
+the baby well was the business of the hour, _wasn't_ it now? And the
+doctor and nurses were looking out for that. Besides, you had 'Stashie
+to wait on you."
+
+"Yes; I had 'Stashie," admitted Lydia.
+
+Paul perceived uneasily some enigmatic quality in her quiet answer, and
+went on reasonably: "Now, Lydia, don't go making yourself out a martyr
+because I didn't come back. You know I'd have come if there was anything
+to be done! I'd have come from the ends of the earth to help you nurse
+her if we'd had to do that! But, thank the Lord, I make enough money so
+we could do better by the little tad than that!"
+
+"Suppose I had gone to the theater that night," asked Lydia slowly.
+"There was nothing I could do here."
+
+Paul was justifiably aggrieved. "Good Lord, Lydia! I wasn't off amusing
+myself! I was doing _business!_"
+
+His special accent for the word was never more pronounced.
+
+"Making money to pay for the trained nurses that saved her life," he
+ended. His conviction of the unanswerable force of this statement put
+him again in good humor. "Now, little madame, you listen to me. You're
+going to take a junketing honeymoon off with me, or I'll know the reason
+why! I'm going to take you up to Put-in-Bay for a vacation! Pretty near
+all our card-club gang are there now, and we'll have a gay old time and
+cheer you up! I bet you just let yourself go, and worried yourself into
+a fever, didn't you?"
+
+During this speech Lydia stood leaning against him, feeling the cloth of
+his sleeve rough on her bare forearm, feeling the stir and life of his
+body, the warmth of his breath on her face. She had an impulse to scream
+wildly to him, as though to make him hear and stop and turn, before he
+finally disappeared from her sight; and she faced him dumbly. There were
+no words to tell him--she tried to speak, but before his absent, kind,
+wandering eyes, a foreknowledge of her own inarticulateness closed her
+lips. He had not been there, and so he would never know. She stirred,
+moved away, and rearranged the flowers in a vase. "Oh, yes; I worried,
+of course," she said. "The baby was awfully sick for three days."
+
+She felt desperately that she was failing in the most obvious duty not
+to try to make him understand what had happened in his absence. She
+bethought herself of one fact, the mere statement of which should tell
+him a thousand times more eloquently than words, something of what she
+had suffered. "The doctor told me twice that she wouldn't have been sick
+if she hadn't been weaned." She said this with an accent of immense
+significance, clasping her hands together hard.
+
+Paul was unpacking his suit-case. "Great Scott! You nursed her six
+months!" he said conclusively, over his shoulder. "Besides, you _had_ to
+wean her--don't you remember?"
+
+"Oh, yes; I remember," said Lydia. Her hands dropped to her sides.
+
+"Don't they get over things quickly?" commented Paul, looking around at
+the baby. "To see her creeping around like a little hop-toad and
+squeaking that rubber bunny--why, I declare, I don't believe that
+anything's been the matter with her at all. You and the doctor lost your
+nerve, I guess."
+
+Three or four days later he was called away again. Their regular routine
+began. The long, slow days, slid past the house in Bellevue in endless,
+dreamy procession. Ariadne grew fast, developing constantly new
+faculties, new powers. By the end of the summer she was no longer a
+baby, but a person. The young mother felt the same mysterious forces of
+change and growth working irresistibly in herself. The long summer,
+thoughtful and solitary, marked the end of one period in her life.
+
+She looked forward shrinkingly to the winter. What would happen to this
+new self whose growth in her was keeping pace with her child's? What
+would happen next?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+A BLACK MILESTONE
+
+
+What happened was, in the first week of October, the sudden death of her
+father. It was sudden only to his wife and daughter, whom, as always,
+the Judge had tried to spare, at all costs, the knowledge of anything
+unpleasant. Dr. Melton thought that perhaps the strong man's incredulity
+of anything for him to fear had a good deal to do with his repeated
+refusals to allow his wife or daughter to be warned of the danger of
+apoplexy. Without that hypothesis, it seemed incredible, he told Mrs.
+Sandworth, that so kind a man could be so cruel.
+
+"Everything's incredible," murmured Mrs. Sandworth, her handkerchief at
+her eyes, her loving heart aching for the newly-made widow, her lifelong
+friend.
+
+Her brother did not answer. He sat, gnawing savagely on his finger
+nails, his thoughts centered, as always, on his darling
+Lydia--fatherless.
+
+He had prided himself on his acute insight into human nature in general,
+and upon his specialized, intensified knowledge of those two women whom
+he had known so long and studied so minutely; but "I've been a conceited
+blockhead, and vanity's treacherous as well as damnable," he cried out
+to his sister some days later, amazed beyond expression at the way in
+which their loss affected Lydia and her mother.
+
+Mrs. Emery's attitude was a revelation to him, a revelation that left
+him almost as angrily full of grief as she herself. He had thought best
+on the whole not to disclose to her the substance of the several
+conversations he had had with his dead friend on the subject of
+finances. With two prosperous sons, the widow would be well taken care
+of, he thought, perhaps adding with a little acridity, "just as she
+always has been, without a thought on her part." But when Mrs. Emery,
+divining the truth with an awful intuition, came flying to him after the
+settlement, he was not proof against the fury of her interrogations. If
+she wanted to know, he would tell her, he thought grimly to himself.
+
+"There is nothing left," she began, bursting into his office, "but the
+house, which has a mortgage, and the insurance--nothing! Nothing!"
+
+It was rather soon for her to be resentful, the doctor thought bitterly,
+misreading the misery on her face. "No," he said.
+
+"Had the Judge lost any money--do you know?"
+
+"No; I think not."
+
+"But where--what--we had at one time five thousand dollars at least in
+the savings bank. I happened to know of that small account. I supposed
+of course there was more. There is no trace of even that, the
+administrator says."
+
+"That went into the extra expenses of the year Lydia made her debut. And
+her wedding cost a great deal, he told me one day--and her
+trousseau--and other expenses at that time."
+
+Used as the doctor was to the universal custom of divided interests
+among his well-to-do patients, it did not seem too strange to him to be
+giving information about her own affairs to this gray-haired matron. She
+was not the first widow to whom he had been forced to break bad news of
+her husband's business.
+
+Mrs. Emery stared at him, her dry lips apart, a glaze over her eyes. He
+thought her expression strange. As she said nothing, he added, with a
+little sour pleasure in defending his dead friend, even if it should
+give a prick to a survivor, "The Judge was so scrupulously honest, you
+know." The widow sat down and laid her arms across the table, still
+staring hard at the doctor. It came to him that she was not looking at
+him at all, but at some devastating inner sight, which seared her
+heart, but from which she could not turn away her eyes. He himself
+turned away, beginning to be aware of some passion within her beyond his
+divination. There was a long silence.
+
+Finally, "That was the reason he would not stop working," said the woman
+in a voice which made the physician whirl about. He looked sharply into
+her face, and what he saw there took him in one stride to her side. She
+kept her stony eyes still on the place where he had been--eyes that saw
+only, as though for the first time, some long procession of past events.
+
+"I see everything now," she went on with the same flat intonation. "He
+_could_ not stop. That was the reason why he would never rest."
+
+She got slowly to her feet, smoothing over and over one side of her
+skirt with a strange automatic gesture. She was looking full into the
+doctor's face now. "I have killed him," she said quietly, and fell as
+though struck down by a blow from behind.
+
+Her long, long illness was spent in the Melton's home, with the doctor
+in attendance and Julia Sandworth, utterly devoted, constantly at hand.
+The old Emery house, the outward symbol of her married life, was sold,
+and the big "yard" cut up into building lots long before she was able to
+sit up. Lydia came frequently, but, acting on the doctor's express
+command, never brought Ariadne. The outbreaks of self-reproach and
+embittered grief that were likely to burst upon the widow, even in the
+midst of one of her quiet, listless days, were not, he said, for a child
+to see or hear, especially such a sensitive little thing as Ariadne.
+Those wild bursts of remorse were delirious, he told Lydia, but to his
+sister he said he wished they were. "I imagine they are the only times
+when she comes really to herself," he added sadly.
+
+[Illustration: "I see everything now," she went on. "He could not
+stop."]
+
+The especial agony for the sick woman was that nothing of what had
+happened seemed to her now in the least necessary. "Why, if I had only
+known--if I had only dreamed how things were--" she cried incessantly to
+those about her. "What did I care about anything compared with Nat! I
+loved my husband! What did I care--if I had only dreamed that--if I had
+only known what I was doing!"
+
+Dr. Melton labored in heartsick pity to remove her fixed idea, which
+soon became a monomania, that she alone was to blame for the Judge's
+death. It now seemed to him, in his sympathy with her grief, that she
+had been like a child entrusted with some frail, priceless object and
+not warned of its fragility. She herself cried out constantly with
+astonished hatred upon a world that had left her so.
+
+"If anyone had warned me--had given me the least idea that it was so
+serious--I could have lived in three rooms--we had been poor--what did I
+care for anything but Nathaniel! I only did all those things
+because--because there was nothing else to do!"
+
+Lydia tried to break the current with a reminder of the sweet memories
+of the past. "Father loved you so! He loved to give you what you wanted,
+Mother dear."
+
+"What I wanted! I wanted my husband. I want my husband!" the widow
+screamed like a person on the rack.
+
+The doctor sent Lydia away with a hasty gesture. "You must not see her
+when she is violent," he said. "You would never forget it."
+
+It was something he himself never forgot, used as he was to pitiful
+scenes in the life of suffering humanity. He was almost like a sick
+person himself, going about his practice with sunken eyes and gray face.
+His need for sympathy was so great that he abandoned the tacit silence
+about the Emerys which had existed between him and Rankin ever since
+Lydia's marriage, and, going out to the house in the Black Rock woods,
+unburdened to the younger man the horror of his heart.
+
+"She's suffering," he cried. "She's literally heartbroken! She is! It's
+real! And what has she had to make up for it? Oh, it's monstrous! One
+thing she says keeps ringing in my ears. That gray-haired woman, a human
+being my own age--the silly, tragic, childish thing she keeps
+saying--'I only did all those things--I only wanted all those
+things--because there was nothing else!' _Nothing else!_" He turned on
+his host with a fierce "Good God! She's right. What else was there ever
+for--for any woman of her class--"
+
+Rankin pushed his shivering, fidgeting visitor into a chair and, laying
+a big hand on his shoulder, said with a faint smile: "Maybe I can divert
+your mind for an instant with a story--another one of my great-aunt's,
+only it's an old one this time; you've probably heard it--about the old
+man who said to his wife on his death-bed, 'I've tried to be a good
+husband to you, dear. It's been hard on my teeth sometimes, but I've
+always eaten the crusts and let you have the soft bread.' You remember
+what the wife's answer was?"
+
+"No," said the doctor frowning.
+
+"It's the epitome of tragedy. She said, 'Oh, my dear, and I like crusts
+so!'"
+
+The doctor stared into the fire. "Do you mean--there's work for them?"
+
+"I mean work for them," repeated the younger man.
+
+The word echoed in a long silence.
+
+"It's the most precious possession we have," said Rankin finally. "We
+ought to share more evenly."
+
+The doctor rose to go. "Generally I forget that we're of different
+generations," he said with apparent irrelevance, "but there are times
+when I feel it keenly."
+
+"Why now especially?" Rankin wondered. "I've stated a doctrine that is
+yours, too."
+
+"No; you wouldn't see, of course. Yes; it's my doctrine--in theory. I
+believe it, as people believe in Christianity. I should be equally loath
+to see anybody doubt it, or practice it. Ah, I'm a fool! Besides, I was
+born in Kentucky. And I'm sixty-seven years old."
+
+He shut the door behind him with emphasis.
+
+He was on his way to Bellevue to see Lydia. Knowing her tender heart, he
+had expected to see her drowned in grief over her father's death. Her
+dry-eyed quiet made him uneasy. That morning, he found her holding
+Ariadne on her knees and telling her in a self-possessed, low tone,
+which did not tremble, some stories of "when grandfather was a little
+boy."
+
+"I don't want her to grow up without knowing something of my father,"
+she explained to the doctor.
+
+Her godfather laid a hand on her arm. "Don't keep the tears back so,
+Lydia," he implored.
+
+She gave him as great a shock of surprise as her mother had done.
+
+"If I could cry," she said quietly, "it would be because I feel so
+little sorrow. I do not miss my father at all--or hardly at all."
+
+The doctor caught at his chair and stared.
+
+"How should I?" she went on drearily. "I almost never saw him. I never
+spoke to him about anything that really mattered. I never let him know
+me--or anything I really felt."
+
+"What are you talking about?" cried the doctor. "You always lived at
+home."
+
+"I never lived with my father. He was always away in the morning before
+I was up. I was away, or busy, in the evening when he was there. On
+Sundays he never went to church as Mother and I did--I suppose now
+because he had some other religion of his own. But if he had I never
+knew what it was--or anything else that was in his mind or heart. It
+never occurred to me that I could. He tried to love me--I remember so
+many times now--and _that_ makes me cry!--how he tried to love me! He
+was so glad to see me when I got home from Europe--but he never knew
+anything that happened to me. I told you once before that when I had
+pneumonia and nearly died Mother kept it from him because he was on a
+big case. It was all like that--always. He never knew."
+
+Dr. Melton broke in, his voice uncertain, his face horrified: "Lydia, I
+cannot let you go on! you are unfair--you shock me. You are morbid! I
+knew your father intimately. He loved you beyond expression. He would
+have done anything for you. But his profession is an exacting one. Put
+yourself in his place a little. It is all or nothing in the law--as in
+business."
+
+"When you bring children into the world, you expect to have them cost
+you some money, don't you? You know you mustn't let them die of
+starvation. Why oughtn't you to expect to have them cost you thought,
+and some sharing of your life with them, and some time--real time, not
+just scraps that you can't use for business?"
+
+As the doctor faced her, open-mouthed and silent, she went on, still
+dry-eyed, but with a quaver in her voice that was like a sob: "But, oh,
+the worst of my blame is for myself! I was a blind, selfish,
+self-centered egotist. I could have changed things if I had only tried
+harder. I am paying for it now. I am paying for it!"
+
+She took her child up in her arms and bent over the dark silky hair. She
+whispered, "It's not that I have lost my father. I never had a
+father--but you!" She put out her hand and pressed the doctor's hard.
+"And my poor father had no daughter."
+
+She set the child on the floor with a gesture almost violent, and cried
+out loudly, breaking for the first time her cheerless calm, "And now it
+is too late!"
+
+Ariadne turned her rosy round face to her mother's, startled, almost
+frightened. Lydia knelt down and put her arms about the child. She
+looked solemnly into her godfather's eyes, and, as though she were
+taking a great and resolute oath, she said, "But it is not too late for
+Ariadne."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+A HINT FROM CHILDHOOD
+
+
+As the spring advanced and Judge Emery's widow recovered a little
+strength, it became apparent that life in Endbury, with its
+heartbreaking associations, would be intolerable to her. In anxious
+family councils many futile plans were suggested, but they were all
+brushed decisively away by the unexpected arrival from Oregon of the
+younger son of the family.
+
+One day in May, a throbbingly sunshiny day, full of a fierce hot vigor
+of vitality, Lydia was with her mother in the Melton's darkened parlor.
+As so often, the two women had been crying and now sat in a weary
+lethargy, hand in hand. There came a step on the porch, in the hall, and
+in the doorway stood a tall stranger. Lydia looked at him blankly, but
+her mother gave a cry and flung herself into his arms.
+
+"I've come to take you home with me, Momma dear," he said quietly, using
+the old name for her, which had been banished from the Emery household
+since Lydia's early childhood. The sound of it went to her heart.
+
+The newcomer smiled at her over his mother's head. It was her father's
+smile, the quaint, half-wistful, humorous smile, which had seemed so
+incongruous on the Judge's powerful face. "I'm your brother Harry,
+little Lyddie," he said, "and I've come to take care of poor Momma."
+
+During all that summer it was a bitter regret to Lydia that she had seen
+her brother so short a time. He had decreed that the sooner his mother
+was taken away from Endbury, the better for her, and Mrs. Emery had
+clung to him, assenting passively to all he said, and peering
+constantly, with tear-blurred eyes, into his face to see again his
+astonishing resemblance to his father. They had left the day after his
+arrival.
+
+He had found time, however, to go out to Bellevue for a brief visit, to
+see Lydia's home and her little daughter--Paul was away on a business
+trip--and the half-hour he spent there was one that Lydia never forgot.
+The tall, sunburned Westerner, with his kind, humorous eyes, his
+affectionate smile, his quaint, homely phrases, haunted the house for
+the rest of the summer. The time of his stay had been too breathlessly
+short for any serious talk. He had looked about at the big, handsome
+house with a half-mocking awe, inspected the "grounds" with a lively
+interest in the small horticultural beginnings Lydia had been able to
+achieve, told her she ought to see his two hundred acres of apple-trees;
+and for the time that was left before his trolley-car was due he played
+with his little niece and talked over her head to his sister.
+
+"She's a dandy, Lyddie! She's a jim-dandy of a little girl! She ought to
+come out and learn to ride straddle with her cousins. I got a boy about
+her age--say, they'd look fine together! He's a towhead, like all the
+rest of 'em--like their mother."
+
+For months afterward Lydia could close her eyes and see again the
+transfigured expression that had come over his face at the mention of
+his wife. "Talk about luck!" he said, after a moment's pause, "there
+never was such luck as my getting Annie. Say, I wish you could know her,
+Lyddie. I tell you what--shoulder to shoulder, every minute, she's stood
+up to things right there beside me for twelve years--Lord! It don't seem
+more than six months when I stop to think about it. We had some hard
+sledding along at the first, but with the two of us pulling together--.
+She's laughed at sickness and drought and bugs and floods. We're all
+through that now, we're doing fine; but, honest, it was worth it, to
+know Annie through and through as I do. There isn't a thing about the
+business she doesn't know as well as I do, and good reason why, too.
+We've worked it all out together. We've stuck close, we have. I've
+helped in the house and with the kids, and she's come right out into the
+orchards with me. Share and share alike--that's our motto."
+
+He was silent a moment, caressing Ariadne's dark hair gently, and
+reviewing the past with shining eyes. "Lord! Lord! It's been a good
+life!" He turned to his sister with a smile. "Well, Lyddie, I expect you
+know something about it, too. You certainly are fixed fine, and
+everybody says you've married a splendid fellow."
+
+Lydia leaned forward eagerly, the impulse to unburden herself
+overwhelming. "Oh, Paul is the best man--" she began, "so true and kind
+and--and--pure--but Harry, we don't--we can't--his business--" She
+turned away from her brother's too keen eyes and stared blindly at the
+wall, conscious of an ache in her heart like a physical hurt.
+
+Later, as they were talking of old memories, of Lydia's childhood, Harry
+asked suddenly: "How'd you happen to give your little girl such a funny
+name?"
+
+It was a question that had not been put to Lydia before. Her family had
+taken for granted that it was a feverish fancy of her sick-bed. She
+gazed at her brother earnestly, and was about to speak when he looked at
+his watch and stood up, glancing uneasily down toward the trolley track.
+It was too late--he would be gone so soon--like something she had
+dreamed. "Oh, I liked the name," she said vaguely; adding, "Harry! I
+wish you could stay longer! There's so much I should like to talk over
+with you. Oh, how I wish you'd never gone away."
+
+"You come out and see us," he urged. "It'd do you good to get away from
+this old hole-in-the-ground! We live six miles from a neighbor, so you'd
+have to get along without tea-parties, but I bet Annie and the kids
+would give you a good time all right."
+
+He kissed Lydia good-by, tossed Ariadne high in the air, and as he
+hurried down the driveway he called back over his shoulder: "Take good
+care of my little niece for me! I tell you it's the kids that count the
+most!" It was a saying that filled ringingly for Lydia the long, hot
+days of the quiet summer that ensued. As for Ariadne, she did not for
+months stop talking of "nice, laughy, Unkie Hawy." Her fluency of speech
+was increasing out of all proportion to her age.
+
+Whatever slow changes might be taking place in Lydia, went on silently
+and obscurely during that summer; but in the fall a new moral horizon
+burst upon her with the realization that she was again to become a
+mother. Another life was to be entrusted to her hands, to hers and
+Paul's, and with the knowledge came the certainty that she must now
+begin to take some action to place her outer life more in accord with
+her new inner self. It would be the worst moral cowardice longer to
+evade the issue.
+
+Thus bravely did she exhort herself, and, though shrinking with
+apprehension at the very thought of entering upon a combat, attempted to
+shame herself into a little courage.
+
+When Paul heard of his wife's hopes, he was enchanted. He cried out
+jubilantly: "I bet you it'll be a boy this time!" and caught her to him
+in an embrace of affection so ardent that for a moment she glowed like a
+bride. She clung to him, happy in the warmth of feeling that,
+responsive, as always, to his touch, sprang up in her; and when in his
+good-natured, half-laughing, dictatorial way he made her lie down at
+once and promise to rest and be quiet, the boyish absurdity of his
+solicitude was sweet to her.
+
+He disappeared in answer to a telephone call, and she closed her eyes,
+savoring the pleasure of the little scene. How she needed Paul to
+reconcile her to life! How kind he really was! How good! His was the
+clean, honorable affection he had promised her on their wedding day. If
+she were to have any faith in the novels she read (like most American
+women of the leisure class, her education after her marriage consisted
+principally in reading the novels people talked about), if there was any
+truth in what she read in these stories, she felt she was blest far
+above most women in that there had come to her since her marriage no
+revelation of a hidden, unclean side to her husband's nature.
+
+But Lydia had never felt herself closely touched by reading; it all
+seemed remote from her own life and problems. The sexual questions on
+which the plots invariably turned, which formed the very core and center
+of the lives of the various female characters, had, as a matter of fact,
+according to her honest observation of her acquaintances, a very
+subordinate place in the average American life about her. The marital
+unhappiness, estrangement, and fragmentary incompleteness in the circle
+she knew, over which she had grieved and puzzled, had nothing to do with
+what novels mean by "unfaithfulness." The women of Endbury, unlike the
+heroines of fiction, did not fear that their husbands would fall in love
+with other women. The men of Endbury spent as little time in
+sentimentalizing over other men's wives as they did over their own.
