Lydia explained, "But Mr. Hollister's aunt is a person who would rather wait half an hour in the cold than see you without an apron."

To which 'Stashie exclaimed, in awestruck wonder before the mysteries of creation, "Folks do be the beatin'est, don't they now, Mis' Hollister!"

"And you must not speak of Mr. Hollister's aunt as a 'poor old soul,'" explained Lydia, apprehensive of Paul's wrath if he ever chanced to hear such a characterization.

"But she is that," protested 'Stashie. "Anybody that's her age and hobbles around so crippled up with the rheumatism—my heart bleeds for 'em."

"She is very rich—" began Lydia, but after a moment's hesitation she had not continued her lesson in social value. She often found that 'Stashie's questions brought her to a standstill.

There was something lacking in the Irishwoman's mental outfit, namely, the capacity even to conceive that ideal of impersonal self-effacement, which, as Paul said truthfully, is the everywhere accepted standard for servants. Her loquacity was a never-ending joke to Madeleine Lowder and her husband, who were exulting in a couple of deft, silent, expensive Japanese "boys" and who, since Madeleine frankly expressed her horror at the bother of having children, seemed likely to continue ignorant, except at comfortable second-hand, of harassing domestic difficulties.

If Lydia had not been in such dire need of another pair of hands than her own slender ones, or if the supply from Endbury intelligence offices had been a whit less unreliable and uncertain, she would not have felt justified in retaining the burly, uncouth Celt, in spite of her own affection, so intensely did Paul dislike her. As it was, she felt guilty for her presence and miserably responsible for her homeliness of conduct. 'Stashie was a constant point of friction between husband and wife, and Lydia was trying with desperate ingenuity to avoid points of friction by some other method than the usual Endbury one of divided interests. Many times she lay awake at night, convinced that her duty was to dismiss Anastasia; only to rise in the morning equally convinced that things without her would be in the long run even harder and more disagreeable for Paul than they were now. The upshot of the matter was that she herself was a very incompetent person, she was remorsefully sure of that; although her mother and Marietta and Paul's aunt all told her that she need expect nothing during the first year of a baby's life but one wretched round of domestic confusion.

Lydia did not find it so. She was immensely occupied, it is true, for though Ariadne was a strong, healthy child, who spent most of her time, her grandmother complained, in sleeping, to Lydia's more intimate contact with the situation there seemed to be more things to be done for the baby, in addition to the usual cares of housekeeping, than could possibly be crowded into twenty-four hours. And yet she was happier during those six months than ever before in her life; happier than she had ever dreamed anyone could be. She stepped about incessantly from one task to another and was very tired at night, but there was no nervous strain on her, and she had no moments of blasting skepticism as to the value of her labors.

Everything she did, even the most menial tasks connected with the baby, was dignified, to her mind, by its usefulness; and she so systematized and organized her busy days that she was always ahead of her work. Paul was obliged to alter his judgment of her as impractical and incapable—although of course the dearest and sweetest of little wives—for nothing could have been more competent than the way she managed her baby and her simple housekeeping. Indeed, there came to the young husband's mind not infrequently, and always with a slight aroma of bitterness, the conviction that Lydia was perfectly able to do whatever she really wished to do and considered important; and that previous conditions must have been due to her unwillingness to set herself seriously at the problems before her. It was a new theory about his wife's character, which the intelligent young man laid by on a mental shelf for future use after this period of intense domesticity should be past.

At present, he accepted thankfully his clean house and his savory food, was not too much put out by 'Stashie's eccentricities, since there was no one but the immediate families to see them, and rejoiced with a whimsical tenderness in Lydia's passion of satisfaction with her baby. He saw so little of the droll, sleeping, eating little mite that he could not as yet take it very seriously as his baby. But it was, on the whole, a happy half-year for him too. He was much moved and pleased by Lydia's joy. He had meant to make his wife happy.

