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.