+
+She often wondered why writers did not treat of the other problems that
+beset her class--for instance, why it was only women in frontier
+conditions, like Harry's wife, who could share in their husband's lives;
+why nobody tried to change things so that they could do more of their
+part in the work of the world; why they could not have a share in the
+activities that gave other men, even little boys like Walter, so much
+closer knowledge of their husbands' characters than they, their wives,
+had. She had a dim notion, caught from stray indications in the
+magazines, that writers were considering such questions in books other
+than novels, but she had no idea how to search them out. The woman's
+club to which she belonged was occupied with the art of Masaccio, who
+was, so a visitor from Chicago's aesthetic circles informed them, the
+"latest thing" in art interests.
+
+She decided to ask Paul if he had heard of such books. She would ask him
+so many such questions in the new life that was to begin. They had been
+married more than three years and, so far as their relations to each
+other went, they were by no means inharmonious; but of the close-knit,
+deep-rooted intimacy of soul and mind that had been her dream of
+married life, there had not been even a beginning. Well, she told
+herself bravely, four years were but a short period in a lifetime. They
+were both so young yet. They could begin now.
+
+Paul came back from the telephone, note-book in hand, jotting down some
+figures. He smiled at her over the top of the book, and before he sat
+down to his desk he covered her carefully with a shawl, stroked her
+hair, and closed her eyes, saying with an absent tenderness: "There!
+take a nap, dear, while I finish these notes."
+
+He looked supremely satisfied with himself in the instant before he
+plunged into his calculations, and Lydia guessed that he was
+congratulating himself on having remembered her in the midst of
+absorbing business cares. She lay looking at him as he worked, her mind
+full of busy thoughts.
+
+Chiefly, as she went over their situation, she felt guilty to think how
+entirely apart from him all her real life was passed. The doubts, the
+racking spiritual changes, that had come to her, she had kept all to
+herself; and yet she could say honestly that her silence had been
+involuntary, instinctive, she fancied whimsically, like the reticence as
+to emotions that one keeps in the hurly-burly of a railway station. With
+tickets to be bought and trunks to be checked and time-tables to be
+consulted, it is absurd to try to communicate to a busy and preoccupied
+companion inexplicable qualms of soul-sickness. Any sensible woman--and
+Lydia, like most American women, had been trained by precept and example
+to desire above all things to be sensible and not emotionally
+troublesome to the men of her family--any sensible woman kept her
+thoughts to herself till the time came when she could talk them over
+without interfering with the business on hand.
+
+As she lay on the sofa and watched Paul's face sharpen in his
+concentration, it occurred to her that the point of the whole matter was
+that for her and Paul the suitable and leisurely time for mutual
+discussion had never come. That was all! That was the whole trouble! It
+was not any inherent lack of common feeling between them. Simply, there
+was always business on hand with which she must not interfere.
+
+Paul lifted his head, his eyes half closed in a narrowed, speculative
+gaze upon some knotty point in his calculation. This long, sideways look
+happened to fall upon Lydia, and she turned cold before the profound
+unconsciousness of her existence in those eyes apparently fixed so
+piercingly upon her. She had a quick fancy that the blank wall of
+abstraction at which that vacant stare was directed really and palpably
+separated her husband from her.
+
+For a moment she wondered if she were growing like the women she had
+heard her father so unsparingly condemn--silly, childish, egotistic
+women who could not bear to have their husbands think of anything but
+themselves, who were jealous of the very business which earned them and
+their children a living. She acquitted herself of this charge proudly.
+She did not want all of Paul's time; she wanted only some of it. And
+then, it was not to have him thinking of her, but with her about the
+common problems of their life; it was to think with him about the
+problems of his life; it was to have him help her by his sound,
+well-balanced, well-trained mind, which, so everyone said, worked such
+miracles in business; to have him help her through the thicket of
+confusion into which she was plunged by her inability to accept the
+plainly-marked road over which all of her world was pressing forward.
+Perhaps it was all right, she thought, the way Endbury people "did." She
+asked nothing better than to be convinced that it was; she longed for a
+satisfying answer. But Paul did not even know she had doubts! How could
+he, she asked herself, exonerating him from blame. He was away so many
+hours of the day and days of the year; and when he came home he was so
+tired!
+
+It was characteristic of her temper that she had learned quickly and
+without bitterness the lesson every wife must learn, that neither
+tenderness nor delicate perceptions of shades of feeling can be extorted
+from a very tired or very preoccupied man. Masculine fatigue brings with
+it a healthy bluntness as to what is being expected in the way of
+emotional responsiveness, and men will not allow their sense of duty to
+spur their jaded affection to the point of exhaustion. Lydia noted this,
+felt that she could not with any show of reason resent it, since it
+showed a state of things as hard for Paul as for her; but she could not
+blind herself to the fact that the inevitable result was Paul's complete
+ignorance of her real life. She felt herself to be so different from the
+girl he had married as scarcely to be recognizable, and yet there was no
+way by which he could have caught even a glimpse of the changes that had
+made her so. The short periods they spent with each other were
+necessarily more than filled by consultations about matters of household
+administration and plans for their social life, and about the way to
+spend the money that Paul earned. Paul was a very good-natured and
+consciously indulgent husband, but Lydia seldom emerged from an hour's
+conversation with him without an uneasy feeling that she was not by any
+means getting out of the money he furnished her the largest amount
+possible of what he wanted; and this sensation was scarcely conducive to
+an expression of what was, after all, on her part nothing but a vague
+aspiration toward an ideal--an aspiration that came to her clearly only
+at times of great tranquillity and peace, when her mind was quite at
+rest.
+
+She was going around and around the treadmill of her familiar
+perplexities when a trifling incident, so small, so dependent on its
+framing of situation, accent, expression and gesture as scarcely to be
+recordable, gave her a sudden glimpse of quite another side to the
+matter. She was shocked into realizing that just as their way of life
+hid from Paul what was going on in her mind, so he also, in all
+probability, was rapidly changing without her knowledge.
+
+Paul finished his figuring, pushed the papers to one side with a sigh of
+fatigue, and turned his eyes thoughtfully on his wife. "That's very good
+news of yours, Lydia dear, about the expected son and heir. But it's
+rather a pity it didn't come last winter, isn't it?"
+
+"How so?" she asked.
+
+"Why, you had to be out of things on account of being in mourning,
+anyhow. If this had happened the year your father died, you could have
+killed two birds with one stone, don't you see?"
+
+Lydia's perception of a thousand reasonable explanations and excuses for
+this speech was so quick that it was upon her almost before she was
+aware of her resentment. She hurried to shut the door on a blighting new
+vision of her husband, by telling herself loudly that it was to be
+expected Paul should feel so; but, rapid as her loyal, wifely movement
+had been, she had felt a gust of hot revulsion against something in her
+husband which her affection for him forbade her to name.
+
+She could not put out of her mind, his look, his accent, his air of
+taking for granted that the speech was a natural one. The knowledge that
+Marietta would be too bewildered by her dwelling on the incident even to
+laugh at her, did not avail to free her of the heavy doubts that filled
+her. Was she mistaken in feeling that it indicated an alarming increase
+of materialism in Paul? She was really too fanciful, she told herself
+many times a day, surprised to find herself going over it again. Was it
+a mere chance remark--a little stone in the garden path--or was it the
+first visible outcropping of a stratum of unconquerable granite which
+grimly underlay all the flower beds of his good nature?
+
+The final impression on her mind was of a new motive for coming to a
+better, closer understanding with Paul about the fundamentals of their
+life. It had not occurred to her before, in spite of all her struggles
+"to be good," as she put it to herself with her childlike naivete, that
+Paul might be needing her as much as she needed him! Spurred on by this
+new reason for breaking through the impalpable wall that separated their
+inner lives, she resolved that she would no longer let herself be
+dominated by the inconsequent multiplicity of the trifling incidents
+that filled their days.
+
+If she could only get close to Paul she was sure that all would be well.
+She made herself hope, with a brave belittling of the tangle that
+baffled her, that perhaps just one long, serious talk with Paul would
+be all that was needed. If she could just make Paul see what she saw, he
+could tell her how to set to work to remedy things. Paul was so clever.
+Paul was always so kind--when he saw!
+
+She began watching for a favorable opportunity for this long, serious
+talk, and as day after day fled past with only a glimpse of Paul
+desperately in a hurry in the morning and desperately tired at night,
+she was aware that her idea of the shape their life was taking had not
+exaggerated the extent of the broad flood of trivialities that separated
+them. Although the light laugh of her girlhood was rarer than before her
+marriage, life had not proved it to be the result of mere animal
+spirits. She still saw a great deal to laugh at, though sometimes it was
+tremulous laughter, carrying her to the edge of tears. And she often
+laughed to herself during these days at the absurd incongruity of what
+her heart was swelling to utter and the occasions on which she would
+have to speak.
+
+'Stashie was away, tending her aunt who was ill, away for an indefinite
+period, for Patsy's steady wages quite sufficed to keep his cousin at
+home to care for his grandmother. Lydia sometimes feared the
+satisfaction she took in Patsy's exemplary career was tinctured with
+vainglory for her own share in it, but, if so, she was punished for it
+now, since it was his very prosperity that took away from her the only
+steady domestic help she had ever been able to keep. She had now only a
+cook, a slatternly negress, with a gift for frying chicken and making
+beaten biscuit, and a total incapacity to conceive of any other activity
+as possible for her. Lydia had telephoned to the two employment agencies
+in Endbury and had been informed, by no means for the first time, that
+the supply of girls willing to work in the suburbs had entirely given
+out. For the time being there was simply not one to be had, so for the
+next few days Lydia, as well as Paul, was more than usually occupied;
+but her fixed intention to "talk things over with him" was not shaken.
+And yet--day after day went by with the routine unvaried--there was no
+time in the morning; in the evening Paul was too tired, and on Sundays
+there was always "Company," it being practically their only time for
+daylight entertainment. Often Paul brought a business associate home for
+dinner; his family or hers came in; there were always callers in the
+afternoon; and they were usually invited out to supper or had guests
+themselves. It was the busiest day of the week.
+
+Ever since her father's death she had been reviving in her mind, shocked
+to find them so few, her positive, personal recollections of him, and
+one of them now came back to her with a symbolic meaning. It had been a
+not uncommon occurrence in her childhood--a school picnic in the Black
+Rock woods; but this one stood out from all the others because, by what
+freak of chance she never knew, her father had gone with her instead of
+her mother. How proud she had been to have him there! How eagerly she
+had done the honors of the "entertainment"! How anxiously she had hoped
+that he would be pleased with the recitations, the songs, the May-day
+dance!
+
+One of the events of the day was to be the recitation of a fairy poem by
+a boy in one of the upper grades. He was to step out of the bushes in
+the character of a Brownie. The child had but just thrust his head
+through the leaves and begun, "I come to tell ye of a world ye mortals
+wot not of," when a terrific clap of thunder overhead, followed by
+lightning, and rain in torrents, broke up the picnic and sent everyone
+flying for shelter to a near-by barn. Lydia had been very much afraid of
+thunderstorms, and she could still remember how, through all her
+confusion and terror, she had admired the fixity of purpose of the
+little Brownie, piteous in his drenched fairy costume, gasping out, as
+they ran along: "I come to tell ye--I come to tell ye, mortals--" to his
+scurrying audience.
+
+When they reached the barn and were huddled in the hay, wet and forlorn,
+and deafened by the peals of thunder, the determined little boy had
+stood up on a farm wagon on the barn floor, and the instant the storm
+abated began again with his insistent tidings of a world they wot not
+of. With her father's death fresh in her mind, Lydia could not without
+a throb of pain recall his rare outburst of hearty laughter at the
+child's perseverance. "I bet on that kid!" he had cried out, applauding
+vigorously at the end. "Who _is_ he?"
+
+"Paul Hollister," she had told him, proud to know the bigger children.
+"He's a very especial friend of mine."
+
+"Well, you can bet he'll get on," her father had assured her.
+
+The opening of the Brownie's speech had come to be one of the humorous
+catchwords of the Emery household, to express firmness of purpose, and
+it was now with a mixture of laughter and tears that Lydia recalled the
+scene--the dusky interior of the barn, the sweet, strong scent of the
+hay, the absurd little figure grimacing and squeaking on the farm wagon,
+and her big, little-known, all-powerful father, one strong arm around
+her, protecting her from all she feared, as nothing in the world could
+protect her now.
+
+She was grown up now, and must learn how to protect her own children
+against dangers less obvious than thunderstorms. It was her turn now to
+insist on making herself heard above uproar and confusion. Her little
+Brownie playmate shamed her into action. She would not wait for a pause
+in the clatter of small events about Paul and herself; she would raise
+her voice and shout to him, if necessary, overcoming the shy reluctance
+of the spirit to speak aloud of its life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+LYDIA REACHES HER GOAL AND HAS HER TALK WITH HER HUSBAND
+
+
+Paul was still asleep when Lydia opened her eyes one morning and said to
+herself with a little laugh, but quite resolutely: "I come to tell ye of
+a world ye mortals wot not of."
+
+As she dressed noiselessly, she fortified herself with the thought that
+she had, in her nervousness, greatly overestimated the seriousness of
+her undertaking. There was nothing so formidable in what she meant to
+do, after all. She only wished to talk reasonably with her husband about
+how to avoid having their life degenerate into a mere campaign for
+material advancement. She did not use this phrase in her thoughts about
+the matter. She thought more deeply, and perhaps more clearly, than
+during her confused girlhood, but she had no learned or dignified
+expressions for the new ideas dawning in her. As she coiled her dark
+hair above her face, rather pale these days, like a white flower instead
+of the glowing rose it had been, she said to herself, like a child:
+"Now, I mustn't get excited. I must remember that all I want is a chance
+for all of us, Paul and the children and me, to grow up as good as we
+can, and loving one another the most for the nicest things in us and not
+because we're handy stepping-stones to help one another get on. And we
+can't do that if we don't really put our minds to it and make that the
+thing we're trying hardest to do. The other things--the parties and
+making money and dressing better than we can really afford to--they're
+only all right if they don't get to seeming the things to look out for
+first. We must find out how to keep them second."
+
+A golden shaft of winter sunshine fell on Paul's face. He opened his
+eyes and yawned, smiling good-naturedly at his wife. Lydia summoned her
+courage and fairly ran to the bed, sitting down by him and taking his
+strong hand in hers.
+
+"Oh, you india-rubber ball!" he cried in humorous despair at her. "Don't
+you know a woman with your expectations oughtn't to go hurling herself
+around that way?"
+
+"I know--I'm too eager always," she apologized. "But, Paul, I've been
+waiting for a nice quiet time to have a long talk with you about
+something that's troubling me, and I just decided I wouldn't wait
+another minute."
+
+Paul patted her cheek. He was feeling very much refreshed by his night's
+sleep. He smiled at his young wife again. "Why, fire away, Lydia dear.
+I'm no ogre. You don't have to wait till I'm in a good temper, do you?
+What is it? More money?"
+
+"Oh, no, _no_!" She repudiated the idea so hotly that he laughed, "Well,
+you can't scare me with anything else. What's up?"
+
+Lydia hesitated, distracted, now that her chance had come, with the
+desire to speak clearly. "Paul dear, it's very serious, and I want you
+to take it seriously. It may take a great effort to change things, too.
+I'm very unhappy about the way we are--"
+
+A wail from Ariadne's room gave warning that the child had wakened, as
+she not infrequently did, terrified by a bad dream. Lydia fled in to
+comfort her, and later, when she came back, leading the droll little
+figure in its pink sleeping-drawers, Paul was dressing with his usual
+careful haste. He stopped an instant to laugh at Ariadne's face of
+determined woe and tossed her up until an unwilling smile broke through
+her pouting gloom. Then he turned to Lydia, as to another child, and
+rubbed his cheek on hers with a boyish gesture. "Now, you other little
+forlornity, what's the matter with you?"
+
+Lydia warmed, as always, at the tenderness of his tone, though she
+noticed with an inward laugh that he continued buttoning his vest as he
+caressed her and that his eyes wandered to the clock with a wary
+alertness. "Perhaps you'd better wait and tell me at the table," he went
+on briskly. "I'm all ready to go down." He pulled his coat on with his
+astonishing quickness, and ran downstairs.
+
+Lydia put Ariadne into her own bed, telling the docile little thing to
+stay there till Mother came back for her, and followed Paul, huddling
+together the remnants of her resolution which looked very wan in the
+morning light. Breakfast was not ready; the table was not even set, and
+when she went out into the kitchen she was met by a heavy-eyed cook,
+moving futilely about among dirty pots and pans and murmuring something
+about a headache. Lydia could not stop then to investigate further, but,
+hurrying about, managed to get a breakfast ready for Paul before his
+first interest in the morning paper had evaporated enough to make him
+impatient of the delay.
+
+He fell to with a hearty appetite as soon as the food was set before
+him, not noticing for several moments that Lydia's breakfast was not yet
+ready. When he did so, he spoke with a solicitous sharpness: "Lydia, you
+need a guardian! You ought to eat as a matter of duty! I bet half your
+queer notions come from your just pecking around at any old thing when
+I'm not here to keep track of you."
+
+He poured out another cup of coffee for himself as he spoke.
+
+"Yes, dear; I know, I do. I will," Lydia assured him, with her quick
+acquiescence to his wishes. "But this morning Mary is sick, or
+something, and I got yours first."
+
+Paul spoke briefly, with his mouth full of toast: "If you were more
+regular in the way you run the house, and insisted on never varying
+the--"
+
+"But I was afraid you would be late," said Lydia. It was the daily
+terror of her life.
+
+"I _am_ late now," he told her, with his good-humored insistence on
+facts. "I've missed the 7:40, and I've just time to catch the next one
+if I hurry. Do you happen to know, dear, where I put that catalogue
+from Elberstrom and Company? The big red book with the picture of a
+dynamo on the cover. I was looking over it last night, and Heaven knows
+where I may have dropped it."
+
+The opinion as to the proper answer to a speech like this was one of the
+sharply marked lines of divergence between Madeleine Lowder and her
+brother's wife. "Soak him one when you get a chance, Lydia," she was
+wont to urge facetiously, and her advice in the present case would
+unhesitatingly have been to answer as acrimoniously as possible that if
+he were more regular in the way he handled such things his wife would
+have to spend less time ransacking the house looking for them. But in
+spite of such practical and experienced counsel, Lydia was scarcely
+conscious of refraining from the entirely justifiable and entirely
+futile customary recriminations, and she was as unaware as Paul of the
+vast amount of embittering domestic friction which was spared them by
+her silence. She had some great natural advantages for the task of
+creating a better domestic life at which she was now so eagerly setting
+herself, and one of them was this incapacity to resent petty injustices
+done to herself. She was handicapped in any effort by her utter lack of
+intellectual training and by a natural tendency to mental confusion, but
+her lack of small vanities not only spared her untold suffering, but
+added much to her singleness of aim.
+
+She now went about searching for the catalogue, finally finding it in
+the library under the couch. When she came back to the dining-room she
+saw Paul standing up by the table, wiping his mouth. Evidently he was
+ready to start. How absurd she had been to think of talking seriously to
+him in the morning!
+
+"Mary brought your breakfast in," he said nodding toward an untidy tray.
+"I hate to seem to be finding fault all the time, but really her breath
+was enough to set the house on fire! Can't you keep her down to moderate
+drinking?"
+
+"I'll try," said Lydia.
+
+Paul took the catalogue from her hand and reached for his hat. They
+were in the hall now. "Good-by, Honey," he said, kissing her hastily and
+darting out of the house.
+
+Lydia had but just turned back to the dining-room when he opened the
+door and came in again, bringing a gust of fresh winter air with him.
+"Say, dear, you forgot about something you wanted to tell me about. I've
+got eight minutes before the trolley, so now's your chance. What is it?
+Something about the plumbing?"
+
+In the dusky hall Lydia faced him for a moment in silence, with so
+singular an expression on her face that he looked apprehensive of some
+sort of scene. Then she broke out into breathless, quavering laughter,
+whose uncertainty did not prevent Paul from great relief at her apparent
+change of mood. "Never mind," she said, leaning against the newel-post,
+"I'll tell you--I'll tell you some other time."
+
+He kissed her again, and she felt that it was with a greater tenderness
+now that he no longer feared a possibly disagreeable communication from
+her.
+
+After he had gone, she thought loyally, putting things in the order of
+importance she had been taught all her life, "Well, it _is_ hard for him
+to have perplexities at home and not to be able to give the freshest and
+best of himself to business." It was not until later, as she was
+dressing Ariadne, that she swung slowly back to her new doubt of that
+view of the problem.
+
+Ariadne was in one of her most talkative moods, and was describing at
+great length the dream that had frightened her so. There was a hen with
+six little chickens, she told her mother, and one of them was as big--as
+big--
+
+"Yes, dear; and what did the big little chicken do?" Lydia laced up the
+little shoes, on her knees before the small figure, her mind whirling.
+"That was just the trouble, she couldn't make it seem right any more,
+that Paul's best and freshest should _all_ go to making money and none
+to a consideration of why he wished to make it."
+
+"Yes, Ariadne, and it flew over the house, and then?"
+
+She began buttoning the child's dress, and lost herself in ecstasy over
+the wisps of soft curls at the back of the rosy neck. She dropped a
+sudden kiss on the spot, in the midst of Ariadne's narrative, and the
+child squealed in delighted surprise. Lydia was carried away by one of
+her own childlike impulses of gayety, and burrowed bear-like, growling
+savagely, in the soft flesh. Ariadne doubled up, shrieking with
+laughter, the irresistible laughter of childhood. Lydia laughed in
+response, and the two were off for one of their rollicking frolics. They
+were like a couple of kittens together. Finally, "Come, dear; we must
+get our breakfasts," said Lydia, leading along the little girl, still
+flushed and smiling from her play.
+
+Her passion for the child grew with Ariadne's growth, and there were
+times when she was tempted to agree in the unspoken axiom of those about
+her, that all she needed was enough children to fill her heart and hands
+too full for thought; but sometimes at night, when Paul was away and she
+had the little crib moved close to her bed, very different ideas came to
+her in the silent hours when she lay listening to the child's quick,
+regular breathing. At such times, when her mind grew very clear in the
+long pause between the hurry of one day and the next, she had rather a
+sort of horror in bringing any more lives into a world which she could
+do so little to make ready for them. Ariadne was here, and, oh! She must
+do something to make it better for her! Her desire that Ariadne should
+find it easier than she to know how to live well, rose to a fervor that
+was a prayer emanating from all her being. Perhaps she was not clever or
+strong enough to know how to make her own life and Paul's anything but a
+dreary struggle to get ahead of other people, but somehow--somehow,
+Ariadne must have a better chance.