Lydia herself was transported by the mere physical intoxication of new motherhood, a potion more exciting, so her much experienced physician said, than any wine ever fermented. She hung over her sleeping baby, poring upon the exquisite fineness of the skin, upon the rosy little mouth, still sucking comically at an imaginary meal, upon the dimpled, fragile hands, upon the peaceful relaxation of the body, till the very trusting, appealing essence of babyhood flooded her senses like a strong drug; and when the child was awake, and she could bathe the much creased little body, and handle the soft arms, and drop passionate kisses on the satin-smooth skin, and rub her cheek on the downy head, she found herself sometimes trembling and dizzy with emotion. She felt constantly buoyed up by a deep trust and belief in life which she had not known before. The huge and steadying continuity of existence was revealed to her in those days. It was a revelation that was never to leave her. She outgrew definitely the sense of the fragmentary futility of living which had always been, inarticulate, unvoiced, but intensely felt, the torment of her earlier life.

It grieved her generous heart and her aspiration to share all with her husband that the exigences of his busy life deprived him of any knowledge of this newly-opened well of sweet waters, that he had nothing from his parenthood but an amused, half shame-faced pride in points about the baby which, he was informed, were creditable.

At a faint hint of this feeling on Lydia's part, her sister-in-law broke into her good-natured laughter at Lydia's notions. "What can a man know about a baby?" she cried conclusively.

"Why, I didn't know about one till Ariadne came. I learned on her. What's to hinder a man's doing the same thing?"

Madeleine was so much amused by this fantastic idea that she repeated it to Dr. Melton, who came in just then.

"Don't it take Lydia!" she appealed to him.

The doctor considered the lovely, fair-haired creature in silence for a moment before answering. Then, "Yes; of course you're right," he assented. "It's a strictly feminine monopoly. It's as true that all men are incapable of understanding the significance of a baby in the universe and in their own lives, as it is true that all women love babies and desire them." His tone was full of a heavy significance. He could never keep his temper with Paul's sister.

Madeleine received this without a quiver. She neither blushed nor looked in the least abashed, but there was an unnecessary firmness in her voice as she answered, looking him steadily in the eye: "Exactly! That's just what I've been telling Lydia." She often said that she was the only woman in Endbury who wasn't afraid of that impertinent little doctor.

After Madeleine had gone away, Lydia looked at her godfather with shining eyes. "I am living! I am living!" she told him, holding up the baby to him with a gesture infinitely significant; "and I like it as well as I thought I should!"

"Most people do," he informed her, "when they get a peck at it. It generally takes something cataclysmic, too, to tear them loose from their squirrel-cages—like babies, or getting converted."

If he thought that early married life could also be classed among these beneficently uprooting agencies, he kept his thoughts to himself. Lydia's marriage had been eminently free from disagreeable shocks or surprises, and amply deserved to be called successful in the usual reasonable and moderate application of that adjective to matrimony; but there had been nothing in it, certainly, to destroy even temporarily anyone's grasp on what are known as the realities of life.

The doctor considered, and added to his last speech: "Getting converted is surer. Babies grow up!"

Lydia felt that her godfather was right, and that babies gave one only a short respite, when, toward spring, she observed in all the inhabitants of her world repeated signs of uneasy dissatisfaction with her "submergence in domesticity," as Mrs. Emery put it in a family council. Her father inquired mildly, one day in March, with the touchingly vague interest he took in his children's affairs, if it weren't about time she returned a few calls and accepted some invitations, and began "to live like folks again." "Ariadne isn't the first baby in the world," he concluded.

"She's the first one I ever had," Lydia reminded him, with the humorous smile that was so like his own.

"Well, you mustn't forget, as so many young mothers do, that you're a member of society and a wife, as well as a wet-nurse," he said.

Marietta had never resumed an easy or genial intercourse with the Hollisters since the affair of the dinner party, but she came to call at not infrequent intervals, and Paul's sister dropped in often, to "keep an eye on Lydia," as she told her husband. She had an affection for her sister-in-law, in spite of an exasperated amusement over her liability to break out with new ideas at unexpected moments. Both these ladies were loud in their exhortations to Lydia not to let maternity be in her life the encumbering, unbeautifying, too lengthy episode it was to women with less force of character than their own. "You do get so out of things," Madeleine told her with her usual breathless italicizing, "if you stay away too long. You just never can catch up! There's a behind-the-timesy smell about your clothes—honest, there is—if you let them go too long."

