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!"

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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.