+
+Something of all this came to her mind in the reaction from her frolic,
+as she established the child in her high-chair and sat down to her own
+cold breakfast; but she soon fell, instead, to pondering the question of
+Mary in the kitchen. She had not now that terror of a violent scene
+which had embittered the first year of her housekeeping, but she felt a
+qualm of revulsion from the dirty negress who, as she entered the
+kitchen, turned to face her with insolent eyes. It seemed a plague-spot
+in her life that in the center of her home, otherwise so carefully
+guarded, there should be this presence, come from she shuddered to think
+what evil haunts of that part of Endbury known as the "Black Hole." She
+thought, as so many women have thought, that there must be something
+wrong in a system that made her husband spend all his strength laboring
+to make money so much of which was paid, in one form or another, to this
+black incubus. She thought, as so many other women have thought, that
+there must be something wrong with a system of life that meant that,
+with rare exceptions, such help was all that could be coaxed into doing
+housework; but Lydia, unlike the other women she knew, did not--could
+not--stop at the realization that something was wrong. Some irresistible
+impulse moved her to try at least to set it right.
+
+On this occasion, however, as she faced the concrete result of the
+system, she was too languid, and felt too acutely the need for sparing
+her strength, to do more than tell her cook briefly that if she did not
+stop drinking she would be dismissed. Mary made no reply, looking down
+at her torn apron, her face heavy and sullen. She prepared some sort of
+luncheon, however, and by night had recovered enough so that with
+Lydia's help the dinner was eatable.
+
+Paul was late to dinner, and when he sat down heavily at the table
+Lydia's heart failed her at the sight of his face, fairly haggard with
+fatigue. She kept Ariadne quiet, the child having already learned that
+when Daddy came home from the city there must be no more noisy play; and
+she served Paul with a quickness that outstripped words. She longed
+unspeakably to put on one side forever all her vexing questions and
+simply to cherish and care for her husband physically. He had so much to
+burden him already--all he could carry. But she had been so long
+bringing herself to the point of resolution in the matter, she had so
+firmly convinced herself that her duty lay along that dark and obscure
+path, that she clung to her purpose.
+
+After dinner, when she came downstairs from putting Ariadne to bed, she
+found him already bent over the writing-table, covering a sheet of paper
+with figures. "You remember, Paul, I have something to talk over with
+you," she began, her mouth twitching in a nervous smile.
+
+He pushed the papers aside, and looked up at her with a weary
+tenderness. "Oh, yes; I do remember. We might as well have it over now,
+I suppose. Wait a minute, though." He went to the couch, piled the
+pillows at one end, and lay down, his hands clasped under his head. "I
+might as well rest myself while we talk, mightn't I?"
+
+"Oh, yes, yes, poor dear!" cried Lydia remorsefully. "I wish I didn't
+_have_ to bother you!"
+
+"I wish so, too," he said whimsically. "Sure it's nothing you can't
+settle yourself?" He closed his eyes and yawned.
+
+"I don't _want_ to settle it myself!" cried Lydia with a rush, seeing an
+opening ready-made. "That's the point. I want you to be in it! I want
+you to help me! Paul, I'm sure there's something the matter with the way
+we live--I don't like it! I don't see that it helps us a bit--or anyone
+else--you're just killing yourself to make money that goes to get us
+things we don't need nearly as much as we need more of each other! We're
+not getting a bit nearer to each other--actually further away, for we're
+both getting different from what we were without the other's knowing
+how! And we're not getting nicer--and what's the use of living if we
+don't do that? We're just getting more and more set on scrambling along
+ahead of other people. And we're not even having a good time out of it!
+And here is Ariadne--and another one coming--and we've nothing to give
+them but just this--this--this--"
+
+She had poured out her accumulated, pent-up convictions with passion,
+feeling an immense relief that she had at last expressed herself--that
+at last she had made a breach in the wall that separated her from Paul.
+At the end, as she hesitated for a phrase to sum up her indictment of
+their life, her eyes fell on Paul's face. Its expression turned her
+cold. She stopped short. He did not open his eyes, and the ensuing
+silence was filled with his regular, heavy breathing. He had fallen
+asleep.
+
+Lydia folded her hands in her lap and sat looking at him intently. In
+the tumult of her emotions there was neither bitterness nor resentment.
+But a cloud had passed between her and the sun. She sat there a long
+time, her face very pale and grave. After a time she laid her hand on
+her husband's shoulder. She felt an intolerable need to feel him at
+least physically near.
+
+The telephone bell rang distinctly in the hall. Paul bounded to his
+feet, wide awake.
+
+"I bet that's the Washburn superintendent!" he cried. "He said they
+might call me up here if they came to a decision." He had apparently
+forgotten Lydia's presence, or else the fact that she knew nothing of
+his affairs. He disappeared into the hall, his long, springy, active
+step resounding quickly as he hurried to the instrument. Lydia heard his
+voice, decisive, masterful, quiet, evidently dictating terms of some
+bargain that had been hanging in the balance. When he came back, his
+head was up, like a conqueror's. "I've got their contract!" he told her,
+and then, snatching her up, he whirled her about, shouting out a "yip!
+yip! yip!" of triumph.
+
+In spite of herself Lydia's chin began to tremble. She felt a stinging
+in her eyes. Paul saw these signs of emotion and was
+conscience-stricken. "Oh, I'm a black-hearted monster!" he cried, in
+burlesque contrition. "I must have dropped off just as you began your
+spiel. But, Lydia, if _you'd_ taken that West Virginia trip, you'd go to
+sleep if the Angel Gabriel were blowing his horn! I was gone three days,
+you know, and, honest, I didn't have three hours' consecutive sleep!
+Don't be too mad at me. Start over again. I'll listen to every word,
+honest to gracious I will. I feel as waked up as a fighting cock,
+anyhow, by this Washburn business! To think I've pulled that off at
+last!"
+
+"I'm not mad at _you_, Paul," said Lydia, trying to speak steadily, and
+holding with desperate resolution to her purpose of communicating with
+her husband. "I'm mad at the conditions that made you so sleepy you
+couldn't keep awake! All I had to say is that I don't like our way of
+life--I don't see that it's making us any better, and I want Ariadne--I
+want our children to have a better one. I want you to help me make it
+so."
+
+Paul stared at her, stupefied by this attack on axioms. "Good gracious,
+my dear! What are you talking about? 'Our way of life!' What do you
+mean? There's nothing peculiar about the way we live. Our life is just
+like everybody else's."
+
+Lydia burned with impatience at the appearance of this argument, beyond
+which she had never been able to induce her mother or Marietta to
+advance a step. She cried out passionately: "What if it is! If it's not
+the right kind of life, what difference does it make if everybody's life
+_is_ like it!"
+
+The idea which her excitement instantly suggested to Paul was
+reassuring. Before Ariadne came, he remembered, Lydia had had queer
+spells of nervous tension. He patted her on the shoulder and spoke in
+the tone used to soothe a nervous horse. "There, Lydia! There, dear!
+Don't get so wrought up! Remember you're not yourself. You do too much
+thinking. Come, now, just curl up here and put your head on my--"
+
+Lydia feared greatly the relaxing influence of his caressing touch. If
+once he put forth his personal magnetism, it would be so hard to go on.
+She drew away gently. "_Can_ anybody do too much thinking, Paul? The
+trouble must be that I'm not thinking right. And, oh, I want to, so!
+_Please_ help me! Everybody says you have such a wonderful head for
+organization and for science--if I were a dynamo that wasn't working,
+you could set me right!"
+
+Paul laughed, and made another attempt to divert her. "I couldn't if
+the dynamo looked as pretty and kissable as you do!" He was paying very
+little attention to what she said. He was only uncomfortable and uneasy
+to see her so white and trembling. He wished he had proposed taking her
+out for the evening. She had been having too dull a time. He ought to
+see that she got more amusement. They said that comic opera now running
+in town was very funny.
+
+"Paul, listen to me!" she was crying desperately as these thoughts went
+through his head. "Listen to me, and look honestly at the way we've been
+living since we were married, and you _must_ see that something's all
+wrong. I never see you--never, never, do you realize that? except when
+you're in a raging hurry in the morning or tired to death at night, and
+when I'm just as tired as you are, so all we can do is to go to bed so
+we can get up in the morning and begin it all over again. Or else we
+tire ourselves out one degree more by entertaining people we don't
+really like--or rather people about whose real selves we don't know
+enough to know whether we like them or not--we have them because they're
+influential, or because everybody else entertains them, or because they
+can help us to get on--or can be smoothed over so they won't hinder our
+getting on. And there's no prospect of doing anything different from
+this all the days of our life--"
+
+"But, look-y here, Lydia, that's the way things _are_ in this world! The
+men have to go away the first thing in the morning--and all the rest of
+what you say! _I_ can't help it! What do you come to me about it for?
+You might as well break out crying because I can't give you eyes in the
+back of your head. That's the way things are!"
+
+Lydia made a violent gesture of unbelief. "That's what everybody's been
+telling me all my life--but now I'm a grown woman, with eyes to see, and
+something inside me that won't let me say I see what I don't--_and I
+don't see that_! I don't _believe_ it has to be so. I can't believe it!"
+
+Paul laughed a little impatiently, irritated and uneasy, as he always
+was, at any attempt to examine too closely the foundations of existing
+ideas. "Why, Lydia, what's the matter with you? You sound as though
+you'd been reading some fool socialist literature or something."
+
+"You know I don't read anything, Paul. I never hear about anything but
+novels. I never have time for anything else, and very likely I couldn't
+understand it if I read it, not having any education. That's one thing I
+want you to help me with. All I want is a chance for us to live together
+a little more, to have a few more thoughts in common, and, oh! to be
+trying to be making something better out of ourselves for our children's
+sake. I can't see that we're learning to be anything but--you, to be an
+efficient machine for making money, I to think of how to entertain as
+though we had more money than we really have. I don't seem really to
+know you or live with you any more than if we were two guests stopping
+at the same hotel. If socialists are trying to fix things better, why
+shouldn't we have time--both of us--to read their books; and you could
+help me know what they mean?"
+
+Paul laughed again, a scornful, hateful laugh, which brought the color
+up to Lydia's pale face like a blow. "I gather, then, Lydia, that what
+you're asking me to do is to neglect my business in order to read
+socialist literature with you?"
+
+His wife's rare resentment rose. She spoke with dignity: "I begged you
+to be serious, Paul, and to try to understand what I mean, although I'm
+so fumbling, and say it so badly. As for its being impossible to change
+things, I've heard you say a great many times that there are no
+conditions that can't be changed if people would really try--"
+
+"Good heavens! I said that of _business_ conditions!" shouted Paul,
+outraged at being so misquoted.
+
+"Well, if it's true of them--No; I feel that things are the way they are
+because we don't really care enough to have them some other way. If you
+really cared as much about sharing a part of your life with me--really
+sharing--as you do about getting the Washburn contract--"
+
+Her indignant and angry tone, so entirely unusual, moved Paul, more than
+her words, to shocked protest. He looked deeply wounded, and his accent
+was that of a man righteously aggrieved. "Lydia, I lay most of this
+absurd outbreak to your nervous condition, and so I can't blame you for
+it. But I can't help pointing out to you that it is entirely uncalled
+for. There are few women who have a husband as absolutely devoted as
+yours. You grumble about my not sharing my life with you--why, I _give_
+it to you entire!" His astonished bitterness grew as he voiced it. "What
+am I working so hard for if not to provide for you and our child--our
+children! Good Heavens! What more _can_ I do for you than to keep my
+nose on the grindstone every minute. There are limits to even a
+husband's time and endurance and capacity for work."
+
+Lydia heard a frightened roaring in her ears at this unexpected turn to
+the conversation. Paul had never spoken so to her before. This was a
+very different tone from his irritation over defective housekeeping. She
+was as horrified as he over the picture that he held up with such
+apparently justified indignation, the picture of her as a querulous and
+ungrateful wife. Why, Paul was looking at her as though he hated her!
+For the first time in her married life, she conceived the possibility
+that she and Paul might quarrel, really seriously quarrel, about
+fundamental things. The idea terrified her beyond words. Her mind,
+undisciplined and never very clear, became quite confused, and only her
+long preparation and expectation of this talk enabled her to keep on at
+all, although now she could but falter ahead blindly. "Why, Paul
+dear--don't look at me so! I never dreamed of _blaming_ you for it! It's
+just because I want things better for you that I'm so anxious to--"
+
+"You haven't noticed me complaining any, have you?" put in Paul grimly,
+still looking at her coldly.
+
+"--It's because I can't bear to see you work so hard to get me things
+I'd ever so much rather go without than have you grow so you can't see
+anything but business--it seems all twisted! I'd rather you'd pay an
+assistant to go off on these out-of-town trips, and we'd get along on
+less money--live in a smaller house, and not entertain."
+
+"Oh, Lydia, you talk like a child! How can I talk business with you when
+you have such crazy, impractical ideas? It's not just the money an
+assistant would cost! Either he'd not be so good as I, and then I'd lose
+my reputation for efficiency and my chance for promotion, or else he
+_would_ be as good and he'd get the job permanently and divide the field
+with me. A man has to look a long way ahead in business!"
+
+"But, Paul, what if he _did_ divide the field with you? What if you
+don't get ahead of everybody else, if you'd have time and strength to
+think of other things more--you said the other day that you weren't
+sleeping well any more, and you're losing your taste for books and music
+and outdoors--why, I'd rather live in four rooms right over your office,
+so that you wouldn't have that hour lost going and coming--"
+
+Paul broke in with a curt scorn: "Oh, Lydia! What nonsense! Why don't
+you propose living in a tent, to save rent?"
+
+"Why I would--I would in a minute if I thought it would make things any
+better!" Lydia cried with a desperate simplicity.
+
+At this crowning absurdity, Paul began to laugh, his ill-humor actually
+swept away by his amusement at Lydia's preposterous fancies. It was too
+foolish to try to reason seriously with her. He put his hand on her
+shining dark hair, ruffling it up like a teasing boy. "I guess you'd
+better leave the economic status of society alone, Lydia. You might
+break something if you go charging around it so fierce."
+
+A call came from the darkness of the hall: "Mis' Hollister!"
+
+"It's Mary," said Paul; "probably you forgot to give her any
+instructions about breakfast, in your anxiety about the future of the
+world. If you can calm down enough for such prosaic details, do tell her
+for the Lord's sake not to put so much salt in the oatmeal as there was
+this morning."
+
+Lydia found the negress with her wraps on, glooming darkly, "Mis'
+Hollister, I'm gwine to leave," she announced briefly.
+
+Lydia felt for a chair. Mary had promised faithfully to stay through the
+winter, until after her confinement. "What's the matter, Mary?"
+
+"I cyant stay in no house wheah de lady says I drinks."
+
+"You will stay until--until I am able to be about, won't you?"
+
+"My things is gone aready," said Mary, moving heavily toward the door,
+"and I'm gwine now." As she disappeared, she remarked casually, "I
+didn't have no time to wash the supper dishes. Good-by."
+
+"What's the matter with Mary?" called Paul.
+
+Lydia went back to him, trying to smile. "She's gone--left," she
+announced.
+
+Paul opened his eyes with a look of keen annoyance. "You can't break in
+a new cook _now_!" he said. "She can't go now!"
+
+"She's gone," repeated Lydia wearily. "I don't know how anybody could
+make her stay."
+
+Paul got up from the couch with his lips closed tightly together, and,
+sitting down in a straight chair, took Lydia on his knee as though she
+were a child. "Now, see here, my wife, you mustn't get your feelings
+hurt if I do some plain talking for a minute. You've been telling me
+what you think about things, and now it's my turn. And what _I_ think is
+that if my dear young wife would spend more time looking after her own
+business she'd have fewer complaints to make about my doing the same.
+The thing for you to do is to accept conditions as they are and do your
+best in them--and, really, Lydia, make your best a little better."
+
+Lydia was on the point of nervous tears from sheer fatigue, but she
+clung to her point with a tenacity which in so yielding a nature was
+profoundly eloquent. "But, Paul, if everybody had always settled down
+and accepted conditions, and never tried to make them better--"
+
+"There's a difference between conditions that have to be accepted and
+those that can be changed," said Paul sententiously.
+
+Lydia tore herself away from him and stood up, trembling with
+excitement. She felt that they had stumbled upon the very root of the
+matter. "But who's to decide which our conditions are?"
+
+Paul caught at her, laughing. "I am, of course, you firebrand! Didn't
+you promise to honor and obey?" He went on with more seriousness, a
+tender, impatient, condescending seriousness: "Now, Lydia, just stop and
+think! Do you, can you, consider this a good time for you to try to
+settle the affairs of the universe--still all upset about your father's
+death, and goodness knows what crazy ideas it started in your head--and
+with an addition to the family expected! _And_ the cook just left!"
+
+"But that's the way things always are!" she protested. "That's life.
+There's never a time when something important hasn't just happened or
+isn't just going to happen, you have to go right ahead, or you
+never--why, Paul, I've waited for two years for a really good chance for
+this talk with you--"
+
+"Thank the Lord!" he ejaculated. "I hope it'll be another two before you
+treat me to another evening like this. Oh, pshaw, Lydia! You're morbid,
+moping around the house too much--and your condition and all. Wait till
+you've got another baby to play with--I don't remember you had any
+doubts of anything the first six months of Ariadne's life. You ought to
+have a baby a year to keep you out of mischief! Just you wait till you
+can entertain and live like folks again. In the meantime you hustle
+around and keep busy and you won't be so bothered with thinking and
+worrying."
+
+Unknowingly, they had drawn again near to the heart of their
+discussion. Unknowingly Lydia stood before the answer from her husband,
+the final statement that she wished to hear.
+
+"But to hustle and keep busy--that's good only so long as you keep at
+it. The minute you stop--"
+
+Paul's answer was an epoch in her thought.
+
+"_Don't stop!_" he cried, surprised at her overlooking so obvious a
+solution.
+
+At this bullet-like retort, Lydia shivered as though she had been
+struck. She turned away with a blind impulse for flight. Her gesture
+brought her husband flying to her. He took her forcibly in his arms.
+"What the devil--what is the matter _now_?" he asked, praying for
+patience. She hung unresponsive in his grasp. "What's the matter?" he
+repeated.
+
+"You've just told me a horrible thing," she whispered; "that life is so
+dreadful that the only way we can get through it at all is by never
+looking at--"
+
+Paul actually shook her in his exasperation. "Gee whiz, Lydia! you're
+enough to drive a man to drink! I never told you any such melodramatic
+nonsense. I told you straight horse sense, which is that if you took
+more interest in your work, in the work that every woman of your class
+and position has to do, you'd have less time to think foolishness--and
+your husband would have an easier life."
+
+Her trembling lips opened to speak again, but he closed them with a firm
+hand. "And now, as your natural guardian, I'm not going to let you say
+another word about it. You dear little silly! However did you get us so
+wound up! Blessed if I have any idea what it's all been about!"
+
+He was determined to end the discussion. He was relieved beyond
+expression that he had been able to get through it without saying
+anything unkind to his wife. He never meant to do that. He now went on,
+shaking a finger at her:
+
+"You listen to me, Lydia-Emery-that-was! Do you know what we are going
+to do? We're going out into that howling desolation that Mary has
+probably left in the kitchen, and we're going to see if we can find a
+couple of clean glasses, and we're going to have a glass of beer apiece
+and a ham sandwich and a piece of the pie that's left over from dinner.
+You don't know what's the matter with you, but I do! You're starved!
+You're as hungry as you can be, aren't you now?"
+
+Lydia had sunk into a chair during this speech and was now regarding him
+fixedly, her hands clasped between her knees. At his final appeal to
+her, she closed her eyes. "Yes," she said with a long breath; "yes, I
+am."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+"THE AMERICAN MAN"
+
+
+A ripple from the surging wave of culture which, for some years, had
+been sweeping over the women's clubs of the Middle West, began to
+agitate the extremely stationary waters of Endbury social life. The
+Women's Literary Club felt that, as the long-established intellectual
+authority of the town, it should somehow join in the new movement. The
+organization of this club dated back to a period now comparatively
+remote. Mrs. Emery, who had been a charter member, had never been more
+genuinely puzzled by Dr. Melton's eccentricities than when he had
+received with a yell of laughter her announcement that she had just
+helped to form a "literary club," which would be the "most exclusive
+social organization" in Endbury. It had lived up to this expectation. To
+belong to it meant much, and both Paul and Flora Burgess had been
+gratified when, on her mother's resignation, Lydia had been elected to
+the vacant place.
+
+This close corporation, composed of ladies in the very inner circle,
+felt keenly the stimulating consciousness of its importance in the
+higher life of the town, and had too much civic pride to allow Endbury
+to lag behind the other towns in Ohio. Columbus women, owing to the
+large German population of the city, were getting a reputation for being
+musical; Cincinnati had always been artistic; Toledo had literary
+aspirations; Cleveland went in for civic improvement. The leading
+spirits of the Woman's Literary Club of Endbury cast about for some
+other sphere of interest to annex as their very own property.
+
+They were hesitating whether to undertake a campaign of municipal
+house-cleaning, or to devote themselves to the study of the sonnet form
+in English verse, when an unusual opportunity for distinction opened
+before them. The daughter of the club's president was married to a
+professor in the State University of Michigan, and on one of her visits
+home she suggested that her mother's club invite to address it the
+Alliance Francaise lecturer of that year. He had to come out to Ann
+Arbor, anyhow--Ann Arbor was not very far from Endbury--not far, that
+is, as compared with the journey the lecturer would have made from
+Columbia and Harvard to "Michigan State." One of the club husbands was a
+railroad man and, maybe, could give them transportation. Frenchmen were
+always anxious to make all the money they could--she was sure that M.
+Buisine could be induced to come for a not extravagant honorarium. Why
+should not Endbury go in for cosmopolitanism? That certainly would be
+something new in Ohio.
+
+And so it was arranged for an afternoon for the first week in December,
+a very grand "house-darkened-and-candle-lighted performance," as
+Madeleine Lowder labeled this last degree of Endbury ceremonious
+elaboration. It was held at the house of Paul's aunt, so that,
+naturally, Lydia could by no means absent herself. Madeleine came for
+her, and together they took Ariadne to Marietta's house and left her
+there for safe-keeping. Lydia was intensely conscious, under her
+sister's forbearing silence, that Marietta had never been asked to join
+the Woman's Literary Club. Even the jaunty Madeleine was aware of a
+tension in the brief conversation over the child's head, and remarked as
+she and Lydia walked away from the house: "Well, really now, _was_ that
+the most tactful thing in the world?"