Marietta added her quota of experienced wisdom to the discussion. "If you just hang over a baby all the time, you get morbid, and queer, and different."

Madeleine had laughed, and summed up the matter with a terse, "Worse than that! You get left!"

Lydia's elder brother, George, the rich one, who lived in Cleveland and manufactured rakes and hoes, wrote her one of his rare letters to the same effect. Lydia thought it likely that he had been moved to this unusual show of interest in her affairs by proddings from her mother and Marietta. If this surmise was correct, and if a similar request had been sent to Henry, the other member of the Emery family, the one who had married the grocer's daughter, the appeal had a strikingly different effect. From Oregon came an impetuous, slangily-worded exhortation to Lydia not to make a fool of herself and miss the best of life to live up to the tommyrot standard of old dry-as-dust Endbury. The Emerys heard but seldom from this erring son, and Lydia, who had been but a child when he left home, had never before received a letter from him. He wrote from a fruit farm in Oregon, the description of which, on the grandiloquent letter-head, gave an impression of ampleness and prosperity which was not contradicted by the full-blooded satisfaction in life which breathed from every line of the breezy, good-natured letter.

The incident stirred Lydia's imagination. It spoke of a wider horizon—of a fresher air than that about her. She tried to remember the loud-talking, much-laughing, easy-going young man as she had seen him last. They were too far apart in years to have had much companionship, but there had been between them an unspoken affection which had never died. People always said that George and Marietta were alike and Lydia and Harry. To this Mrs. Emery always protested that Lydia wasn't in the least like Henry, and she didn't know what people were talking about; but the remark gave a secret pleasure to Lydia. She, too, was very fond of laughing, and her brother's vein of light-hearted nonsense had been a great delight to her. It was not present in any of the rest of the family, and certainly did not show itself in her at this period of her life.

During this time Paul's attention was concentrated on bringing about a reallotment of American Electric territory in the Middle West, an arrangement that would add several busy cities to his district and make a decided difference in his salary and commissions. He worked early and late in the Endbury office, and made many trips into all parts of the field, to gather data conclusive of the value of his scheme. Lydia had tried hard to get from him information enough to understand what it was all about, but he put her off with vague, fatigued assurances that it was too complicated for her to grasp, or for him to go over without his papers; that it would take him too long to explain, and that, anyhow, she could be sure of one thing—it was all straight, clean business, designed entirely to give the public better service and more work from everybody all 'round. Lydia did not doubt this. It was always a great source of satisfaction to her to feel secure and unshaken trust in her father's and her husband's business integrity, and she was sorry for Marietta, who could not, she feared, count among her spiritual possessions any such faith in Ralph. It was, on the other hand, one of her most unresigned regrets, that she was not allowed to share in these ideals for public service of her husband and father—these ideals so distantly glimpsed by her, and perhaps not very consciously felt by them. It was not that they refused to answer any one of her questions, but they were so little in the habit of articulating this phase of their activities that their tongues balked stubbornly before her ignorant and fumbling attempts to enter this inner chamber.

"Oh, it's all right, Lydia! Just you trust me!" Paul would cry, with a hint of vexation in his voice, as if he felt that questions could mean only suspicion.

Lydia's tentative efforts to construct a bridge between her world and his met constantly with this ill success. She had had so little training in bridge-building, she thought sadly.

One evening that spring, such a futile attempt of hers was interrupted by the son of one of their neighbors, a lad of eighteen, who had just been given a subordinate position in his father's business. As he strolled up to their veranda steps, Lydia looked up from the dress she was enlarging for the rapidly growing baby and reflected that astonishingly rapid growth is the law of all healthy youth. The tall boy looked almost ludicrous to her in his ultra-correct man's outfit, so vividly did she recall him, three or four years before, in short trousers and round-collared shirt-waist. His smooth, rosy face had still the downy bloom of adolescence.