+
+"What else could I do?" asked Lydia, at her wit's end. "I don't dare
+leave Ariadne with those awful things from the employment agencies, and
+'Stashie's not coming back till next week."
+
+"Oh, _she's_ coming again, is she?" commented her companion. "Well,
+that'll mean lots of fun watching Paul squirm. But don't mind him,
+Lydia." Madeleine was one of the women who prided herself on her loyal
+sense of solidarity among her sex. "If he says a word, you poke him one
+in the eye. Keep her till after your confinement, anyhow. A woman ought
+to be allowed to run her house without any man butting in. We let them
+alone; they ought to let us."
+
+There never was a person in the world, Lydia thought, in whom marriage
+had made less difference than in Paul's sister. She was exactly the same
+as in her girlhood. Lydia wondered at her with an ever-growing
+amazement. The enormous significance of the marriage service, the
+mysteries of the dual existence, her new responsibilities,--they all
+seemed non-existent. Paul said approvingly that Madeleine knew how to
+get along with less fuss than any woman he ever saw. Her breezy high
+spirits were much admired in Endbury, and her good humor and prodigious
+satisfaction with life were considered very cheerfully infectious.
+
+The two women had reached Madame Hollister's house while Madeleine was
+expounding her theory of matrimony, and now took their places in the
+throng of extremely well-dressed women sitting on camp chairs, the rows
+of which filled the two parlors. The lecturer with the president of the
+club, occupied a dais at the other end of the room. He was a tall, ugly
+man, with prominent blue eyes, gray hair upstanding in close-cropped
+military stiffness, and a two-pronged grizzled beard. He was looking
+over his audience with a leisurely smiling scrutiny that roused in Lydia
+a secret resentment.
+
+"He's very distinguished looking, isn't he?" whispered Madeleine. "So
+different! And _cool_! I'd like to see Pete Lowder sit up there to be
+stared at by all this gang of women."
+
+"Oh, he's probably used to it," said her neighbor on the other side.
+"They say he's spoken before any number of women's clubs. He does two a
+day sometimes. He's seen lots of American society women before now."
+
+Madeleine stared at him curiously. "I wonder what he thinks of us! I
+wonder! I'd give anything to know!" she said. She repeated this
+sentiment in varying forms several times.
+
+Lydia wondered why Madeleine should care so acutely about the opinion of
+a stranger and a foreigner, and finally, in her naive, straightforward
+way, she put this question to her. Madeleine was not one of the many who
+evaded Lydia's questions, or answered them only with a laugh at their
+oddity. She was very straightforward herself and generally had a very
+clear idea of what underlay any action or feeling on her part. But this
+time her usual rough-and-ready methods of analysis seemed at fault.
+
+"Oh, because," she said indefinitely. "Don't you always want to know
+what men are thinking of you?"
+
+"Men that know something about me, maybe," Lydia amended.
+
+Madeleine laughed. "_They're_ the ones that don't think at all, one way
+or the other," she reminded her sister-in-law.
+
+The president of the club rose. Her introduction of the speaker was
+greeted with cordial, muted applause from gloved hands. There was a
+scraping of chairs, a stir of draperies, and little gusts of delicate
+perfumes floated out, as the hundred or more women settled themselves at
+the right angle, all their keen, handsome, nervous faces lifted to the
+speaker in a pleasant expectancy. Not only were they agreeably aware
+that they were forming part of one of the most recherche events of
+Endbury's social life, but they were remembering piquant rumors of M.
+Buisine's sensational attacks on American materialism. The afternoon
+promised something more interesting than their usual programme of
+home-made essays and papers.
+
+Their expectation was not disappointed. In fluent English, apparently
+smooth with long practice on the same theme, he wove felicitous and
+forceful elaborations on the proverb relating to people who are absent
+and the estimation in which they are held by those present. He had seen
+in America, he said, everything but the American man. He had seen
+hundreds and thousands of women as well-dressed as Parisiennes (and, as
+a rule, much more expensively), as self-possessed as English great
+ladies, as cultivated as Russian princesses, as universally and
+variously handsome as visions in a painter's dream--("He's not afraid of
+laying it on thick, is he?" whispered Madeleine with an appreciative
+laugh)--but, except for a few professors in college, he had seen no men.
+He had inquired for them everywhere and was told that he did not see
+them because he was a man of letters. If he had been the inventor of a
+new variety of railroad brake he would have seen millions. He was told
+that the men, unlike their wives, had no intellectual interests, had no
+clubs with any serious purposes, had no artistic aims, had no home life,
+no knowledge of their children, no interest in education--that, in
+short, they left the whole business of worthy living to their wives, and
+devoted themselves exclusively to the wild-beast joys of tearing and
+rending their business competitors.
+
+He gave many picturesque instances of his contention, he sketched
+several lively and amusing portraits of the one or two business men he
+had succeeded in running down; their tongue-tied stupefaction before the
+ordinary topics of civilization, their scorn of all aesthetic
+considerations; their incapacity to conceive of an intellectual life as
+worthy a grown man; the Stone-age simplicity with which they referred
+everything to savage cunning; their oblivion to any other standard than
+"success," by which they meant possessing something that they had taken
+away by force from somebody else.
+
+It was indeed a very entertaining lecture, a most stimulating,
+interesting experience to the crowd of well-dressed women; although
+perhaps some of them found it a little long after the dining-room across
+the hall began to be filled with waiters preparing the refreshments and
+an appetizing smell of freshly-made coffee filled the air. Still, it was
+a lecture they had paid for, and it was gratifying to have it so full
+and conscientiously elaborated.
+
+The ideas promulgated were not startlingly new to them, since they had
+read magazine articles on "Why American Women Marry Foreigners" and
+similar analyses of the society in which they lived; but to have it said
+to one's face, by a living man, a tall, ugly, distinguished foreigner,
+with the ribbon of the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole,--that brought
+it home to one! They nodded their beautifully-hatted heads at the truth
+of his well-chosen, significant anecdotes, they laughed at his sallies,
+they applauded heartily at the end when the lecturer sat down, the
+little smile, that Lydia found so teasing, still on his bearded lips.
+
+"Well, he hit things off pretty close, for a foreigner, didn't he?"
+commented Madeleine cheerfully, gathering her white furs up to the
+whiter skin of her long, fair throat and preparing for a rush on the
+refreshment room. "He must have kept his eyes open pretty wide since he
+landed."
+
+Lydia did not answer, nor did she join in the stampede to the
+dining-room. She sat still, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, her
+eyes very bright and dark in her pale face. She was left quite alone in
+the deserted room. Across the hall was the loud, incessant uproar of
+feminine conversation released from the imprisonment of an hour's
+silence. From the scraps of talk that were intelligible, it might have
+been one of her own receptions. Lydia heard not a mention of the
+opinions to which they had been listening. Apparently, they were
+regarded as an entertaining episode in a social afternoon. She listened
+intently. She looked across at the crowd of her acquaintances as though
+she were seeing them for the first time. In their midst was the tall
+foreigner, smiling, talking, bowing, drinking tea. He was being
+introduced in succession to all of his admiring auditors.
+
+Lydia rose to go and made her way to the dressing-room on the second
+floor for her wraps. As she returned toward the head of the stairs she
+saw a man's figure ascending, and stood aside to let him pass. He bowed
+with an unconscious assurance unlike that of any man Lydia had ever
+seen, and looked at her pale face and burning eyes with some curiosity.
+A faint aroma of delicate food and fading flowers and woman's
+sachet-powder hung about him. It was the lecturer, fresh from his throng
+of admirers. Lydia's heart leaped to a sudden valiant impulse,
+astonishing to her usual shyness, and she spoke out boldly, hastily:
+"Why did you tell us all that about our men? Didn't you think any of us
+would realize that they are good--our men are--good and pure and kind!
+Didn't you think we'd know that anything that's the matter with them
+must be the matter with us, too? They had mothers as well as fathers!
+It's not fair to blame everything on the men! It's not fair, and it
+can't be true! We're all in together, men and women. One can't be
+anything the other isn't!"
+
+She spoke with a swift, grave directness, looking squarely into the
+man's eyes, for she was as tall as he. They were quite alone in the
+upper hall. From below came the clatter of the talking, eating women.
+The Frenchman did not speak for a moment. For the first time the faint
+smile on his lips died away. He paid to Lydia the tribute of a look as
+grave as her own. Finally, "Madame, you should be French," he told her.
+
+The remark was so unexpected an answer to her attack that Lydia's eyes
+wavered. "I mean," he went on in explanation, "that you are acting as my
+wife would act if she heard the men of her nation abused in their
+absence. I mean also that I have delivered practically this same lecture
+over thirty times in America before audiences of women, and you are the
+first to--Madame, I should like to know your husband!" he exclaimed with
+another bow.
+
+"My husband is like all other American men," cried Lydia sharply,
+touched to the quick by this reference. "It is because he is that I--"
+She broke off with her gesture of passionate unresignation to her lack
+of fluency. Already the heat of the impulse that had carried her into
+speech was dying away. She began to hesitate for words.
+
+"Oh, I can't say what I mean--you must know it, anyhow! You blame the
+fathers for leaving all the bringing-up of the children to their wives,
+and yet you point out that the sons keep growing up all the time to
+be--to be--to be all you blame their fathers for being! If we women were
+half so--fine--as you tell us, why haven't we changed things?"
+
+The foreigner made a vivid, surprised, affirmatory gesture. "Exactly!
+exactly! exactly, Madame!" he cried. "It is the question I have asked
+myself a thousand times: Why is it--why is it that women so
+strong-willed, so unyielding in the seeking what they desire, why is it
+that apparently they have no influence on the general fabric of the
+society in--"
+
+"Perhaps it is," said Lydia unsparingly, her latent anger coming to the
+surface again and furnishing her fluency, "perhaps it is because people
+who see our faults don't help us to correct them, but flatter us by
+telling us we haven't any, and all the time think ill of us behind our
+backs."
+
+The lecturer began to answer with aplomb and an attempt at graceful
+cynicism: "Ah, Madame, put yourself in my place! I am addressing
+audiences of women. Would it be tactful to--" but under Lydia's honest
+eyes he faltered, stopped, flushed darkly under his heavy beard, up over
+his high, narrow forehead to the roots of his gray hair. He swallowed
+hard. "Madame," he said, "you have rebuked me--deservedly. I--I demand
+your pardon."
+
+"Oh, you needn't mind me," said Lydia humbly; "my opinion doesn't amount
+to anything. I oughtn't to talk, either. I don't _do_ anything different
+from the rest--the women downstairs, I mean. I can only see there's
+something wrong--" She found the other's gaze into her troubled eyes so
+friendly that she was moved to cry out to him, all her hostility gone:
+"What _is_ the trouble, anyhow?"
+
+The lecturer flushed again, this time touched by her appeal. "I proudly
+put at your service any reflections I have made--as though you were my
+daughter. I have a daughter about your age, who is also married--who
+faces your problems. Madame, you look fatigued--will you not sit down?"
+He led her to a sofa on one side of the hall and took a seat beside her.
+"Is not the trouble," he began, "that the women have too much leisure
+and the men too little--the women too little work, the men too much?"
+
+"Oh, yes, yes, yes!" Lydia's meditations had long ago carried her past
+that point; she was impatient at his taking time to state it. "But how
+can we change it?"
+
+"You cannot change it in a day. It has taken many years to grow. It has
+seemed to me that one way to change it is by using your leisure
+differently. Even those women who use their leisure for the best
+self-improvement have not used it well. Many of my countrymen say that
+the culture of American women is like a child's idea of
+ornamentation--the hanging on the outside of all odd bits of broken
+finery. I have not found it always so. I have met many learned women
+here, many women more cultivated than my own wife. But listen, Madame,
+to the words of an old man. Culture is dust and ashes if the spiritual
+foundations of life are not well laid; and, believe me, it takes two, a
+man and a woman, to lay those foundations. It can not be done alone."
+
+"But how, how--" began Lydia impatiently.
+
+"In the only way that anything can be accomplished in this world, by
+working! Your women have not worked patiently, resolutely, against the
+desertion of their men. Worse--they have encouraged it! Have you never
+heard an American, woman say: 'Oh, I can't bear a man around the house!
+They are so in the way!' Or, 'I let my husband's business alone. I want
+him to let--'"
+
+He imitated an accent so familiar to Lydia that she winced. "Oh, don't!"
+she said. "I see all that."
+
+"You must find few to see with you."
+
+"But how to change it?" She leaned toward him as though he could impart
+some magic formula to her.
+
+"With the men, work to have them share your problems--work to share
+theirs. Do not be discouraged by repeated failure. Defeat should not
+exist for the spirit. And, oh, the true way--you pointed it out in your
+first words. You have the training of the children. Their ideals are
+yours to make. A generation is a short--"
+
+His face answered more and more the eager intentness of her own. He
+raised his hand with a gesture that underlined his next words: "But
+remember always, always, what Amiel says, that a child will divine what
+we really worship, and that no teaching will avail with him if we
+_teach_ in contradiction to what we _are_."
+
+They were interrupted by a loud hail from the stairs. Madeleine Lowder's
+handsome head showed through the balustrade, and back of her were other
+amused faces.
+
+"I started to look you up, Lydia," she said, advancing upon them
+hilariously, "I thought maybe you weren't feeling well, and then I saw
+you monopolizing the lion so that everybody was wondering where in the
+world he was, and you were so wrapped up that you never even noticed me,
+so I motioned the others to see what a demure little cat of a sister I
+have."
+
+She stood before them at the end of this facetious explanation,
+laughing, frank, sure of herself, and as beautiful as a great rosy
+flower.
+
+"Your _sister_," said the lecturer incredulously to Lydia.
+
+"My husband's sister," Lydia corrected him, and presented the newcomer
+in one phrase.
+
+"Isn't she a sly, designing creature, Mr. Buisine?" cried Madeleine, in
+her usual state of hearty enjoyment of her situation. "You haven't met
+many as up-and-coming, have you now?"
+
+"I do not know the meaning of your adjective, Mademoiselle; but it is
+true that I have met few like your brother's wife."
+
+"I'm not Mademoiselle!" Madeleine was greatly amused at the idea.
+
+The lecturer looked at her with a return to his enigmatic smile of the
+earlier afternoon. "I never saw a person who looked more unmarried than
+yourself, Mademoiselle," he persisted.
+
+"Oh, we American women know the secret of not looking married," said
+Madeleine proudly.
+
+"You do indeed," said the Frenchman with the manner of gallantry. "All
+of you look unmarried."
+
+Lydia rose to go. The lecturer looked at her, his eyes softening, and
+made a silent gesture of farewell.
+
+He turned back to Madeleine. "But I _am_," she assured him, pleased and
+flattered with the centering of their persiflage on herself. She made a
+gesture toward Lydia, disappearing down the stairs. "I'm as much married
+as _she_ is!"
+
+M. Buisine continued smiling. "That is quite, quite incredible," he told
+her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+"... in tragic life, God wot,
+No villain need be. Passions spin the plot."
+
+
+"Say, Lydia," said Madeleine with her bluff good humor, coming into the
+house a few days after the French lecture, "say, I'm awfully sorry I
+told Paul! I never supposed he'd go and get mad. It was just my fool
+notion of being funny."
+
+Lydia was dusting the balustrade, her back to her visitor. She tingled
+all through at this speech, and for an instant went on with her work,
+trying to decide if she should betray the fact that she knew nothing of
+the incident to which Madeleine's remark seemed to refer, or if she
+should, as she had done so many times already, conceal under a silence
+her ignorance of what her husband told other people. She never learned
+of matters pertaining to Paul's profession except from chance remarks of
+his business associates. He had not even told her, until questioned,
+about his great inspiration for rearranging the territory covered in
+that region by his company; a plan that must have engrossed his thoughts
+and fired his enthusiasm during months of apparently common life with
+his wife. And Paul had been genuinely surprised, and a little put out at
+her desire to know of it.
+
+She decided that she dared not in this instance keep silent. She was too
+entirely in the dark as to what Madeleine had done. "I don't know what
+you're talking about, Madeleine," she said, turning around, dust-cloth
+in hand, trying to speak casually.
+
+Her sister-in-law stared. "Didn't Paul come home and give it to you? He
+looked as though he were going to."
+
+Lydia's heart sank in a vague premonition of evil. "Paul hasn't said
+anything to me. Why in the world should he? Is it about 'Stashie? She's
+been back several days now, but I thought he hadn't noticed her much."
+
+"Well, he _hasn't_ said anything, that's a fact!" exclaimed Madeleine,
+with the frank implication in her voice that she had not before believed
+Lydia's statement. "My, no! It's not about 'Stashie. It's about the
+French lecturer."
+
+Lydia's astonishment at this unexpected answer quite took away her
+breath. "_About the_--" she began.
+
+"Why, look-y here, it was this way," explained Madeleine rapidly. "I
+told you I was only joking. I thought it would be fun to tease Paul
+about the mash you made on old What's-his-name--about your sitting off
+on a sofa with him, and being so wrapped up you didn't even notice when
+the whole gang of us came to look at you--and maybe I stretched it some
+about how you looked leaning forward and gazing into his eyes--" She
+broke off with a laugh, cheerfully unable to continue a serious attitude
+toward life. "Oh, never you mind! It does a married man good to make him
+jealous once in a while. Keeps 'em from getting too stodgy and
+husbandy."
+
+"Jealous!" cried Lydia. "Paul jealous! Of me! Never!" Her certainty on
+the point was instant and fixed.
+
+"Well, you'd ha' thought he was, if you'd seen him. I was jollying him
+along--we were in the trolley, going to Endbury. I had to take that
+early car so's to keep a date with Briggs, and, oh, Lydia! that brown
+suit he's making for me is a _dream_, simply a dream! He's put a little
+braid, just the least little bit, along--"
+
+"What did Paul say?"
+
+"Paul? Oh, yes--How'd I get switched off onto Briggs? Why, Paul didn't
+say _anything_; that was what made me see he wasn't taking it right. He
+just sat still and listened and listened till it made me feel foolish. I
+thought he'd jolly me back, you know. He's usually a great hand for
+that. And then when I looked at him I saw he looked as black as a
+thundercloud--that nasty look he has when he's real mad. When we were
+children and he'd look that way, I'd grab up any old thing and hit him
+quick, so's to get it in before he hit me. Well, I was awfully sorry,
+and I said, 'Why, hold on a minute, Paul, let me tell you--' but he said
+he guessed I'd told him about enough, and before I could open my mouth
+he dropped off the car. We'd got in as far as Hayes Avenue. I wanted to
+explain, you know, that the Frenchman was old enough to be our
+_grandfather_!"
+
+"When did this happen?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know; three or four days ago--why, Thursday, it must have
+been, for after I got through with Briggs I went on to that--"
+
+"And this is Monday," said Lydia; "four days."
+
+At the sight of her sister-in-law's troubled eyes, Madeleine was again
+overcome with facile remorse. She clapped her on the shoulder
+hearteningly. "I'm awfully sorry, Lyd, but don't you go being afraid of
+Paul. You're too gentle with him, anyhow. A married woman can't afford
+to be. You have to keep the men in their places, and you can't do that
+if you don't knock 'em the side of the head once in so often. It's good
+for 'em. Honest! And about this, don't you worry your head a minute.
+Like as not Paul's forgot everything about it. He'd forget anything, you
+know he would, if an interesting job came up in business. And if he ever
+does say anything, you just laugh and tell him about old Thingamajig's
+white hair and pop eyes, and he'll laugh at the joke on himself."
+
+Lydia drew back with a gesture of extreme repugnance. "Don't talk so--as
+though Paul could be so--so vulgar."
+
+Madeleine laughed. "I guess you won't find a man in _this_ world that
+isn't 'vulgar' that way."
+
+"Why, I've been _married_ to Paul for years--he wouldn't think I--no
+matter what you told him, he couldn't conceive of my--"
+
+Mrs. Lowder, as usual, found her brother's wife very diverting. "Of your
+doing a little hand-holding on the side? Oh, go on! Flirting's no
+crime! And you did--honest to goodness, you did, turn that old fellow's
+head. You ought to have seen the way he looked after you."
+
+Lydia cut her off with a sharp "Oh, _don't_!" She was now sitting, still
+absently grasping the dust-cloth.
+
+Madeleine stood for a moment looking at her in a meditative silence
+rather unusual for her. "Lydia, you don't look a bit well," she said
+kindly. "Are you still bothered with that nausea?" She sat down by her
+sister-in-law and put her arms around her with an impulse of
+affectionate pity that almost undid Lydia, always so helplessly
+responsive to tenderness. "What's the matter, Lyd?" Madeleine went on.
+"Something's not going just right. Are you scared about this second
+confinement? Is Paul being horrid about something? You just take my
+advice, and if you want anything out of him, you fight for it. Nobody
+gets anything in this world if they don't put up a fight for it."
+
+Lydia began to say that there were some things which lost their value if
+obtained by fighting, but suddenly she stopped her faltering words, drew
+a long breath, and laid her head on the other's shoulder. More than
+wifely loyalty kept her silent. All her lifelong experience of Madeleine
+crystallized into a certainty of her limitations, and with this
+certainty came the realization that Madeleine stood for all the circle
+of people about her. Lydia had learned one lesson of life. She knew, she
+now knew intensely, that there was no cry by which she could reach the
+spiritual ear of the warm human beings so close to her in the body. She
+knew there was no language in which she could make intelligible her
+travail of soul. In the moment the two women sat thus, she renounced,
+once for all, any hope of outside aid in her perplexities. They lay
+between herself and Paul. She could hope to find expression and relief
+for them only through that unique privilege of marriage, utter intimacy.
+
+She kissed her husband's sister gently, comforted somewhat by the mere
+fact of her presence. "You're good to bother about me, Maddely," she
+said, using a pet name of their common childhood. "I guess I'm not
+feeling very well these days. But that's to be expected."
+
+"Well, I tell you what, I wouldn't be so patient about it as _you_ are!"
+cried the other wife. "It's simply horrid to have all this a second
+time, and Ariadne so little yet. It's _mean_ of Paul."
+
+She continued voicing an indignant sympathy with her usual energy. Lydia
+looked at her with a vague smile. At the first words of the childless
+woman, she had been filled with the mother-hunger which gave savor to
+her life during those days. As Madeleine went on, she sat unheeding,
+lost in a fond impatience to feel the tiny body on her knees, the downy
+head against her cheek. Her arms ached with emptiness. For an instant,
+so vivid was her sense of it, the child seemed to be there, in her arms.
+She felt the eager tug of the soft lips at her breast. She looked
+down--"Well, anyhow, you poor, dear thing! I hope you will bottle-feed
+this one! It would be just a little _too_ much if they made you nurse
+it!"
+
+Lydia did not even attempt a protest. Her submissive, entire acceptance
+of spiritual isolation seemed an answer to many of the conflicting
+impulses which had hitherto distracted her. She wished that she could
+reassure Madeleine by telling her that she would never again make
+another "odd" speech to her. She renounced all common life except the
+childlike, harmless, animal-like one of mutual material wants, and this
+renunciation brought her already a peace which, though barren, was
+infinitely calming after her former struggling uncertainties. "How did
+those waists come out that you sent to the cleaner's, Madeleine?" she
+asked, in a bright, natural tone of interest. "I hope the blue one
+_didn't_ fade."
+
+Madeleine reported to her husband that Lydia had seemed in one of her
+queer notional moods at first, but cheered up afterward and talked more
+"like folks," and seemed more like herself than she had since her father
+died. They had a real good visit together she said, and she began to
+think she could get some good satisfaction out of having Lydia for a
+neighbor, after all.
+
+But after Lydia was alone, there sprang upon her the terror of living on
+such terms with Paul. No, no! Never that! It would be dying by inches!
+Beaten back to this last inner stronghold of the dismantled castle of
+her ideals of life, she prepared to defend it with the energy of
+desperation.
+
+She did not believe Madeleine's story, or, at least, not her
+interpretation of Paul's attitude, but she felt a dreary chill at his
+silence toward her. It seemed to her that their marriage ought to have
+brought her husband an irresistible impulse to have in all their
+relations with each other a perfect openness. She resolved that she
+would begin to help him to that impulse that very day; now, at once.
+
+When Paul came in, he seemed abstracted, and went directly upstairs to
+pack a satchel, stating with his usual absence of explanatory comment
+that he was called to Evanston on business. He ate his dinner rather
+silently, glancing furtively at the paper. Only at the
+breakfast-table--such was their convention--did he allow himself to
+become absorbed in the news.
+
+Ariadne prattled to her mother of her adventures in the kitchen, where
+Patsy O'Hern, 'Stashie's cousin Patsy, was visiting her, and he made
+Ariadne a "horse out of a potato and toothpicks for legs, and a little
+wagon out of a matchbox, and a paper doll to sit and drive, and Patsy
+was perfectly loverly, anyhow, and he was making such a lot of money
+every day, and, oh, he made the wheels out of potato, too, as round as
+could be he cut it, and he gave every cent of it to his grandmother and
+she loved him as much as she did 'Stashie, and wasn't it good to have
+'Stashie back, and--"
+
+Paul frowned silently over his pie.
+
+"Come, dear; it's seven o'clock and bedtime," said Lydia, leading the
+little girl away.
+
+When she came back she noticed by the clock that she had been gone
+almost half an hour. She was surprised to see Paul still in the
+dining-room, as though he had not stirred since she left him. He was
+sitting in an attitude of moody idleness, singular with him, his elbows
+on the table, his chin in his hands. He looked desperately, tragically
+tired.
+
+No inward monitor gave any warning to Lydia of what the next few moments
+were to be in her life. She crossed the room quickly to her husband,
+feeling a great longing to be close to him.
+
+As she did so, a rattling clatter of tin was heard from the kitchen,
+followed by a shout of roaring laughter. Something in Paul's tense face
+snapped. He started up, overturning his chair. "Oh, _damn_ that idiot!"
+he cried.
+
+The door opened behind them. 'Stashie stood there, her red hair hidden
+in a mass of soft dough that was beginning to ooze down over her
+perspiring, laughing face. "I just wanted to show you what a comycal
+thing happened, Mis' Hollister," she began, in her familiar way.
+"'Twould make a pig laugh, now! I'd begun my bread dough, and put it on
+a shelf, an'--"
+
+"Oh, get out of here!" Paul yelled at her furiously. "And less noise out
+of you in the kitchen!"
+
+He slammed the door shut on her retreat, and turned to Lydia with a face
+she did not recognize. The room grew black before her eyes.
+
+"I suppose you still prefer that dirty Irish slut to my wishes," he
+said.
+
+His words, his accent, the quality of his voice, were the zigzag of
+lightning to his wife. The storm burst over her head like thunder.
+
+She was amazed to feel a great wave of anger surge up in her, responsive
+to his own. She cried, in outraged resentment at his injustice: "You
+know very well--" and stopped, horrified at the passion which rose
+clamoring to her lips.
+
+"I know very well that my home is the last place where my wishes are
+consulted," said Paul, catching her up.
+
+"I will dismiss 'Stashie to-morrow," returned Lydia with a bitter,
+proud brevity.
+
+"You're rather slow to take a hint. How long has she been with us? As
+for your saying that you can't get anyone else, and can't keep house
+decently as other decent people do, there isn't a word of truth in it!
+You can do whatever you care enough about to try to do. You didn't make
+an incompetent mess of taking care of the baby as you did out of that
+disgusting dinner party!"
+
+It was the first time he had ever spoken outright to her of that
+experience. Lydia was transfixed to hear the poison of the memory as
+fresh in his voice as though it had happened yesterday.
+
+"I'm simply not worth putting yourself out for," went on Paul, turning
+away and picking up his overcoat. "I'm only a common, ignorant,
+materialistic beast of an American husband!" He added in an insulting
+tone: "I suppose you'd like two husbands; one to earn your living for
+you, and one to talk to about your soul and to exchange near-culture
+with!"
+
+He had not looked at Lydia as he poured out this sudden flood of
+acrimony, but at her quick, fierce reply, he faced her.
+
+"I'd like _one_ husband," she cried white with indignation.
+
+"And I'd like a wife!" Paul flashed back at her hotly. "A wife that'd be
+a help and not a hindrance to everything I want to do--a wife that'd be
+loyal to me behind my back, and not listen to sneaking foreigners
+telling her that she's a misunderstood martyr--_martyr_!" His sense of
+injury exalted him. "Yes; all you American wives are martyrs, all right,
+I must say. While your husbands are working like dogs to make you money,
+you're sitting around with nothing to do but drink tea and listen to a
+foreigner who tells you--in summer time, while you're enjoying the cool
+breeze out here on a--maybe you think a dynamo-room's a funny place to
+be, with the thermometer standing at--what am I _doing_ when I'm away
+from you? Enjoying myself, no doubt. Maybe you think it's enjoyment to
+travel all night on a--maybe you think it's nice to make yourself
+conspicuous with another man that's been abusing your--"
+
+Lydia could hear no more for a loud roaring in her ears. She knew then
+the blackest moment of her life--a sickening scorn for the man before
+her. Madeleine had been right, then. They were of the same blood. His
+sister knew him better than--she, his wife, his wedded wife, was not to
+be spared the pollution of having her husband--
+
+"I didn't take any stock in Madeleine's nasty insinuations about your
+flirting with him, of course, but it showed me what you've been thinking
+about me all this time I've been working like a--"
+
+Lydia drew the first conscious breath since the beginning of this
+nightmare. The earth was still under her feet, struck down to it though
+she was. The roaring in her ears stopped. She heard Paul say:
+
+"Maybe you think I'm made of iron! I tell you I'm right on my nerves
+every minute! Dr. Melton threatens me with a breakdown every time I see
+him!" There was a sort of angry pride in this statement. "I can't sleep!
+I'm doing ten men's work! And what do I get from you? Any rest? Any
+quiet? Why, these first years, when you might have made things easier
+for me by taking all other cares off my mind and leaving me free for
+business--they've actually been harder because of you!"
+
+He thrust his arms into his overcoat and caught up his satchel. "I
+haven't wanted anything so hard to give! Good Lord! All I asked for was
+a well-kept house where I could invite my friends without being ashamed
+of it, and to live like other decent people!" He moved to the door, and
+put one hand, one strong, thin hand, on the knob. With the unearthly
+clearness of one in a terrible accident, Lydia noticed every detail of
+his appearance. He was flushed, a purple, congested color, singularly
+unlike his usual indoor pallor; hurried pulses throbbed visibly, almost
+audibly, at his temples; one eyelid twitched rapidly and steadily, like
+a clock ticking. With a gesture as automatic as drawing breath, he
+jerked out his watch and looked at it, apparently to make sure of
+catching his trolley, although his valedictory was poured out with such
+a passionate unpremeditation that the action must have been involuntary
+and unconscious. "But I don't even ask that now--since it doesn't suit
+you to bother to give it! All I ask now ought to be easy enough for any
+woman to do--not to _bother_ me! Leave me alone! Keep your everlasting
+stewing and fussing and hysterical putting-on to yourself! I don't
+bother you with my affairs--I haven't, and I never will--why, for God's
+sake, can't you-- Some men marry women who help them, and pull with them
+loyally, instead of pulling the other way all the time! Such a woman
+would have made me a thousand times more successful than I--"
+
+Lydia broke in with a loud voice of anguished questioning: "Do they make
+them better men?" she asked piercingly.
+
+Her husband looked at her over his shoulder. "Oh, you and your
+goody-goody cant!" he said, and going out without further speech, closed
+the door behind him.
+
+The clock struck the half-hour. Their conversation had lasted less than
+five minutes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+TRIBUTE TO THE MINOTAUR
+
+
+The scene of Paul's departure was no worse than many an outbreak in the
+ordinary married life of ordinary, quick-tempered, over-tired married
+people, for whom an open quarrel brings relief like the clearing of the
+air after an electric storm, but to Lydia it was no such surface
+manifestation of nerves. The impulse that had made them both break out
+into the cruel words came from some long-gathering bitterness, the very
+existence of which was like the end of all things to her. A single flash
+of lightning had showed her to the edge of what a terrifying precipice
+they had strayed, and then had left her in darkness.
+
+That was how it seemed to her; she was in the most impenetrable
+blackness, though the little girl played on beside her with a child's
+cheerful blindness to its elder's emotion, and Anastasia detected
+nothing but that her mistress had a better color than before and stepped
+about quite briskly.
+
+It was the restless activity of a tortured animal which drove Lydia from
+one household task to another, hurrying her into a trembling physical
+exhaustion, which, however, brought with it no instant's cessation of
+the tumult in her heart. The night after Paul's departure was like a
+black eternity to her turning wildly on her bed, or rising to walk as
+wildly about the silent house. "But I can't stand this!--to hate and be
+hated! I can not bear it! I must do something--but what? but what?" Once
+she feared she had screamed out these ever-recurring words, so audibly
+like a cry of agony did they ring in her ears; but, forcing herself to
+an instant's immobility, she heard Ariadne's light, regular breathing
+continue undisturbed.
+
+She sat down on her bed and told herself that she would go out of her
+mind if she could not think something different from this chaos of angry
+misery. She fell on her knees, she sent her soul out in a supreme appeal
+for help and, still kneeling, she felt the intolerable tension within
+her loosen. She began to cry softly. The unnatural strength which had
+sustained her gave way; she sank together in a heap, her head leaning
+against the bed, her arms thrown out across it. Here Anastasia found her
+the next morning, apparently asleep, although upon being called she
+seemed to come to herself from a deeper unconsciousness.
+
+Whatever it had been, the hour or two of oblivion that lay back of her
+was like a wall between her soul and the worst phase of her suffering.
+In answer to her cry for help, perhaps an appeal to the best in her own
+nature, there had come a cessation of what was to her the only
+unbearable pain--the bitter, blaming anger which had flared up in her,
+answering her husband's anger like the reflection of a torch in a
+mirror. In that silent hour before dawn, she had seen Paul suddenly as a
+victim to forces outside himself quite as much as she was; poor, tired
+Paul, with his haggard face, flushed with a wrath that was not his own,
+but an involuntary expression of suffering, the scream of a man caught
+in the cogs of a great machine. She hung before her mental vision now,
+constantly, the picture of Paul as she had seen him when she came
+downstairs; Paul leaning his chin on his hands, his jaded face white and
+drawn under his thinning, graying hair.
+
+The alleviation which came through this conception of her husband was
+tempered by the final disappearance of her old feeling that Paul was
+stronger, clearer-headed, than she, and that if she could but once make
+him stop and understand the forces in their life which she feared, he
+could conquer them as easily as he conquered obstacles in the way of
+their material success. She now felt that he was not even as strong as
+she, since he could not get even her faint glimpse of their common
+enemy, this Minotaur of futile materialism which had devoured the young
+years of their marriage and was now threatening to destroy the
+possibility of a great, strongly-rooted affection which had lain so
+clearly before them. She felt staggered by the responsibility of having
+to be strong enough for two; and as another day wore on this new
+preoccupation became almost as absorbing an obsession as her anger of
+the night before.
+
+But this was steadying in the very velocity with which her mind swept
+around the circle of possible courses of action. Her thoughts hummed
+with a steady, dizzy speed around and around the central idea that
+something must be done and that she was now the only one to do it.
+'Stashie thought to herself that she had never seen Mrs. Hollister look
+so well, her eyes were so bright, her cheeks so pink.
+
+Lydia had set herself the task of getting down and sorting the curtains
+in the house, preparatory to sending them to the cleaner. Above the
+piles of dingy drapery, her face shone, as 'Stashie had noted, with a
+strange, feverish brightness. Her knees shook under her, but she walked
+about quickly. Ariadne ran in and out of the house, chirping away to her
+mother of various wonderful discoveries in the world of outdoors. Lydia
+heard her as from a distance, although she gave relevant answers to the
+child's talk.
+
+"It has come down," she was saying to herself, "to a life-and-death
+struggle. It isn't a question now of how much of the best in Paul, in
+me, in our life, we can save. It's whether we can save _any_! How dirty
+lace curtains get! It must be the soft coal--yes, it is a life and death
+struggle--I must see to Ariadne's underwear. It is too warm for these
+sunny days.--Oh! Oh! Paul and I have quarreled! And what about! About
+such sickeningly trivial things--how badly 'Stashie dusts! There are
+rolls of dust under the piano--but I thought people only
+quarreled--quarreled terribly--over great things: unfaithfulness,
+cruelty, differences in religion! Oh, if I only now had a religion, a
+religion which would--Yes, Ariadne; but only to the edge of the driveway
+and back. How muddy the driveway is! Paul said it should have more
+gravel--_Paul!_ How _can_ he come back to me after such--Madeleine says
+married people always quarrel--how can they look into each other's eyes
+again! We must escape that sort of life! We must! We _must_!"
+
+The thought of what she had hoped from her marriage and of what she had,
+filled her with the most passionate self-reproach. It must be at least
+half her fault, since she and Paul made up but one whole. As she helped
+'Stashie sort the dingy curtains, she was saying over and over to
+herself that she was responsible, responsible as much as for Ariadne's
+health. This conception so possessed her now that she felt herself able
+to accomplish anything, even the miracle needed.
+
+To have achieved this state of passionate resolution gave her for a
+moment the sense of having started upon the straight road to escape from
+her nightmare; and for the first time since the door had slammed behind
+Paul she drew a long breath and was able to give more than a blind gaze
+to the world about her.
+
+She noticed that, though it was after twelve o'clock, Ariadne had not
+been told to come to luncheon. When the little girl came running at her
+mother's call, her vivid face flushed with happy play, Lydia knew a
+throb of that exquisite, unreasoning parent's joy, lying too near the
+very springs of life for any sickness of the spirit to affect it. Like
+everything else, however, the touch of the child's tight-clinging arms
+about her neck brought her back to her preoccupation. Ariadne must not
+be allowed to grow up to such a regret as she felt, that she had never
+known her father. There were moments, she saw them clearly, when Paul
+realized with difficulty the fact of his daughter's existence, and he
+never realized it as a fact involving any need for a new attitude on his
+part.
+
+"When is Daddy coming back to us _vis_ time?" asked Ariadne over her
+egg.
+
+Anastasia paused furtively at the door. She had had a divination of
+trouble in the last talk between her master and mistress. The door had
+slammed. Mr. Hollister had not called for the tie she was pressing for
+him in the kitchen--'Stashie told herself fiercely that "killing wud be
+too good for her, makin' trouble like the divil's own!" She listened
+anxious for Lydia's answer.
+
+"Daddy's coming back to us as soon as his business is done," said Paul's
+wife. At the turn of her phrase she turned cold, and added with a quick
+vehemence: "No, no! before that! Long before that!" She went on, to
+cover her agitation and get the maid out of the room, "'Stashie, get the
+baby a glass of milk."
+
+"The front door bell's ringin'," said 'Stashie, departing in that
+direction, with the assurance of her own ability to choose the proper
+task for herself, so exasperating to her master.
+
+She came back bringing Miss Burgess in her wake, Miss Burgess
+apologizing for "coming right _in_, that way," exclaiming effusively at
+the pretty picture made by mother and child,--"She must be such company
+for you, Miss Lydia"--Miss Burgess, deferential, sure of her own
+position and her hostess', and determinedly pleased with the general
+state of things. Lydia repressed a sigh of impatience, but, noting the
+tired lines in the little woman's face, told Anastasia to make another
+cup of tea for Miss Burgess and cook her an egg.
+
+"Oh, delighted, I'm sure! Quite an honor to have the same lunch with
+little Miss Hollister."
+
+Ariadne did not smile at this remark, though from the speaker's accent
+it was meant as a pleasantry.
+
+Miss Burgess cast about in her mind for another bit of suitable
+badinage, but finding none, she began at once on the object of her
+visit.
+
+"Now, my dear, I want you to listen to all I have to say before you make
+one objection. It's an idea of my very own. You'll let me get through
+without interruption?"
+
+"Yes, oh, yes," murmured Lydia, lifting Ariadne down from her high-chair
+and untying the napkin from about her thin little neck.
+
+The introduction of a new element in her surroundings had for a moment
+broken the thread of her exalted resolutions. She wondered with a sore
+heart, as though it had been a common lovers' quarrel, how she and Paul
+could ever get over the first sight of each other again. She was
+wondering how, with the most passionate resolve in the world, she could
+do anything at all under the leaden garment of physical fatigue which
+would weigh her down in the months to come.
+
+Miss Burgess began in her best style, which she so evidently considered
+very good indeed, that she could not doubt Lydia's attention. It was all
+about a home for working-women she explained; a new charity which had
+come from the East, had caught on like anything among the Smart Set of
+Columbus, and was about to be introduced into Endbury. The most
+exclusive young people in Columbus--the East End Set (Miss Burgess had a
+genius for achieving oral capitalization) gave a parlor play for the
+first benefit there, in one of the Old Broad Street Homes, and they were
+willing to repeat it in Endbury to introduce it there. A Perfectly
+splendid crowd was sure to come, tickets could be Any Price, and the
+hostess who lent her house to it could have the glory of a most unique
+affair. Mrs. Lowder would be overwhelmed with delight to have the pick
+of the Society of the Capital at her house, but Miss Burgess had thought
+it such an opportunity for Miss Lydia to come out of mourning with,
+since it was for charity. She motioned Lydia, about to speak, sternly to
+silence: "You said you wouldn't interrupt! And you haven't let me say
+_half_ yet! That's your side of it--the side your dear mother would
+think of if she were only here; but there's another side that you can't,
+you _oughtn't_ to resist!" She finished her tea with a hasty swallow
+and, going around the table, sat down by Lydia, laying her hand
+impressively on the young matron's slim arm. "You're the sweetest thing
+in the world, of course, but, like other people of your fortunate class,
+you can't realize how perfectly awfully lucky you are, nor how unlucky
+_poor_ people are! Of course it stands to reason that you can't even
+imagine the life of a working-woman--you, a woman of entire leisure,
+with every want supplied before you speak of it by a husband who adores
+you! Why, Miss Lydia, to give you some idea let me tell you just one
+little thing. Lots and lots of the working-women of Endbury live with
+their families in two or three rooms right on that horrid Main Street
+near their work because they can't afford _carfares_!"
+
+Lydia looked at her without speaking. She remembered her futile,
+desperate, foolish proposition to Paul to get more time together by
+living near his work. With a roar, the flood of her bewilderment,
+diverted for a time, broke over her again. She braced herself against
+it. Through her companion's dimly-heard exhortations that, from her high
+heaven of self-indulgence, she stoop to lend a hand to her less favored
+sisters, she repeated to herself, clinging to the phrase as though it
+were a magic formula: "If I can only wish hard enough to make things
+better, nothing can prevent me."
+
+The telephone bell rang, and Miss Burgess interrupted herself to say:
+"It's for me, I know. I told them at the office to call me up here." She
+got herself out of the room in her busy way, her voice soon coming in a
+faint murmur from the far end of the hall.
+
+Lydia walked to the window to call Ariadne in to put on a wrap, the
+thought and action automatic. She had buttoned the garment about the
+child's slender body before she responded again to the little living
+presence. Then she took her in a close embrace. With the child's breath
+on her face, with her curls exhaling the fresh outdoor air, there came
+to pass for poor Lydia one of the strange, happy mysteries of the
+contradictory tangle that is human nature. She had felt it often with
+Paul after one of their long separations--how mere physical presence can
+sometimes bring a consolation to the distressed spirit.
+
+As she held her child to her heart, things seemed for a moment quite
+plain and possible. Why, Paul was Ariadne's father! As soon as he was
+with her again, all would be well. It must be. Nothing could separate
+her from the father of her baby! They were one flesh now. There was
+still all their lifetime to grow to be one in spirit. She had only to
+try harder. They had simply started on a false track. They were so
+young. So many years lay before them. There was plenty of time to turn
+back and start all over again--there was plenty of time to--
+
+"Oh, my dear! my dear!" Miss Burgess faltered weakly into the room and
+sank upon a chair.
+
+Lydia sprang up, Ariadne still in her arms, and faced her for a long
+silent instant, searching her face with passion. Then she set the little
+girl down gently. "Run out and play, dear," she said, and until the door
+had shut on the child she did not stir. Her hand at her throat, "Well?"
+she asked.
+
+Miss Burgess began to cry into her handkerchief.
+
+"It's Paul!" said Lydia with certainty. She sat down.
+
+The weeping woman nodded.
+
+"He has left me," Lydia continued in the same dry tone of affirmation.
+"I know. We had a quarrel, and he has left me."
+
+Miss Burgess looked up, quite wild with surprise, her sobs cut short,
+her face twisted. "Oh, no--no--no!" she cried, running across the room
+and putting her arms about the other. "No; it's not that! He--he--the
+man who telephoned said they were testing the dynamo, and your husband
+insisted on--"
+
+Lydia came to life like a swimmer emerging into the air after a long
+dive. "Oh, he's hurt! He's hurt!" she cried, bounding to her feet. "I
+must go to him. I must go to him!"