"Howd' do, Walter!" said Paul, glancing up from a pile of blue-prints over which he had been straining his eyes in the fading evening light.

"Evening," answered the boy, nodding and sitting down on the top step with one knee up. "D'you mind if I smoke, Mrs. Hollister?"

"Not at all," she answered gravely, tickled by the elaborate carelessness with which he handled his new pipe.

"What you working on, Hollister?" he went on with the manner of one old business man to another.

Lydia hid a smile. She found him delicious. She began to think how she could make Dr. Melton laugh with her account of Walter the Man.

"The lay-out of the new power-house—Elliott-Gridley works in Urbana," answered Paul, in a straightforward, reasonable tone, a little absent.

Lydia stopped smiling. It was a tone he had never used to answer any business question she had ever put to him. "I'm figuring on their generators," he went on in explanation.

"Big contract?" asked Walter.

"Two thousand kilowatt turbo generator," answered Paul.

The other whistled. "Whew! I didn't know they had the cash!"

"They haven't," said Paul briefly.

"Oh, chattel-mortgage?" surmised the other.

"Lease-contract," Paul corrected. "That doesn't have to be recorded."

"What's the matter with recording it?"

"Afraid of their credit. They don't want Dunn's sending all over creation that they've put chattel-mortgages on their equipment, do they?"

"No; sure! I see." The boy grasped instantly, with a quick nod, the other's meaning. "Well, that's one way of gettin' 'round it!" he added admiringly after an instant's pause.

Lydia had laid down her work and was looking intently at her two companions. At this she gave a stifled exclamation which made the boy turn his head. "Say, Mrs. Hollister, aren't you looking kind of pale this evening?" he asked. "These first hot nights do take it out of a person, don't they? Mr. Hollister ought to take you to Put-in-Bay for a holiday. Momma'd take care of the baby for you and welcome. She's crazy about babies." He was again the overgrown school-boy that Lydia knew. The conversation drifted to indifferent topics. Lydia did not take her usual share in it, and when their caller had gone Paul inquired if she really were exhausted by the heat.

"Oh, no," she said; "you know I don't mind the heat."

"You didn't say much when Walter was here, and I—"

"I was thinking," Lydia broke in. "I was thinking that I couldn't understand a word you and Walter were saying any more than if you were talking Hebrew. I was thinking that that little boy knows more about your business than I do."

Paul did not attempt to deny this, but he laughed at her dramatic accent. "Sure, he does! And about how to tie a four-in-hand, and what's the best stud to wear at the back of a collar, and where to buy socks. What's that to you?"

Lydia looked at him with quivering, silent lips.

He answered, with a little heat: "Why, look-y here, Lydia, suppose I were a doctor. You wouldn't expect to know how many grains of morphine or what d'you call 'em I was going to use in—"

"But Dr. Melton is a doctor, and I know lots about what he thinks of as he lives day after day—there are other things besides technical details and grains of morphine—other problems—human things—Why, for instance, there's one question that torments him all the time—how much it's right to humor people who aren't sick but think they are. He talks to me a great deal about such—"

Paul laughed, rising and gathering up his blue-prints. "Well, I can't think of any problem that torments me but the everlasting one of how to sell more generators and motors than my competitors. Come on indoors, Honey; I've got to have some light if I finish going over these to-night."

His accent was evidently intended to end the discussion, and Lydia allowed it to do so, although the incident was one she could not put out of her mind. She watched Walter going back and forth to Endbury with a jealousy the absurdity of which she herself realized, and she listened with a painful intentness to the boy's talk during his occasional idle sojourns on their veranda steps. Yet she had been used to hearing Paul talk unintelligibly to the business associates whom, from time to time, he brought out to the house to dine and to talk business afterward. Somehow, she said to herself, it's being just Walter seemed to bring it home to her. To have that boy—and yet she liked him, too, she thought. She looked sometimes into his fresh, innocently keen face with a yearning apprehension. Paul was amused at his precocious airs, and yet was not without respect for his rapidly developing business capacity. He said once, "Walter's a real nice boy. I shouldn't mind having a son like that myself!"