+
+She tore herself away from the reporter and darted toward the door. The
+older woman ran after her, stumbling, sobbing, putting hands of
+imploring pity on her.
+
+Although no word was spoken, Lydia suddenly screamed out as though she
+had been stabbed. "_NO! Not that!_" she cried.
+
+"Yes, yes, my poor darling!" said the other.
+
+Lydia turned slowly around. "Then it is too late. We never can do
+better," she said.
+
+Miss Burgess tried helplessly to unburden her kind heart of its aching
+sympathy. "You spoke of a little disagreement, but, oh, my dear, don't
+let that be the last thought. Think of the years of perfect love and
+knowledge you had together."
+
+"We never knew each other," said Lydia. Her voice did not tremble.
+
+"Oh, don't! don't!" pleaded Miss Burgess, alarmed. "You mustn't let it
+unhinge you so! Such a perfect marriage!"
+
+"We were never married," said Lydia. She leaned against the wall and
+closed her eyes.
+
+"Oh, help! Someone!" called the poor reporter. "Somebody come quick."
+
+Lydia opened her eyes. She spoke still in a low, steady voice, but in it
+now was a shocking quality from which the other shrank back terrified.
+"_I could have loved him!_" she said.
+
+"Quick--'Stashie--hurry--keep the baby out of the room! Your mistress
+has fainted!"
+
+- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
+
+                                BOOK IV
+
+                  "BUT IT IS NOT TOO LATE FOR ARIADNE"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+PROTECTION FROM THE MINOTAUR
+
+
+Dr. Melton burst open the door of the house in the Black Rock woods, and
+running to the owner caught hold of his bared brown arm. "Paul Hollister
+is dead!" he cried.
+
+"I read the papers," said Rankin, looking down at him without stirring.
+
+"The damn fool!" cried the doctor, his face working. "Just now! There's
+another child expected."
+
+Rankin's inscrutable gravity did not waver at this speech. He felt the
+hand that rested on his arm tremble, and he was thinking, as Judge Emery
+had so often thought, that perhaps one reason for the doctor's success
+in treating women was a certain community of too-responsive nerves. "You
+can hardly blame a man because the date of his death is inconvenient,"
+he said reasonably. He drew up one of his deep chairs and pushed the
+doctor into it. "Sit down and get your breath. You look sick. How do you
+happen to be up so early? It's hardly daylight."
+
+"Up! You don't suppose I've been to bed! Lydia--" His voice halted.
+
+Rankin's quiet face stirred. "She feels it--terribly?"
+
+"I can't make her out! I can't make her out!" The doctor flung this
+confession of failure before him excitedly. "I don't know what's in her
+mind, but she's evidently dangerously near--women in her condition
+never have a very settled mental poise, anyhow, and this sudden
+shock--they _telephoned_ it--and there was nobody there but that fool
+Flora--"
+
+"Do you mean that Mrs. Hollister is out of her mind?" asked Rankin
+squarely.
+
+"I don't know! I don't know, I tell you! She says strange
+things--strange things. When I got there yesterday afternoon, she was
+holding Ariadne--you knew, didn't you? that she called their little girl
+Ariadne--?"
+
+Rankin sat down, white to the lips. "No," he said, "I didn't know that.
+I never heard anything about--about her married life."
+
+"Well, she was holding Ariadne as close as though she was expecting
+kidnapers. I came in and she looked up--God! Rankin, with what a face of
+fear! It wasn't grief. It was terror! She said: 'I must save the
+children--I mustn't let it get the children, too.' I asked her what she
+meant, and she went on in a whisper that fairly turned the blood
+backward in my veins, 'The Minotaur! He got Paul--I must hide the
+children from him!' And that's all she would say. I managed to put
+Ariadne to bed, though Lydia screamed at the idea of having her out of
+her sight, and I gave Lydia a bromide and made her lie down. I think she
+knew me--oh, yes, I'm sure she did--why, she seemed like herself in
+every way but that one--but all night long she has wakened at intervals
+with a shriek and would not be quieted until she had felt of Ariadne.
+Nothing I said has had the slightest effect. I'm at my wits' end! If she
+doesn't get quieted soon--I finally gave her an opiate--enough to drug
+her senseless for a time--I don't know what to do! I don't know what to
+do!" He dropped his head into his hands and sat silent, shivering.
+
+Rankin was looking at him, motionless, his powerful hands gripping his
+knees. He did not seem to breathe at all.
+
+The doctor sprang up and began to trot about, kicking at the legs of
+the furniture and biting his nails. "Yes, I can, too! I do blame him for
+the date of his death!" He went back angrily to an earlier remark.
+"Hollister killed himself as gratuitously as if he had taken a pistol!
+And he did it out of sheer, devilish vanity--ambition! He had worked
+himself almost insane, anyhow. I'd warned him that he must take it easy,
+get all the rest he could. His nerves were like fiddle-strings. And what
+did he do? Made a night trip to Evanston to superintend a job entirely
+outside his work. The inspector gave the machines the regular test; but
+Paul wasn't satisfied. Said they hadn't come up to what he'd guaranteed
+to get the contract; took charge of the test himself, ran the speed up
+goodness knows how high. The inspector said he warned him, but Paul had
+got going and nothing could stop
+him--speed-mad--efficiency-mad--whatever you call it. And at last the
+fly-wheel on the engine couldn't stand it. It went through four floors
+and tore a hole in the roof--they say, in their ghastly phrase, there
+isn't enough left of him for a funeral! The other men left widows and
+children, too, I suppose--Oh, damn! damn! damn!" He stopped short in the
+middle of the floor, his teeth chattering, his hand at his mouth.
+
+Rankin's face showed that he was making a great effort to speak. "Would
+I be allowed to see her?" he asked finally.
+
+The doctor spun round on him, amazed. "You? Lydia? Why in the world?"
+
+"Perhaps I could quiet her. I have been able to quiet several delirious
+sick people when others couldn't."
+
+"I don't even know she's delirious--that's what puzzles me. She seems--"
+
+"Will you let me try?" asked Rankin again.
+
+                 *       *       *       *       *
+
+When they reached the house in Bellevue, Lydia was still in a heavy
+stupor, so Mrs. Sandworth told them, showing no surprise at Rankin's
+appearance. The two men sat down outside the door of her room to wait.
+It was a long hour they passed there. Rankin sat silent, holding on his
+knee little Ariadne, who amused herself quietly with his watch and the
+leather strap that held it. He took the back off, and let her see the
+little wheel whirring back and forth. His eyes never left the child's
+serious, rosy face. Once or twice he laid his large, work-roughened hand
+gently on her dark hair.
+
+Dr. Melton fidgeted about, making excursions into the sick room and
+downstairs to look after his business by telephone, and, when he sat by
+the door, relieving his overburdened heart from time to time in some
+sudden exclamation. "Paul hasn't left a penny, of course," one of these
+ran, "and he hadn't finished paying for the house. But she'll come
+naturally to live with Julia and me." At these last words, in spite of
+his painful preoccupation, a tender look of anticipation lighted his
+face.
+
+Again, he said: "What crazy notion can it be about the whatever-it-was
+getting Paul?" Later, "Was there ever such a characteristic death?"
+Finally, with a long sigh: "Poor Paul! Poor Paul! It doesn't seem more
+than yesterday that he was a little boy. He was a brave little boy!"
+
+Mrs. Sandworth came to the door. "She's beginning to come to herself, I
+think. She stirs, and moves her hands about."
+
+As she spoke, there was a scream from the bedroom: "My baby! My baby!"
+
+Rankin sprang to his feet, holding Ariadne on one arm, and stepped
+quickly inside. "Here is the baby," he said in a quiet voice. "I was
+holding her all the time you slept. I will not let the Minotaur come
+near her."
+
+Lydia looked at him long, with no sign of recognition. The room was
+intensely silent. A drop of blood showed on Dr. Melton's lower lip where
+his teeth gripped it.
+
+"Nobody else sees it," said Lydia in a hurried, frightened tone. "They
+won't believe me when I say it is there. They won't take care of
+Ariadne. They can't--"
+
+"I see it," Rankin broke in. He went on steadily: "I will take care
+that it does not hurt Ariadne."
+
+"Do you promise?" asked Lydia solemnly.
+
+"I promise," said Rankin.
+
+Lydia looked about her wonderingly, with blank eyes. "I think, then, I
+will lie down and rest a little," she said, in a thin, weak voice. "I
+feel very tired. I can't seem to remember what makes me so tired." She
+sank back on the pillows and closed her eyes. Her face was like a sick
+child's in its appealing, patient look of suffering. She looked up at
+Rankin again. "You will not go far?" she asked.
+
+"I shall be close at hand," he answered.
+
+"You are very kind," murmured Lydia, closing her eyes again. "I am sorry
+to be so much trouble to you--but it is so important about Ariadne. I am
+sorry to be so--you are--very--"
+
+Melton touched the other man's arm and motioned him to the door.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+AS ARIADNE SAW IT
+
+
+All that day, the tall, ruddy-haired man in working clothes sat in the
+hall, within sight, though not within hearing, of the sick room, playing
+with the rosy child, and exerting all his ingenuity to invent quiet
+games that they could play there "where Muvver tan see us"; Ariadne soon
+learned the reason for staying in one place so constantly. She was very
+happy that day. Never in her life had she had so enchanting a
+playfellow. He showed her a game to play with clothespins and tin plates
+from the kitchen--why, it was so much fun that 'Stashie herself had to
+join in as she went past. And he told one story after another without a
+sign of the usual grown-up fatigue. They had their lunch there at the
+end of the hall, on the little sewing-table with two dolls beside them
+and the new man made Ariadne laugh by making believe feed the dolls out
+of her doll's tea-set.
+
+It was a little queer, of course, to stay right there all the time, and
+to have Muvver staring at them from the bedroom at the other end of the
+hall, and not to be allowed to do more than tiptoe in once or twice and
+kiss her without saying a word; but when Ariadne grew confused with
+trying to think this out, and the little eyes drooped heavily, the new
+man picked her up and tucked her away in his arms so comfortably that,
+though she meant to reach up and feel if his beard felt as red as it
+looked, she fell asleep before she could raise her hand.
+
+When she woke up it was twilight, but she was still in his arms. She
+stirred sleepily, and he looked down and smiled at her. His face looked
+like an old friend's--as though she had always known it. He had a
+friendly smile. She was very happy. Uncle Marius came toward them,
+teetering on his toes, the way he always did. "I think it's safe to
+leave now, Rankin," he said. "She has fallen into a natural sleep."
+
+The new man stood up, still holding Ariadne. How tall he was! She kept
+going up and up, and when she peered over his shoulder she found herself
+looking down on Uncle Marius' white head.
+
+"How about to-morrow?" asked the new man.
+
+"We'll see. We'll see," said Dr. Melton; and then they all went
+downstairs and had toast and boiled eggs for supper. Ariadne informed
+her companions, looking up from her egg with a yolky smile, "Daddy told
+Muvver the other day that 'Stashie had certainly learned to boil eggs
+something _fine_! And he laughed, but Muvver didn't. Was it a joke?"
+
+"They are very good eggs indeed, and well boiled," the new man answered.
+She loved the way in which he conversed with her.
+
+"Ought we to give her some idea?" asked the doctor in a low voice.
+
+"I would wait until she asks," said the other.
+
+But Paul's child never asked. Once or twice she remarked that Daddy was
+away longer than usual "_vis_ time," but he had never been a very
+steadily recurrent phenomenon in her life, and soon her little brain,
+filled with new impressions, had forgotten that he ever used to come
+back.
+
+There were many new impressions. A great deal was happening nowadays.
+Every morning something different, every day new people going and
+coming. Aunt Marietta, Auntie Madeleine, Uncle George from Cleveland,
+whom she'd seen only once or twice before, and Great-Aunt Hollister,
+whom she knew very well and feared as well as she knew her. After a time
+even the husbands began to appear, the husbands she had seen so rarely;
+Aunt Marietta's husband, and Aunt Madeleine's--fat, bald Mr. Lowder, who
+smelled of tobacco and soap and took her up on his lap--as much as he
+had--and gave her a big round dollar and kissed her behind her ear and
+smiled at her very kindly and held her very close. He said he liked
+little girls, and he wished Auntie Madeleine would get him one some day
+for a Christmas present. She informed him, filled with admiration at the
+extent of her own knowledge, that he couldn't get a Christmas present
+some day, but only just Christmas Day.
+
+Mostly, however, they paid no attention to her, these many aunts and
+uncles who came and went. And, oddly enough, Uncle Marius always shut
+the door to Muvver's room when they came, and wouldn't let them, no
+matter how much they wanted to, go in and see Muvver, who was, she
+gathered, very sick. Ariadne didn't see, really, why they came at all,
+since they couldn't see Muvver and they certainly never so much as
+looked at 'Stashie, dear darling 'Stashie--more of a comfort these queer
+days than ever before--and they never, never spoke to the new man, who
+came and went as though nobody knew he was there. They would look right
+at him and never see him. Everything was very hard for a little girl to
+understand, and she dared ask no questions.
+
+Everybody seemed to be very angry, and yet not at her. Indeed, she took
+the most prodigious care to avoid doing anything naughty lest she
+concentrate on herself this now widely diffused disapprobation. Never in
+her life had she tried so hard to be good, but nobody paid the least
+attention to her--nobody but the new man and 'Stashie, and they weren't
+the angry ones. The others stood about in groups in corners, talking in
+voices that started in to be low and always got loud before they
+stopped. Ariadne added several new words to her vocabulary at this time,
+from hearing them so constantly repeated. When her dolls were bad now,
+she shook them and called them "Indecent! indecent!" and asked them,
+with as close an imitation as she could manage, of Great-Aunt
+Hollister's tone, "What _do_ you suppose people are thinking! What _do_
+you suppose people are thinking!" Or she knocked them into a corner and
+said "Shocking! Shocking!"
+
+One day she stopped Uncle Marius, hurrying past her up the stairs, and
+asked him: "What are you thinking of, Uncle Marius?"
+
+"What am I thinking of? What do you mean?" he repeated, his face and
+eyes twitching the way they did when he couldn't understand something
+right off.
+
+"Why, Auntie Madeleine keeps asking everybody all the time, 'What _can_
+the doctor be thinking of?' I just wondered."
+
+He bent to kiss her raspingly--there were stiff little stubby white
+hairs coming out all over his face--and he said, as he trotted on up the
+stairs, "I am thinking of making sure that you have a mother, my poor
+dear."
+
+And then there was a bigger change one day. She went to bed in her own
+little crib, and when she woke up she wasn't there at all, but in a big
+bed in a room at Aunt Julia's; and Aunt Julia was smiling at her, and
+hugging her, and saying she was so glad she had come to live with her
+and Uncle Marius for a while. Ariadne found out that Uncle Marius had
+brought her and Muvver the night before in a carriage all the way from
+Bellevue. She regretted excessively that she had not been awake to enjoy
+the adventure.
+
+At Aunt Julia's, things were quieter. All at once the other people, the
+other uncles and aunts, had disappeared. That, of course, was because
+she and Muvver were at Aunt Julia's. She conceived of the house in
+Bellevue as still filled with their angry faces and voices, still
+echoing to "Indecent! indecent!" and "What _do_ you suppose people
+are saying?"
+
+There was a long, long time after this when nothing special happened.
+The new man continued to come here, and his visits were the only events
+in Ariadne's quiet days. Apparently he came to see Ariadne, for he never
+went to see Muvver at all, as he used to do in Bellevue. He took Ariadne
+out in the back yard as the weather began to get warmer, and showed her
+lots of outdoor plays. He was as nice as ever, only a good deal whiter;
+and that was odd, for they were now in May, and from playing outdoors
+all the time Ariadne herself was as brown as a berry. At least, that was
+what Aunt Julia said. Ariadne accepted it with her usual patient
+indulgence of grown-ups' mistakes. There was not, of course, a single
+berry that was anything but red or black, or at least a sort of blue,
+like huckleberries in milk. She and 'Stashie had gone over them, one by
+one; they knew.
+
+Uncle Marius remembered to shave himself nowadays. In fact, everything
+was more normal. Ariadne began to forget about the exciting time in
+Bellevue. Muvver wasn't in bed all the time now, but sat up in a chair
+for part of the day and even, if one were ever so quiet, could listen to
+accounts of what happened in Ariadne's world and could be told how Aunt
+Julia said that 'Stashie was quite a help as second girl if you just
+remembered to put away the best china, and that they had had eight new
+cooks since Ariadne had been there, but the second _would_ have stayed,
+only her mother got sick. The others just left. But Aunt Julia didn't
+mind. When there wasn't any cook, if it happened to be 'Stashie's day
+off, they all had bread and milk for supper, just as she had, and they
+let her set the table, and she could do it ever so well only she forgot
+_some_ things, of course, and Uncle Marius never got mad. He just said
+he hoped eating bread and milk like her would make him as good as she
+was--and she _was_ good--oh, Muvver, she was trying ever so hard to be
+good--
+
+"Come, dear," said Aunt Julia, "Mother's getting tired. We'd better go."
+
+It was only after she went away, sometimes only when she lay awake in
+her strange big bed, that Ariadne remembered that Muvver never said a
+word, but only smoothed her hair and kissed her.
+
+She and the new man used to play out in the old grape-arbor in the back
+yard, and it was there, one day in mid-May, that Uncle Marius came
+teetering out and called the new man to one side, only Ariadne could
+hear what they said. Uncle Marius said: "It's no use, Rankin. It's a
+fixed idea with her. She isn't violent any more, but she hasn't changed.
+She is certainly a little deranged, but not enough for legal restraint.
+She could take Ariadne and disappear any day. I'm in terror lest she do
+that. I've no authority to prevent her. She won't talk to me freely
+about what she is afraid of. She doesn't seem to trust me--_me_!"
+
+Ariadne found the conversation as dull as all overheard grown-ups' talk,
+and tried to busy herself with a corn-cob house the new man had been
+showing her how to build. Two or three times lately he had taken her out
+to his little house in the woods and showed her a lot of tools, and told
+her what they were for, and said if she were older he would teach her
+how to use them. Ariadne's head was full of the happy excitement of
+those visits. Corn-cob houses were for babies, she thought now.
+
+After a time, Uncle Marius went away, slamming the front gate after him
+and stamping away up the street as though he were angry, only he did all
+kinds of queer things without being angry. In fact, she had never seen
+him angry. Perhaps he and Muvver were different from other people and
+never were.
+
+She looked up with a start. The new man had come back to the arbor, but
+he did not look like play. He looked queer, so queer that Ariadne's
+sensitive lower lip began to tremble and the corners of her mouth to
+draw down. She could _not_ remember having done anything naughty. She
+was frightened by the way he looked. And yet, he picked her up quite
+gently, and held her on his knee, and asked her if Muvver could walk
+about the house yet.
+
+"Oh, yes," she told him, "and came down to dinner last night."
+
+The new man put her down, and asked her with a "please" and "I'd be much
+obliged" as though she were a grown-up herself, if she would do
+something for him--go to Muvver and ask her if she felt strong enough to
+come down into the grape-arbor to see him. Tell her he had something
+very special to say to her.
+
+Ariadne went, skipping and hopping in pleasurable excitement at her own
+importance, and returned triumphantly to say that Muvver said she would
+come. She wondered if he felt too grown-up for cob houses himself. He
+hadn't built it any higher when she was gone. He looked as if he hadn't
+even winked. While she stood wondering at his silence, his face got very
+white. He stood up looking toward the house. Muvver was coming out, very
+slowly, leaning on the railing to the steps--Muvver in the nightgowny
+dress Aunt Julia had made her, only it wasn't really nightgowny, because
+it was all over lace--Muvver with her hair in two braids over her
+shoulders and all mussed up where she'd been lying down. Ariadne
+wondered that she hadn't smoothed it a little. She knew what people
+would say to _her_ if she came around with her hair looking like that.
+
+The man went forward to meet Muvver, and gave her his hand, and they
+neither of them smiled or said how do you do, but came back together
+toward the arbor. And when they got there Muvver sat down quick, as
+though she were tired, and laid her head back against the chair. The man
+lifted Ariadne up and kissed her--he had never done that before. Now she
+knew how his beard felt--very soft. She felt it against her face for a
+long time. And he told her to go into the house to 'Stashie.
+
+So she went. Ariadne always did as she was told. 'Stashie was trying to
+make some ginger cookies, and the oven "jist would _not_ bake thim," she
+said. They were all doughy when they came out, very much as they were
+when they went in; but the dough was deliciously sweet and spicy.
+'Stashie and Ariadne ate a great deal of it, because 'Stashie knew very
+well from experience that the grown-ups have an ineradicable prejudice
+against food that comes out of the oven "prezackly" the way it went in.
+
+After that they had to wash their hands, all sticky with dough, and
+after that 'Stashie took Ariadne on her lap and told her Irish fairy
+stories, all about Cap O'Rushes and the Leprechaun, till they were
+startled by the boiling over of the milk 'Stashie had put on the stove
+to start a pudding. 'Stashie certainly did have bad luck with her
+cooking, as she herself frequently sadly admitted.
+
+But, oh! wasn't she darling to Ariadne! It made the lonely little girl
+warm all over to be loved the way 'Stashie loved her. Sometimes when
+Ariadne woke up with a bad dream it was 'Stashie who came to quiet her,
+and she just hugged her up close, close, so that she could feel her
+heart go thump, thump, thump. And she always, always had time to explain
+things. It was wonderful how much time 'Stashie had for that--or
+anything else Ariadne needed.
+
+She was putting more milk on the stove when in dashed Uncle Marius, his
+mouth wide open and his hands jumping around. "Where's your mother?
+Where's Mrs. Hollister?" he cried.
+
+"Out in the arbor," said Ariadne.
+
+"Alone?"
+
+"Oh, no--" Ariadne began to explain, but the doctor had darted to the
+window. You could see the grape-arbor plainly from there--Muvver sitting
+with her hair all mussed up around her face, listening to the new man,
+who sat across the table from her and talked and talked and talked, and
+never moved a finger. Uncle Marius put his hand up quick to his side and
+said something Ariadne couldn't catch. She looked up, saw his face, and
+ran away, terrified, to hide her face in 'Stashie's dirty apron. Now she
+knew how Uncle Marius looked when he was angry. She heard him go out and
+down the steps, and went fearfully to watch him. He went across the
+grass to the arbor. The others looked toward him without moving, and
+when he came close and leaned against the table, Muvver looked up at him
+and said something, and then leaned back again, her head resting against
+the chair, her eyes closed, her hands dropped down. How tired Muvver
+always looked!
+
+And just then 'Stashie spilled all the cocoa she was going to use to
+flavor the pudding with. She spilled it on the stove, and it smoked and
+stinked--there was nobody nowadays to forbid Ariadne to use 'Stashie's
+words--and 'Stashie said there wasn't any more and they'd have to go off
+to the grocery-store to get some, and if Ariadne knew where that nickel
+was Mis' Sandworth give her, they could get a soda-water on the way, and
+with two straws it would do for both.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+WHAT IS BEST FOR THE CHILDREN?
+
+
+Lydia lifted her face, white under the shadow of her disordered hair,
+and said: "It is Mr. Rankin who must take care of the children--Ariadne,
+and the baby if it lives."
+
+She spoke in a low, expressionless voice, as though she had no strength
+to spare. Dr. Melton's hand on the table began to shake. He answered: "I
+have told you before, my dear, that there is no reason for your fixed
+belief that you will not live after the baby's birth. You must not dwell
+on that so steadily."
+
+Lydia raised her heavy eyes once more to his. "I want him to have the
+children," she said.
+
+The doctor took a step or two away from the table. He was now shaking
+from head to foot, and when he came back to the silent couple and took a
+chair between them he made two or three attempts at speech before he
+could command his voice. "It is very hard on me, Lydia, to--to have you
+turn from me to a--to a stranger." His voice had grotesque quavers.
+
+Lydia raised a thin, trembling hand, and laid it on her godfather's
+sinewy fingers. She tried to smile into his face. "Dear Godfather," she
+said wistfully, "if it were only myself--but the children--"
+
+"What do you mean, Lydia? What do you mean?" he demanded with tremulous
+indignation.
+
+She dropped her eyes again and drew a long, sighing breath. "I haven't
+strength to explain to you all I mean," she said gently, "and I think
+you know without my telling you. You have always known what is in my
+heart."
+
+"I had thought there was some affection for me in your heart," said the
+doctor, thrusting out his lips to keep them from trembling.
+
+Lydia's drooping position changed slightly. She lifted her hands and
+folded them together on the table, leaning forward, and bending full on
+the doctor the somber intensity of her dark, deep-sunken eyes. "Dear
+Godfather, I have no time or strength to waste." The slowness with which
+she chose her words gave them a solemn weight. "I cannot choose. If it
+hurts you to have me speak truth, you must be hurt. You know what a
+failure I have made of my life, how I have missed everything worth
+having--"
+
+Dr. Melton, driven hard by some overmastering emotion, drew back, and
+threw aside precipitately the tacit understanding he and Lydia had
+always kept. "Lydia, what are you talking about! You have been more than
+usually favored--you have been loved and cherished as few women--" His
+voice died away under Lydia's honest, tragic eyes.
+
+She went on as though he had not spoken. "My children must know
+something different. My children must have a chance at the real things.
+If I die, who can give it to them? Even if I live, shall I be wise
+enough to give them what I had not wisdom or strength enough to get for
+myself?"
+
+"You speak as though I were not in the world, Lydia," the doctor broke
+in bitterly, "or as though you hated and mistrusted me. Why do you look
+to a stranger to--"
+
+"Could you do for my children what you have not done for yourself?" she
+asked him earnestly. "How much would you see of them? How much would you
+know of them? How much of your time would you be willing to sacrifice to
+learn patiently the inner lives of two little children? You would be
+busy all day, like the other people I know, making money for them to
+dress like other well-to-do children, for them to live in this fine, big
+house, for them to go to expensive private schools with the children of
+the people you know socially--for them to be as much as possible like
+the fatherless child I was."
+
+Lydia clenched her thin hands and went on passionately: "I would rather
+my children went ragged and hungry than to be starved of real
+companionship."
+
+The doctor made a shocked gesture. "But, Lydia, someone must earn the
+livings. You are--"
+
+Lydia broke in fiercely: "They are not earning livings--they are earning
+more dresses and furniture and delicate food than their families need.
+They are earning a satisfaction for their own ambitions. They are
+willing to give their families anything but time and themselves."
+
+"Lydia! Lydia! I never knew you to be cruel before! They can not help
+it--the way their lives are run. It's not that they wish to--they can
+not help it! It is against an economic law you are protesting."
+
+"That economic law has been broken by _one_ person I know," said Lydia,
+"and that is the reason I--"
+
+The doctor flushed darkly. The tears rose to his eyes. "Lydia, oh, my
+dear! trust me--trust me! I, too, will--I swear I will do all that you
+wish--don't turn away from me--trust me--!"
+
+Lydia's mouth began to quiver. "Ah! don't make me say what must sound so
+cruel!"
+
+The doctor stared at her hard. "Make you say, you mean, that you _don't_
+trust me."
+
+She drew a little, pitiful breath, and turned away her head. "Yes; that
+is what I mean," she said. She went on hurriedly, putting up appealing
+hands to soften her words, "You see--it's the children--I _must_ do what
+is best for them. It must be done once for all. Suppose you found you
+couldn't now, after all these years, turn about and be different?
+Suppose you found you couldn't arrange a life that the children could be
+a part of, and help in, and really do their share and live with you. You
+_mean_ to--I'm sure you mean to! But you never _have_ yet! How dare I
+let you try if you are not sure? I can't come back if I am dead, you
+know, and make a new arrangement. Mr. Rankin has proved that he can--"
+
+At the name, the doctor's face darkened. He shot a black look at the
+younger man sitting beside him in his strange silence. "What has Rankin
+done?" he asked bitterly. "I should say the very point about him is that
+he has done nothing."
+
+"He has tried, he has tried, he is trying," cried Lydia, beating her
+hands on the table. "Think! Of all the people I know, he is the only one
+who is even trying. That was all I wanted myself. That is all I dare ask
+for my children--a chance to try."
+
+"To try what?" asked the doctor challengingly.
+
+"To try not to have life make them worse instead of better. That's not
+much to ask--but nobody I know, but one only has--"
+
+"Simplicity and right living don't come from camping out in a shed,"
+said the doctor angrily. "Externals are nothing. If the heart is right
+and simple--"
+
+"If the heart is right and simple, nothing else matters. That is what I
+say," answered Lydia.
+
+Dr. Melton gave a gesture of cutting the question short. "Well, of
+course it's quite impossible! Rankin can't possibly have any claim on
+your children in the event of your death. Think of all your family, who
+would be--"
+
+"_I think of them_," said Lydia with an accent so strange that the
+doctor was halted. "Oh, I have thought of them!" she said again. She put
+her hands over her eyes. "Could I not make a will, and appoint as
+guardian--" she began to ask.
+
+Dr. Melton cut her short with a sound like a laugh, although his face
+was savage. "Did you never hear of wills being contested? How long do
+you suppose a will you make under the present circumstances would stand
+against an attack on it by your family and the Hollisters, with their
+money and influence!"
+
+"Oh! Oh!" moaned Lydia, "and I shall not be here to--"
+
+Rankin stirred throughout all his great height and broke his silence.
+He said to Lydia: "There is some way--there must be some way. I will
+find it."
+
+Lydia took down her hands and showed a face so ravaged by the emotions
+of the colloquy that the physician in her godfather sprang up through
+the wounded jealousy of the man. "Lydia, my dear, you must stop--this is
+idiotic of me to allow you--not another word. You must go into the house
+this instant and lie down and rest--"
+
+He bent over her with his old, anxious, exasperated, protecting air.
+Lydia seized his hands. Her own were hot and burning. "Rest! I can't
+rest with all this unsettled! I go over and over it--how can I sleep!
+How can you think that your little opiates will make me forget that my
+children may be helpless, with no one to protect them--" She looked
+about her wildly. "Why, little Ariadne may be given to _Madeleine_!" Her
+horrified eyes rested again on her godfather. She drew him to her. "Oh,
+help me! You've always been kind to me. Help me now!"
+
+There was a silence, the two exchanging a long gaze. The man's forehead
+was glistening wet. Finally, his breath coming short, he said: "Yes; I
+will help you," and, his eyes still on hers, put out a hand toward
+Rankin.
+
+The younger man was beside them in a stride. He took the hand offered
+him, but his gaze also was on the white face of the woman between them.
+"We will do it together," he told her. "Rest assured. It shall be done."
+
+The corners of Lydia's mouth twitched nervously. "You are a good man,"
+she said to her godfather. She looked at Rankin for a moment without
+speaking, and then turned toward the house, wavering. "Will you help me
+back?" she said to the doctor, her voice quite flat and toneless; "I am
+horribly tired."
+
+                 *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the doctor came back again to the arbor, Mrs. Sandworth was with
+him, her bearing, like his, that of a person in the midst of some
+cataclysmic upheaval. It was evident that her brother had told her.
+Without greeting Rankin, she sat down and fixed her eyes on his face.
+She did not remove them during the talk that followed.
+
+The doctor stood by the table, drumming with his fingers and grimacing.
+"You must know," he finally made a beginning with difficulty, "I don't
+know whether you realize, not being a physician, that she is really not
+herself. She has for the present a mania for providing as she thinks
+best for her children's future. Of course no one not a monomaniac would
+so entirely ignore your side, would conceive so strange an idea. She is
+so absorbed in her own need that she does not realize what an unheard-of
+request she is making. To burden yourself with two young children--to
+mortgage all your future--"
+
+Rankin broke in with a shaking voice and a face of exultation: "Good
+God, Doctor! Don't grudge me this one chance of my life!"
+
+The doctor stared, bewildered. "What are you talking about?" he asked.
+
+"About myself. I don't do it often--let me now. Do you think I haven't
+realized all along that what you said of me is true--that I have done
+nothing? Done nothing but succeed smugly in keeping myself in comfort
+outside the modern economic treadmill! What else could I do? I'm no
+orator, to convince other people. I haven't any universal panacea to
+offer! I'm only an inarticulate countryman, a farmer's son, with the
+education the state gives everyone--who am I, to try to lead? Apparently
+there was nothing for me to do but ignobly to take care of myself--but
+now, God be thanked! I have my chance. Someone has been hurt in their
+infernal squirrel-cage, and I can help--"
+
+The older man was looking at him piercingly, as though struck by a
+sudden thought. He now cut him short with, "You're not deceiving
+yourself with any notion that she--"
+
+The other answered quickly, with a smile of bitter humility: "You have
+seen her look at me. She does not know whether I am a human being or
+not--I am to her any strong animal, a horse, an ox--any force that can
+carry Ariadne safely!" He added, in another tone, his infinitely gentle
+tone: "I see in that the extremity of her anxiety."
+
+The doctor put his hand on the other man's powerful arm. "Do you realize
+what you are proposing to yourself? You are human. You are a young man.
+Are you strong enough to keep to it?"
+
+Rankin looked at him. Mrs. Sandworth leaned forward.
+
+"I am," said Rankin finally.
+
+The words echoed in a long silence.
+
+The younger man stood up. "I am going to see a lawyer," he announced in
+a quiet voice of return to an everyday level. "Until then, we have all
+more to think over than to talk about, it seems to me."
+
+                 *       *       *       *       *
+
+After he had left them the brother and sister did not speak for a time.
+Then the doctor said, irritably: "Julia, say something, for Heaven's
+sake. What did you think of what he said?"
+
+"I didn't hear what he said," answered Mrs. Sandworth; "I was looking at
+him."
+
+"Well?" urged her brother.
+
+"He is a good man," she said.
+
+A sense that she was holding something in reserve kept him silent,
+gazing expectantly at her.
+
+"How awfully he's in love with her!" she brought out finally. "That's
+the whole point. He's in love with her! All this talk about 'ways of
+living' and theories and things that they make so much of--it just
+amounts to nothing but that he's in love with her."
+
+"Oh, you sentimental idiot!" cried the doctor. "I hoped to get some
+sense out of you."
+
+"That's sense," said Mrs. Sandworth.
+
+"It hasn't anything to do with the point! Why, as for that, Paul was in
+love with--"
+
+"He was _not_!" cried Mrs. Sandworth, with a sudden loud certainty.
+
+The doctor caught her meaning and considered it frowningly. When he
+spoke, it was to burst out pathetically: "_I_ have loved her all her
+life."
+
+"Oh, you!" retorted his sister, with a sad conclusiveness.
+
+Ariadne came running out to them. "I just went to look into Muvver's
+room, and she was sound asleep! Honest! She was!"
+
+The child had heard enough of the doctor's long futile struggles with
+the horrors of Lydia's sleepless nights to divine that her news was
+important. She was rewarded with a startled look from her elders.
+"Come!" said the doctor.
+
+They went into the house, and silently to Lydia's half-open door. She
+lay across the bed as she had dropped down when she came in, one long
+dark braid hanging to the floor. They stood looking at her almost with
+awe, as though they were observing for the first time the merciful
+miracle of sleep. Her bosom rose and fell in long, regular breaths. The
+drawn, haggard mask that had overlain her face so many months was
+dissolved away in an utter unconsciousness. Her eyelashes lay on a cheek
+like a child's; her mouth, relaxed and drooping, fell again into the
+lines they had loved in her when she was a little girl. She looked like
+a little girl again to them.
+
+Mrs. Sandworth's hand went to her throat. She looked at her brother
+through misty eyes. He closed the door gently, and drew her away, making
+the gesture of a man who admits his own ignorance of a mystery.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+THROUGH THE LONG NIGHT
+
+
+"They must have gone crazy, simply crazy!" said Madeleine, making quick,
+excited gestures. "Mrs. Sandworth, of course--a person can hardly blame
+her for anything! She's a cipher with the rim off when the doctor has
+made up his mind. But, even so, shouldn't you think in common decency
+she'd have let us know what they were up to in time to prevent it? _I_
+never heard a word of this sickening business of Ariadne's adoption till
+day before yesterday. Did _you_?" she ended half-suspiciously.
+
+Mrs. Mortimer stopped her restless pace up and down the old-fashioned,
+high-ceilinged room, and made a gesture for silence. "I thought I heard
+something--up there," she explained, motioning to the upper part of the
+house. "I wonder what made Lydia so sure beforehand that she wouldn't
+live through this?"
+
+"Well, I guess from what the nurse told me there _isn't_ much chance for
+her," said Madeleine in a hard voice. Her color was not so high as
+usual, her beautiful face looked grim, and she spoke in a bitter tone of
+seriousness that made her seem quite another person. Marietta's thin,
+dark countenance gave less indication of her mood, whatever it was. She
+looked sallow and worn, and only her black eyes, hot and gloomy, showed
+emotion.
+
+Both women were silent a moment, listening to the sound of footsteps
+overhead. "It seems as though it _must_ be over soon now!" cried the
+childless one of the two, drawing in her breath sharply. "It makes me
+furious to think of women suffering so. Bertha Williamson was telling me
+the other day about when her little Walter was born--it made me _sick_!"
+
+The matron looked at her and shivered a little, but made no response.
+
+"The nurse says Lydia is mostly unconscious now. Perhaps the worst is
+over for her! Poor Lyd! What do you suppose made her act so?" went on
+Madeleine, moving about restlessly, her voice uncertain. She went to the
+window, and drew aside the shade to look out into the blackness. "Oh, I
+wish the men would come! What time is it, do you suppose? Yes, I see;
+half-past three. Oh, it _must_ be over soon! I wish they'd come! You
+telegraphed George, didn't you? Heavens! how it rains!"
+
+"He was to come on the midnight train. Is your husband--"
+
+"Oh, he was horrid about it--wanted me to do it all myself. He's in the
+midst of some big deal or other. But I told him he'd _have_ to come and
+help out, or I'd--I'd _kill_ him! He'll bring the lawyer."
+
+"Where do you suppose?" began Marietta, looking over her shoulder.
+
+"Out in his shanty in the Black Rock woods," said Madeleine harshly,
+"with no idea of what's going on. Just before you came, the doctor sent
+out for a messenger to take him word, and you'd better believe I got
+hold of that messenger!"
+
+"Of course that'll make things easier," said Marietta.
+
+"Oh, it won't be hard at all," Madeleine assured her; "the lawyer'll be
+right at hand; it'll be over in a minute."
+
+Marietta's face altered. She drew back from the other woman. "Oh,
+Madeleine! you act as though--you were counting on Lydia's--"
+
+"No; I'm not. I used to think a lot of Lydia before she disgraced poor
+Paul's memory in this way! But you see it'll be easy to do, one way or
+the other. If she--if she doesn't--why, Marietta, you know Lydia! She
+never can hold out against you and George, the nearest she has in the
+world. I should think you'd feel awfully about what people are
+saying--her letting Ariadne be adopted in that scandalous way when she
+had brothers and sisters. I should think you'd feel like asserting
+yourselves. _I_ do, certainly! I'm just as near to Ariadne as you are!
+And I know George is perfectly furious about the whole business!"
+
+"But maybe the doctor won't let us go in, right in to her--"
+
+A long-cherished grudge rose to the surface in Mrs. Lowder's energetic
+reply: "Well, I guess this is one time when the high-and-mighty Dr.
+Melton'll have to be shoved on one side, and if necessary I'll do the
+shoving!"
+
+"You feel justified?"
+
+"Justified! I should think I do! Justified in keeping my brother's child
+out of the clutches of that--and if my husband and your brother together
+can't raise the cash and the pull to get Ariadne away from him, too, I
+miss my guess. They will; of course they will, or what's the use of
+having money when you go to law!"
+
+Marietta was silent. Madeleine took her lack of responsiveness as due to
+the resentment of a poor person to her remarks as to the value of wealth
+in a democracy. She frowned, regretting a false step, and went on
+conciliatorily: "Of course we're only doing what any decent family is
+bound to do--protecting the children. It's what Lydia herself would want
+if she were in her right mind."
+
+She fell silent now, restless, fidgeting about, picking up small objects
+and setting them down unseeingly, and occasionally going to the window
+to look out at the hot, rainy night. She was in mourning for Paul, and
+above her black draperies her face was now like marble.
+
+Mrs. Mortimer, also in black, sat in a determinedly passive silence.
+
+Finally, the younger woman broke out: "Oh, I'll go crazy if I just stay
+here! I'm going upstairs to see the nurse again."
+
+In an instant she was back, her face whiter than before.
+
+"It's a boy--alive, all right--half an hour ago. Would you think they'd
+let us sit here and never tell us--" Her voice changed. "A little boy--"
+She sat down.
+
+"How is Lydia?" asked Lydia's sister.
+
+"--a little boy," said Madeleine. She addressed the other woman
+peremptorily. "I want him! You can have Ariadne!" She flushed as she
+spoke, and added defiantly: "I know I always said I didn't want
+children!"
+
+"How is Lydia?" Marietta broke in with an angry impatience.
+
+"Very low, the nurse said; Dr. Melton wouldn't give any hope."
+
+Marietta's face twitched. Her large white hands clasped each other hard.
+
+"I'm going into the doctor's office to telephone my husband," went on
+Madeleine; "there's not a minute to lose."
+
+After she was alone, Mrs. Mortimer's thin, dark face settled into tragic
+repose. She leaned back her head and closed her eyes, from which a slow
+tear ran down over her sallow cheeks. There was no sound but the patter
+of summer rain on the porch roof outside.
+
+Firm, light steps came hastily to the outer door, the door clicked open
+and shut, the steps came down the hall. Mrs. Mortimer sat up and opened
+her eyes. She saw a tall man in rough clothes, hatless, with raindrops
+glistening on his bright, close-cropped hair and beard. He was
+hesitating at the foot of the stairs, but at her slight movement he
+caught sight of her and rushed toward her. "Has she--is there--" he
+began.
+
+Mrs. Mortimer gazed intently into his quivering face. "My sister has
+given birth to a son, and lies at the point of death," she said with her
+unsparing conciseness, but not harshly.
+
+The man she addressed threw up one hand as though she had struck him,
+and took an aimless, unsteady step. Mrs. Mortimer did not turn away her
+eyes from the revelation of his face. Her own grew sterner. She was
+trying to bring herself to speak again. She put her hand on his arm to
+attract his attention, and looked with a fierce earnestness into his
+face. "Listen," she said. "We were wrong, all of us, about Lydia. We
+were wrong about everything. You were right. I wanted to tell you. If my
+sister had lived--she is so young--I hoped--" She turned away to hide
+the sudden break-up of her rigid calm. "Little Lydia!" she cried. "Oh,
+misery! misery!"
+
+Behind them was the sound of a shutting door and a key turned in the
+lock. They both spun about and saw Mrs. Lowder slip the key into the
+bosom of her dress. Her aspect of white determination suited this
+theatrical gesture, as she placed herself quickly before the door. "If
+you will promise me solemnly that you will leave the house at once, I
+will let you out," she said, in a high, shaking voice.
+
+Rankin did not answer. He looked at her as though he did not see her.
+
+"What business have you here, anyhow?" she went on fiercely.
+
+"I am here to adopt Mrs. Hollister's second child," stated Rankin,
+collecting himself with an effort.
+
+Mrs. Lowder's pale face flushed. "You'll do nothing of the sort. I shall
+adopt my brother's child myself! How _dare_ you--a perfect stranger--"
+
+"Mrs. Hollister wishes it," said Rankin.
+
+"Lydia is out of her mind--if she is alive!" said Madeleine, trembling
+excitedly, "and the child's own relatives are the proper--you needn't
+think you are going to keep Ariadne, either! It can be proved in any
+court that Lydia was crazy, and that her family are the ones that ought
+to--"
+
+"That will be decided in the future," said Rankin. "For the present I
+have a legal right to Ariadne, and I shall have to the boy!"
+
+"Do you mean you would dare to lay hands on a woman?" cried Madeleine,
+extending her arms across the door.
+
+Rankin turned, and in one stride had reached the window, which stood
+open to the hot, rainy summer night. He was gone in an instant.
+
+"Quick! quick! Lock the front door!" cried Madeleine, fumbling with the
+key. She turned it and darted into the hallway, and fell back, crying
+angrily: "Oh, no! there's the back door--and the doctor's office and all
+the windows. It's no use! It's no use!" She broke into a storm of sobs.
+"You didn't help a bit!" she cried furiously to the other woman. "You
+didn't even try to help!"