The remark startled Lydia. If she were to have a son he would be like that, she realized. And he would grow up and marry some—she sprang up and caught Ariadne to her in a sudden fierce embrace.

"You'll break your back lifting that heavy baby 'round so," Paul remonstrated with justice.

For all her aversion to the set forms of "society" as understood by Endbury, Lydia was fond of having people about her, "to try to get really acquainted with them" she said, and during that summer the Hollister veranda in the evening became a rendezvous for their Bellevue neighbors. Paul rather deplored the time wasted in this unprofitable variety of informal social life which, in his phrase, "counted for nothing" but he was always glad to see Walter. "At the rate he's going and the way he's taking hold, he'll be a valuable business friend in a few years," he said prophetically to Lydia, and he assumed more and more the airs of a comrade with the lad.

One evening when Walter came lounging over to the veranda, Lydia was busy indoors, but later she stepped to the door in time to hear Paul say, laughing: "Well, for all that, he's not so good as Wellman Phelps' stenographer."

"How so?" asked the boy, alert for a pleasantry from his elder.

"Why, Phelps carries this fellow 'round with him everywhere he goes, has had him for years, and twice a week all he has to do is to say: 'Say, Fred; write my wife, will you?'"

His listener broke out into a peal of boyish laughter. "Pretty good!" he applauded the joke.

"It's a fact," Paul went on. "Fred writes it and signs it and sends it off, and Phelps never has to trouble his head about it."

Lydia stepped back into the darkness of the hall.

When she came out later, a misty figure in white, Paul rose, saying, "Well, Walter, I'll leave you to Mrs. Hollister now. I've got some work to do before I get to bed."

Lydia sat silent, looking at the boy's face, clear and untarnished in the moonlight. He was looking dreamily away at the lawn, dappled with the shadow of the slender young trees. They seemed creatures scarcely more sylvan than he, sprawled, like a loitering faun with his hands clasped behind his head. His mouth had the pure, full outlines of a child's.

"What are you thinking about, Walter?" Lydia asked him suddenly.

He started, and brought his limpid gaze to hers. "About how to cross-index our follow-up letter catalogue better," he answered promptly.

"Really? Really?" She leaned toward him, urging him to frankness.

He was surprised at her tone. "Why, sure!" he told her. "Why not? What else?"

Lydia said no more.

She had never felt more helplessly her remoteness from her husband's world than during that spring. It was a sentiment that Paul, apparently, did not reciprocate. In spite of his frequent absences from home and his detached manner about most domestic questions, he had as definite ideas about his wife's resumption of her social duties as had everyone else. "It made him uneasy," as he put it, "to be losing so many points in the game."

"Look here, my dear," he said one evening in spring when the question came up; "summer's almost here, and this winter's been as good as dropped right out. Can't you just pick up a few threads and make a beginning? It'll make it easier in the fall." He added, uneasily, "We don't want old Lowder and Madeleine to get ahead of us entirely, you know. You can leave the kid with 'Stashie, can't you, once in a while? She ought to be able to do that much, I should think." He spoke as though he had assigned to her the simplest possible of all domestic undertakings. As Lydia made no response, he said finally, before attacking a pile of papers, "If I'm going to earn a lot more money, what good'll it do us if you don't do your share? Besides, we owe it to the kid. You want to do your best by your little girl, don't you?"

As always, Lydia responded with a helpless alacrity to that appeal. "Oh, yes! Oh, yes! We must do our best for her." This phrase summed up the religion she had at last found after so much fervent, undirected search. The church, as she knew it, was chiefly the social center of various fashionable activities which differed from ordinary fashionable enterprises only in being used to bring in money, which money, handed over to the rector, disappeared into the maw of some unknown, voracious, charitable institution. And beyond the church there had been no element in the life she knew, that was not frankly materialistic. But now, as the miracle of awakening consciousness took place daily in her very sight, and as the first dawnings of a personality began to look out of her child's eyes, all Lydia's vague spiritual cravings, all the groping tendrils of her aspirations, clung about the conviction more and more summing up her inner life, that she must do her best for Ariadne, must make the world, into which that little new soul had come, a better place than she herself had found it. She felt as naively and passionately that her child must be saved the mistakes that she had made, as though she were the first mother who ever sent up over her baby's head that pitiful, universal prayer.