+
+It was an accusation against which Marietta did not attempt to defend
+herself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+THE SWAYING BALANCE
+
+
+Dr. Melton was at the top of the stairs as the other man came bounding
+up. "Where in God's name have you been?" he demanded. "Did you start as
+soon as my messenger--"
+
+"No messenger came--only 'Stashie just now. I started the instant she--"
+
+"Have you the paper--the contract--whatever it--"
+
+Rankin showed a flash of white in his pocket. "Is she able to sign it?"
+
+"Oh, she _must_! She won't have an instant's peace until she does. She
+has been wild because you were so late in--"
+
+Their hurried, broken colloquy was cut short by a nurse who came to Dr.
+Melton, saying, "The patient is always asking if the gentleman who is
+to--"
+
+"Yes, yes; he is here." The doctor motioned her to precede them. "Go in;
+you're needed as a witness."
+
+He held Rankin back an instant at the door. "Remember! No heroics! Just
+have the signing done as quickly as possible and get out!" His little
+wizened face looked ghastly in the dim light of the hall, but his voice
+was firm, and his hand did not tremble.
+
+Rankin followed him into the bedroom, which was filled with a strong
+odor of antiseptics. The nurse turned on the electric light, shading it
+with her hand so that the light fell only on the lower part of the bed,
+leaving Lydia's head in the shadow.
+
+She lay very straight and stark, as though, thought Rankin despairingly,
+she were already dead. Her right arm was out over the sheet, her thin
+hand nerveless. Her face was very white, her lips swollen and bleeding
+as though she had bitten them repeatedly. She was absolutely motionless,
+lying on her back with closed eyes. At the slight sound made by the men
+in entering, she opened her eyes and looked at them. Every vestige of
+color dropped out of Rankin's face. Her eyes were alive, sane,
+exalted--Lydia's own eyes again.
+
+He was holding the paper open in his hand, and without a word knelt down
+by the bed, offering it to her mutely. Their eyes met in a long gaze.
+The doctor and nurse looked away from this mute communion. Rankin put a
+pen in Lydia's fingers and held up the paper. With, a faint, sighing
+breath, loud in the silent room, she raised her hand. It fell to the bed
+again. Dr. Melton then knelt beside her, put his own sinewy, corded
+fingers around it and guided it to the paper. The few lines were traced.
+Lydia's hand dropped and her eyes closed. Rankin stood up to go.
+
+The nurse turned off the light and the room was again in a half
+obscurity, the deep, steady voice of the rain coming in through the open
+windows, the sweet summer-night smells mingling with the acrid odor of
+chemicals, Lydia lying straight and stark under the sheet--but now her
+eyes were open, shining, fixed on Rankin. Their light was the last he
+saw as he closed the door behind him.
+
+After a time the doctor came out and joined Rankin waiting at the head
+of the stairs. He looked very old and tired, but the ghastly expression
+of strain was replaced with a flickering restlessness. He came up to
+Rankin, blinking rapidly, and touched him on the arm. "Look here!" he
+whispered. "Her pulse has gone down from a hundred and fifty to a
+hundred and thirty."
+
+He sat down on the top step, clasped his hands about his knees, and
+leaned his white head against the balustrade. He looked like some small,
+weary, excited old child. "Lord, Rankin! Sit down when you get a
+chance!" he whispered. "If you'd been through what I have! And you
+needn't try to get me to add another word to what I've just told you. I
+don't dare! It may mean nothing, you know. It may very likely mean
+nothing. Good Heavens! The mental sensitiveness of women at this time!
+It's beyond belief. I never get used to the miracle of it. Everything
+turns on it--everything! If the pulse should go down ten more now, I
+should--Oh, Heaven bless that crazy Celt for getting you here! Good
+Lord! If you hadn't come when you did! I don't see what could have
+become of the messenger I sent--why, hours ago--I knew that nothing
+could go right if you weren't--is that the door?" He sprang up and sank
+back again--"I told the nurse to report as soon as there was any
+change--I was afraid if I stayed in the room she would feel the
+twitching of my damned nerves--yes, really--it's so--she's in a state
+when a feather's weight--suppose 'Stashie hadn't brought you! I couldn't
+have kept Madeleine off much longer--God! if _Madeleine_ had gone into
+that room, I--Lydia--but nobody told 'Stashie to go! It must have been
+an inspiration. I thought of course my messenger--I was expecting you
+every instant. She's been crouching out here in the hall all night, not
+venturing even to ask a question, until I caught sight of her eyes--she
+loves Lydia too! I told her then the baby had come and that her mistress
+had no chance unless you were here. She must have--when did she--"
+
+Rankin gave a sound like a sob, and leaned against the wall. He had not
+stirred before since the doctor's first words. "You don't mean there's
+_hope_?" he whispered, "any hope at all?"
+
+The doctor sprang at him and clapped his hand over his mouth. "I didn't
+say it! I didn't say it!"
+
+The door behind them opened, and the nurse stepped out with a noiseless
+briskness. The doctor walked toward her steadily and listened to her
+quick, low-toned report. Then he nodded, and she stepped back into the
+bedroom and shut the door. He stood staring at the floor, one hand at
+his lips.
+
+Rankin made an inarticulate murmur of appeal. His face glared white
+through the obscurity of the hall.
+
+The older man went back to him, and looked up earnestly into his eyes.
+"Yes; there's every hope," he said. He added, with a brave smile: "For
+you and Lydia there's every hope in the world. For me, there's the usual
+lot of fathers."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+ANOTHER DAY BEGINS
+
+
+They started. From below came a wail of fright. As they listened the
+sound came nearer and nearer. "That's Ariadne--a bad dream--get her
+quiet, for the Lord's sake."
+
+"Where is she sleeping?"
+
+"In the room next the parlor."
+
+Rankin gave an exclamation, and leaped down the stairs. At the foot he
+was met by a little figure in sleeping-drawers. "Favver! Favver!" she
+sobbed, holding up her arms.
+
+Rankin caught her up and held her close. "You promised you wouldn't get
+so afraid of dreams, little daughter," he said in a low, tender voice of
+reproach.
+
+"But this was a nawful one!" wept Ariadne. "I fought I heard a lot of
+voices, men's and ladies' as mad--Oh! awful mad--and loud!" She went on
+incoherently that she had been too frightened to stir, even though after
+a while she dreamed that the front door slammed and they all went away.
+But then she was _too_ frightened, and came out to find Favver.
+
+Rankin took her back to her bed, and sat down beside it, keeping one big
+hand about the trembling child's cold little fingers. "It was only a bad
+dream, Ariadne. Just go to sleep now. Father'll sit here till you do."
+
+"You won't let them come back?" asked the child, drawing long, shaken
+breaths.
+
+"No," he said quietly.
+
+"You'll always be close, to take care of me?"
+
+"Yes, dear."
+
+"And of Muvver and 'Stashie?"
+
+There was a pause.
+
+Ariadne spoke in grieved astonishment. "Why, of _course_ of Muvver and
+'Stashie, Favver."
+
+Rankin took a sudden great breath. "I hope so, Ariadne."
+
+"Well, you _can_ if you want to," the child gravely gave her assent.
+
+She said no more for a time, clutching tightly to his hand. Then,
+"Favver."
+
+"Yes, dear."
+
+"I fink I could go to sleep better if I had my bunny."
+
+"Yes, dear," said the man patiently; "where is he?"
+
+"I fink he's under ve chair where my clothes are--ve _big_ chair.
+'Stashie lets me put my clothes on ve biggest chair."
+
+The man fumbled about in the dark. Then, "Here's your bunny, Ariadne."
+
+The child murmured something drowsily unintelligible. The man took his
+seat again by the bed. There was a pause. The child's breathing grew
+long and regular. The rain sounded loud in the silence.
+
+In the distance a street-car rattled noisily by. Ariadne started up with
+a scream: "Favver! Favver!"
+
+"Right here, dear. Just the trolley-car."
+
+"It 'minded me of ve mad ladies' voices," explained Ariadne
+apologetically, breathing quickly. She added: "Vat was such a _nawful_
+dream, Favver. I wonder could I have your watch to hear tick in my hand
+to go me to sleep."
+
+"Yes, dear; but only for to-night because of the bad dream."
+
+There were little nestling noises, gradually quieting down. Then,
+sleepily:
+
+"Favver, please."
+
+"Yes, dear."
+
+"I fink I could go _all_ to sleep if you'd pit your head down on my
+pillow next my bunny."
+
+A stir in the darkness, and an instant's quiet, followed by, "Why,
+Favver, what makes your face all over water?"
+
+There was no answer.
+
+"And your beard is as wet as--" She broke off to explain to herself:
+"Oh, it's rain, of tourse. I forgot it's raining. _Now_ I remember how
+to _really_ go all to sleep. I did before. I listen to it going patter,
+patter, patter, patter--" The little voice died away.
+
+There was no sound at all in the room but the swift, light voice of the
+watch calling out that Time, Time, Time can cure all, can cure all, can
+cure all--and outside the brooding murmur of the rain.
+
+A faint, clear gray began to show at the windows.
+
+                                THE END
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+                           ROMAIN ROLLAND'S
+                            JEAN-CHRISTOPHE
+                    DAWN . MORNING . YOUTH . REVOLT
+                     Translated by GILBERT CANNAN.
+
+                   600 pp. $1.50 net; by mail, $1.62.
+
+It commences with vivid episodes of this musician's childhood, his
+fears, fancies, and troubles, and his almost uncanny musical sense. He
+plays before the Grand Duke at seven, but he is destined for greater
+things. An idol of the hour, in some ways suggesting Richard Strauss,
+tries in vain to wreck his faith in his career. Early love episodes
+follow, and at the close the hero, like Wagner, has to fly, a hopeful
+exile.
+
+"'Hats off, gentlemen--a genius.' ... Has the time come for the 20th
+century to uncover before a master work? A book as big, as elemental, as
+original as though the art of fiction began to-day."--Springfield
+Republican. (Entire notice on application.)
+
+"The most momentous novel that has come to us from France, or from any
+other European country, in a decade.... Highly commendable and effective
+translation ... the story moves at a rapid pace. It never lags."--_E. F.
+Edgett in Boston Transcript._
+
+                        JEAN-CHRISTOPHE IN PARIS
+                            THE MARKET-PLACE
+                        ANTOINETTE . THE HOUSE
+
+                   473 pp. $1.50 net; by mail, $1.62.
+
+A writer in the _London Daily Mail_ comments on the French volumes here
+translated as follows:--"In 'The Market-Place,' we are with the hero in
+his attempt to earn his living and to conquer Paris. The author
+introduces us to the numberless 'society' circles in Paris and all the
+cliques of so-called musicians in pages of superb and bitter irony and
+poetic fire. Christophe becomes famous. In the next volume, Antoinette
+is the sister of Christophe's great friend, Olivier. She loves
+Christophe.... This, the best volume of the series, is a flawless gem.
+'The House' introduces us to the friends and enemies of the young
+musician. They gravitate around Christophe and Olivier, amid the noisy
+and enigmatic whirl of Parisian life."
+
+It is worth adding that toward the close of this book a war-cloud
+appears between France and Germany. Christophe, with Olivier, visits his
+mother and his Fatherland.
+
+                         HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+                         PUBLISHERS -- NEW YORK
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+                    WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S JOSEPH VANCE
+
+A touching story, yet full of humor, of lifelong love and heroic
+sacrifice. While the scene is mostly in and near the London of the
+fifties, there are some telling glimpses of Italy, where the author
+lives much of the time ($1.75).
+
+"The book of the last decade; the best thing in fiction since Mr.
+Meredith and Mr. Hardy; must take its place as the first great English
+novel that has appeared in the twentieth century."--Lewis Melville in
+_New York Times Saturday Review._
+
+"If the reader likes both 'David Copperfield' and 'Peter Ibbetson,' he
+can find the two books in this one."--The _Independent._
+
+                  WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S ALICE-FOR-SHORT
+
+This might paradoxically be called a genial ghost-and-murder story, yet
+humor and humanity again dominate, and the most striking element is the
+touching love story of an unsuccessful man. The reappearance in
+Nineteenth Century London of the long-buried past, and a remarkable case
+of suspended memory, give the dramatic background ($1.75).
+
+"Really worth reading and praising ... will be hailed as a masterpiece.
+If any writer of the present era is read a half century hence, a quarter
+century, or even a decade, that writer is William De Morgan."--_Boston
+Transcript._
+
+"It is the Victorian age itself that speaks in those rich, interesting,
+over-crowded books.... Will be remembered as Dickens' novels are
+remembered."--_Springfield Republican._
+
+                    WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S SOMEHOW GOOD
+
+The purpose and feeling of this novel are intense, yet it is all
+mellowed by humor, and it contains perhaps the author's freshest and
+most sympathetic story of young love. Throughout its pages the "God be
+praised evil has turned to good" of the old Major rings like a trumpet
+call of hope. This story of to-day tells of a triumph of courage and
+devotion ($1.75).
+
+"A book as sound, as sweet, as wholesome, as wise, as any in the range
+of fiction."--_The Nation._
+
+"Our older novelists (Dickens and Thackeray) will have to look to their
+laurels, for the new one is fast proving himself their equal. A higher
+quality of enjoyment than is derivable from the work of any other
+novelist now living and active in either England or America."--_The
+Dial._
+
+                         HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+                      34 WEST 33D STREET NEW YORK
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+             WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S IT NEVER CAN HAPPEN AGAIN
+
+This novel turns on a strange marital complication. The beautiful Judith
+Arkroyd, with her stage ambitions, the pathetic Lizarann and her father,
+Blind Jim, are striking figures. There are strong dramatic episodes
+($1.75).
+
+"De Morgan at his very best, and how much better his best is than the
+work of any novelist of the past thirty years."--_The Independent._
+
+"There has been nothing at all like it in our day. The best of our
+contemporary novelists ... do not so come home to our business and our
+bosoms ... most enchanting ... infinitely lovable and pathetic."--_The
+Nation._
+
+               WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S AN AFFAIR OF DISHONOR
+
+A dramatic story of England in the time of the Restoration. It commences
+with a fatal duel, and shows a new phase of its remarkable author
+($1.75).
+
+"An artistic triumph.... He is a persistent humorist."--_Boston
+Transcript._
+
+"A better story than any of the others, so far as sustained interest is
+concerned.... The rich, suggestive, highly metaphorical the M. I.
+style.... A marvelous example of Mr. De Morgan's inexhaustible fecundity
+of invention.... Shines as a romance quite as much as 'Joseph Vance'
+does among realistic novels."--_Chicago Record-Herald._
+
+                   WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S A LIKELY STORY
+                               $1.35 net.
+
+"Begins comfortably enough with a little domestic quarrel in a
+studio.... The story shifts suddenly, however, to a brilliantly told
+tragedy of the Italian Renaissance embodied in a girl's portrait ...
+which speaks and affects the life of the modern people who hear it....
+The many readers who like Mr. De Morgan will enjoy this charming fancy
+greatly."--_New York Sun._
+
+"In the forefront of English fiction.... Both ingenious and amusing....
+All in his highly personal and individual manner, the result of which is
+a novel with an emphatic difference from all other works of contemporary
+fiction."--_Boston Transcript._
+
+"One sparkling stream, where realism in its sweeter, human and humorous
+aspects shall appear at its best.... Humor, wisdom, artists' jargon from
+the studios, psychic phenomena.... All in Mr. De Morgan's best vein....
+The advancing chapters ... how realistically modern they are, with the
+exactness of finish, appositeness of delineation, humor in dialog, and
+condensed dramatic action!"--_The Independent._
+
+A thirty-two page illustrated leaflet about Mr. De Morgan, with complete
+reviews of his first four books, sent on request.
+
+                         HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+                         PUBLISHERS -- NEW YORK
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+                      INEZ HAYNES GILLMORE'S JANEY
+              Illustrated by Ada C. Williamson. $1.25 net.
+
+"Being the record of a short interval in the journey thru life and the
+struggle with society of a little girl of nine, in which she repudiates
+her duties as an amateur mother, snares the most blundering of birds,
+successfully invades Grub Street, peers behind the veil of the seen into
+the unseen, interprets the great bard, grubs at the root of all evil,
+faces the three great problems--Birth--Death--Time--and finally, in
+passing thru the laborious process of becoming ten, discovers the great
+illusion," says the descriptive title.
+
+"Our hearts were captive to 'Phoebe and Ernest,' and now accept 'Janey.'
+... She is so engaging.... Told so vivaciously and with such
+good-natured and pungent asides for grown people."--_Outlook._
+
+"Janey's naturalness in quest of the whys of life is the naturalness of
+the child who lives in the world instead of between the covers of a
+delightfully written book."--_Washington Evening Star._
+
+"Depicts youthful human nature as one who knows and loves it. Her
+'Phoebe and Ernest' studies are deservedly popular, and now, in 'Janey,'
+this clever writer has accomplished an equally charming
+portrait."--_Chicago Record-Herald._
+
+                INEZ HAYNES GILLMORE'S PHOEBE AND ERNEST
+           With 30 illustrations by R. F. Schabelitz. $1.50.
+
+Parents will recognize themselves in the story, and laugh
+understandingly with, and sometimes at, Mr. and Mrs. Martin and their
+children.
+
+Youths and maidens will understand Phoebe and Ernest's experiences and
+problems.
+
+"Attracted delighted attention in the course of its serial publication.
+Sentiment and humor are deftly mingled in this clever book."--_N. Y.
+Tribune._
+
+"We must go back to Louisa Alcott for their equals."--_Boston
+Advertiser._
+
+"For young and old alike we know of no more refreshing story."--_New
+York Evening Post._
+
+                         HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+                         PUBLISHERS -- NEW YORK
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+                HENRY WILLIAMS'S THE UNITED STATES NAVY
+                              A Handbook.
+
+By Henry Williams, Naval Constructor, U. S. Navy. With 32 full-page
+illustrations and a number in the text. 12mo. $1.50 net; by mail, $1.67.
+
+This is a neat, crisp, matter-of-fact account of our Navy, with an
+occasional illuminating anecdote of famous court-martials and such. It
+has been passed by high authorities and its publication officially
+sanctioned. The _Contents_ includes: Naval History--The Navy's
+Organization--The Navy's Personnel--Man-of-War in Commission--Classes of
+Ships in the Navy--Description--High Explosives; Torpedoes; Mines;
+Aeroplanes--Designing and Building a Warship; Dry Docks--The National
+Defense.
+
+                            THOMAS LEAMING'S
+               A PHILADELPHIA LAWYER IN THE LONDON COURTS
+
+Illustrated by the Author. 8vo. $2.00 net; by mail, $2.15. (Circular on
+application.)
+
+A trained observer's graphic description of the English Law Courts, of
+their ancient customs yet up-to-date methods; of the lives and
+activities of the modern barrister and solicitor--the "K. C.," the
+"Junior," the "Devil"--and of the elaborate etiquette, perpetuated by
+the Inns of Court, which still inflexibly rules them, despite the
+tendencies of the times and growth of socialism.
+
+_Nation_:--"The style of narrative, the conciseness of statement, and
+the wealth of allusion make this book one which certainly the lawyer,
+and probably many laymen, will wish to finish at one sitting, and not
+hurriedly.... We hope to see the author appear again, and as a
+Philadelphia Lawyer at Home."
+
+_Bookman_:--"This quiet recital of facts ought of itself to create a
+revolution in this country.... He disclaims any intention of entering
+upon odious comparisons.... When the Bar of America is aroused to the
+necessity of reform it will find these observations ... a mine of
+well-digested information and helpful suggestions."
+
+_Dial_:--"His interesting account of the trial and conviction of Madar
+La Dhingra."
+
+_New York Evening Sun_:--"A suitable mixture of anecdote and
+generalization to give the reader a pleasant and clear idea of English
+courts, their ways and plan.... One of the most valuable chapters
+relates to the discipline of the bar."
+
+_Philadelphia Press_:--"A vast deal of useful and often fascinating
+information.... An eminently readable volume, which, although designed
+primarily for the lay reader, has already elicited hearty commendation
+from not a few leaders of the profession.... American lawyers are
+beginning to see that much may be learned from modern English
+practice.... On the subject of the ethics of the English bar Mr. Leaming
+has much to say that is worth careful perusal."
+
+                         HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+                      34 WEST 33D STREET NEW YORK
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+               SIXTH EDITION, ENLARGED AND WITH PORTRAITS
+
+                      HALE'S DRAMATISTS OF TO-DAY
+
+                     ROSTAND, HAUPTMANN, SUDERMANN,
+                  PINERO, SHAW, PHILLIPS, MAETERLINCK
+
+By Prof. Edward Everett Hale, Jr., of Union College. With gilt top,
+$1.50 net; by mail, $1.60.
+
+Since this work first appeared in 1905, Maeterlinck's SISTER BEATRICE,
+THE BLUE BIRD and MARY MAGDALENE, Rostand's CHANTECLER and Pinero's
+MID-CHANNEL and THE THUNDERBOLT--among the notable plays by some of Dr.
+Hale's dramatists--have been acted here. Discussions of them are added
+to this new edition, as are considerations of Bernard Shaw's and Stephen
+Phillips' latest plays. The author's papers on Hauptmann and Sudermann,
+with slight additions, with his "Note on Standards of Criticism," "Our
+Idea of Tragedy," and an appendix of all the plays of each author, with
+dates of their first performance or publication, complete the volume.
+
+_Bookman_: "He writes in a pleasant, free-and-easy way.... He accepts
+things chiefly at their face value, but he describes them so accurately
+and agreeably that he recalls vividly to mind the plays we have seen and
+the pleasure we have found in them."
+
+_New York Evening Post_: "It is not often nowadays that a theatrical
+book can be met with so free from gush and mere eulogy, or so weighted
+by common sense ... an excellent chronological appendix and full index
+... uncommonly useful for reference."
+
+_Dial_: "Noteworthy example of literary criticism in one of the most
+interesting of literary fields.... Provides a varied menu of the most
+interesting character.... Prof. Hale establishes confidential relations
+with the reader from the start.... Very definite opinions, clearly
+reasoned and amply fortified by example.... Well worth reading a second
+time."
+
+_New York Tribune_: "Both instructive and entertaining."
+
+_Brooklyn Eagle_: "A dramatic critic who is not just 'busting' himself
+with Titanic intellectualities, but who is a readable dramatic
+critic.... Mr. Hale is a modest and sensible, as well as an acute and
+sound critic.... Most people will be surprised and delighted with Mr.
+Hale's simplicity, perspicuity and ingenuousness."
+
+_The Theatre_: "A pleasing lightness of touch.... Very readable book."
+
+                         HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+                         PUBLISHERS -- NEW YORK
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
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