The matter of the social duty of the young Hollisters was finally compromised by Lydia's accepting a number of invitations for the latter part of the season, and giving a series of big receptions in May. They were not by a hair nor a jot nor a tittle to be distinguished from their predecessors of the year before. As they seemed hardly adequate, Lydia suggested half-heartedly that they give a dinner party, but Paul replied, "With 'Stashie to pour soup down people's backs and ask them how their baby's whooping cough is, as she passes the potatoes?"

The hot weather came with the rush that was always so unexpected and so invariable, and another season was over. It was a busy, silent, thoughtful summer for Lydia. Of course (much to Lydia's distress), Ariadne had been weaned when her mother had been forced to leave her to "go out" again, and this necessitated such anxious attention to her diet and general regimen during the hot weather that Lydia was very grateful to have little to interfere with her.

The General Office had accepted provisionally Paul's redistributing plan, and in his anxiety to prove its value he was away from home more even than usual. The heat was terrible, but Lydia and he both knew no other climate, and Lydia loved the summer as the time of year when the fierceness of Nature forced on all her world a reluctant adjournment of their usual methods of spending their lives. She was absorbed in Ariadne, and the slow, blazing summer days were none too long for her.

The child began to develop an individuality. She was a sensitive, quickly-responsive little thing; exactly, so Mrs. Emery said, like Lydia at her age, except that she seemed to have none of Lydia's native mirth, but, rather, a little pensive air that made her singularly appealing to all who saw her, and that pierced her mother's heart with an anguish of protecting love.

Lydia said to her godfather one day, suddenly, "I wonder if people can be taught how to fight?"

He had one of his flashes of intuition. "The baby, you mean?"

Lydia evaded the directness of this. "Oh, in general, aren't folks better off if they like to fight for themselves? Don't they have to?"

He considered the question in one of his frowning silences, so long that Lydia started when he spoke again. "They don't need to fight with claws for their food, as they used to do. Things are arranged now so that the physically strong, who like such a life, are the ones who choose it. They get food for the others. Why shouldn't the morally strong fight for the weaker ones and make it possible for everyone to have a chance at developing the best of himself without having to battle with others to do it?"

"That's pretty vague," said Lydia.

"Why, look here," said the doctor. "You don't plow the field to plant the wheat that makes your bread. That's a man of a coarser physical fiber than yours, who is strengthened by the effort, and not exhausted as you would be. Why shouldn't the world be so organized that somebody of coarser moral texture than yours should do battle with the forces of materialism and tragic triviality that—"

"But Ariadne's growing up! She will need all that so soon— and the world won't be organized then, you know it won't—and she's no fighter by instinct, any more than—" She was silent. The doctor filled in her incomplete sentence mentally, and found no answer to make.



CHAPTER XXIV

"THROUGH PITY AND TERROR EFFECTING A PURIFICATION OF THE HEART"

One hot day in August, Ariadne slept later than usual and when she woke was quite unlike her usual romping, active self. Her round face was deeply flushed, and she lay listlessly in her little bed, repulsing with a feeble fretfulness every attempt to give her food. Lydia's heart swelled so that she was choked with its palpitations. Paul was out of town. She was alone in the house except for her servant. To that ignorant warm heart she turned with an inexpressible thankfulness. "Oh, 'Stashie! Stashie!" she called in a voice that brought the other clattering breathlessly up the stairs. "The baby! Look at the baby! And she won't touch her bottle."

The tragic change in the Irishwoman's face as she looked at their darling, their anguished community of feeling—there was instantly a bond for the two women which wonderfully ignored all the dividing differences between them. Lydia felt herself—as she rarely did—not alone. It brought a wild comfort into her tumult. "'Stashie, you don't—you don't think she's—sick?" She brought the word out with horrified difficulty.

'Stashie was running down the back stairs. "I'm 'phonin' to th' little ould doctor," she called over her shoulder.

Lydia ran to catch up Ariadne. The child turned from her mother with a moan and closed her eyes heavily. A moment later, to Lydia's terror, she had sunk into a stupor.

The doctor found mistress and maid hanging over the baby's bed with white faces and trembling lips, hand in hand, like sisters. He examined the child silently, swiftly, looking with a face of inscrutable blankness at the clinical thermometer with which he had taken her temperature. "Just turn her so she'll lie comfortably," he told 'Stashie, "and then you stay with her a moment. I want a talk with your mistress."

In the hall, he cast at Lydia a glance of almost angry exhortation to summon her strength. "Are you fit to be a mother?" he asked harshly.

"Wait a minute," said Lydia; she drew a long breath and took hold of the balustrade. "Yes," she answered.

"Ariadne's very sick. I oughtn't to have allowed you to wean her with hot weather coming on. You'd better wire Paul."

"Yes," she said, not blenching. "What else can I do?"

"'Phone to the hospital for a trained nurse, start some water boiling to sterilize things, and get somebody here in a hurry to go to the nearest drug store for me. I'll go back to her now."

"Is she—is she—dangerously—?" asked Lydia in a low, steady voice.

"Yes; she is," he said unsparingly.

The telegram Lydia sent her husband read: "Ariadne suddenly taken very sick. Dr. Melton says dangerously. He thinks she does not suffer much, though she seems to. When shall I expect you?"

The answer she received in a few hours read: "Have two nurses. Get Jones, Cleveland, consultation. Impossible to leave."

It was handed her as she was running up the stairs with a pitcher of hot water. She read it, as she did everything that day, in a dreamlike rapidity and quietness, and showed it to Dr. Melton without comment. He handed it back without a word. Later, he turned for an instant from the little bed to say, irrelevantly, "Peterson, of Toledo, would be better than Jones, if I have to have anybody. But so far, it's simple enough—damnably simple."

He was obliged to leave for a time after this, called by a patient at the point of death. That seemed quite natural to Lydia. Death was thick in the air. He left the baby to a clear-eyed, deft-handed, impersonal trained nurse, on whom Lydia waited slavishly, sitting motionless in a corner of the room until she was sent for something, then flying noiselessly upon her errand.

Her mother and father were out of town, and Marietta limited herself to telephoning frequent inquiries. She told 'Stashie to tell her sister she knew she would be only in the way, with two nurses in the house. Lydia made 'Stashie answer all the telephone calls. She felt that if she broke her silence, if she tried to speak—and then she could not bear to be out of the sight of the little figure with the flushed cheeks, moving her head back and forth on the pillow and gazing about with bright, unseeing eyes. As night came on, she began to give, in a voice not her own, little piteous cries of suffering, or strange delirious mockeries of her pretty laughter and quaint, unintelligible, prattling talk. Once, as the long, hot night stood still, the baby called out, quite clearly: "Mamma! Mamma!" It was the first time she had ever said it.

Lydia sprang up and rushed toward the bed like an insane person, her arms outstretched, her eyes glittering. Dr. Melton did not forbid her to take up her child, but he said in a neutral tone, "It would be better for her to lie perfectly quiet."

Lydia stopped short, shuddering. The doctor did not take his eyes from his little patient. After a moment the mother went slowly back to her seat. "Hand me the thermometer," said the doctor to the nurse.

In the early morning came a telegram from Paul. "Wire me frequently baby's condition. Spare no expense in treatment."

Lydia answered: "Ariadne slightly worse. Doctor says crisis in three days."

This time she put in no extra information as to the baby's suffering, and her message was under ten words, like his own. She despatched him thereafter a bulletin every four or five hours. They ran mostly to the effect that Ariadne was about the same.

The doctor came and went, the nurses relieved each other, the telephone rang for Marietta's inquiries, Flora Burgess called once a day to get the news from 'Stashie. Lydia was slave to the nurses, alert for the slightest service she could render them, divining, with a desperate intuition, their needs before they were formulated. 'Stashie was the only person who paid the least attention to her, 'Stashie the only phenomena to break in on the solitude that surrounded her like an illimitable plain. 'Stashie made her eat. 'Stashie saw to it that once or twice she lay down. 'Stashie combed her hair, and bathed her white face—most of all, 'Stashie went about with eyes that reflected faithfully the suffering in Lydia's own. She said very little, but as they passed, the two women sometimes exchanged brief words: "Niver you think it possible, Mis' Hollister!"

"No," Lydia would answer resolutely; "it's not possible."

But as the hours slowly filed past the doctor assured her bluntly that it would be quite possible. "There's a fighting chance," he said, "and nothing more." He added relentlessly, "If I hadn't been such a fool as to let you wean her—"

There was in his manner none of his usual tenderness to his godchild. One would have thought he scarcely saw her. He was the physician wholly. Lydia was grateful to him for this. She could not have borne his tenderness then, but his professional concentration left her horribly alone.

No, not alone! There was always 'Stashie—silent 'Stashie, with red eyes, her heart bleeding. But even 'Stashie's loyal heart could not know all the bitterness of Lydia's. 'Stashie's breasts did not swell and throb, as if in mockery. 'Stashie did not hear, over and over, "If she had not been weaned—"

On the night and near the hour when the crisis was expected, Lydia was at the end of the hall, where she had installed an oil-stove. She was heating water needed for some of the processes of the sick room. It had begun to steam up in the thick, hot night air, was singing loudly, and would boil in an instant. She sat looking at it in her tense, trembling quiet. There was no light but the blue flame of the stove.

Suddenly there rang loudly in her ears the question to which she had deafened herself with such crucifying effort—"What if Ariadne should die?" It was as though someone had called to her. She looked down into the black abyss from which she had willfully turned away her eyes, and saw that it was fathomless. A throe of revolt and hatred shook her. She bowed her head to her knees, racked by an anguish compared with which the torture of childbirth was nothing; and out of this deadly pain came forth, as in childbirth, something alive—a vision as swift, as passing as a glimpse into the gates of Paradise; a blinding certainty of immensity, of the hugeness of the whole of which she and Ariadne were a part; of the sacredness of life, which was to be lived sacredly, even if— She raised her head, living a more exalted instant than she had ever dreamed she would know.

The water broke into quick, dancing bubbles. In a period of time incalculably short, transfiguration had come to her.

The door at the other end of the hall opened and Dr. Melton's light, uneven footstep echoed back of her. She did not turn. He laid a hand on her shoulder. It was trembling, and with a wonderful consciousness of endless courage she turned to comfort him. His lips were twitching so that for an instant he could not speak. Then, "She'll pull through. I'm pretty sure now, she'll—" he got out and leaned against the wall.

Lydia took him into a protecting embrace as though it were his baby who had turned back from the gates of death. She had come into a larger heritage. She was mother to all that suffered. Looking down on the head which, for an instant, lay on her bosom, she noticed how white the hair was. He was an old man, her godfather, he had been on a long strain—. He looked up at her. And then in an instant it was over. He had mastered himself and had grasped the handle of the basin.

"How long has this been boiling?" he asked.

Lydia pointed to her watch, hanging on the wall. "Three minutes by that," she said. "May I leave to tell 'Stashie?"

The doctor nodded absently.

Neither spoke of Paul.

Lydia hurried across the dark, silent house with swift sureness. The happiness she was about to confer cast a radiance upon her. She touched the door to the servant's room, and ran her fingers lightly over it to find the knob. Faint as the noise was, it was answered instantly by a stir inside. There was a thud of bare feet and a quick rush. Lydia felt the door swing open before her in the darkness and spoke quickly to the trembling, breathing form she divined there, "The doctor says she's safe."

Strong arms were about her, hot tears not her own rained down on her face. Before she knew it, she was swept to her knees, where, locked in the other's close embrace, she felt the big heart thump loud against her own and heard go up above her head a wild "Oh, God! Oh, Mary Mother! Oh, Christ! Oh, Mary Mother! Glory be to God! Hail, Mary, Mother of God! Thanks be to God! Thanks be—"

Kneeling there in the blackness, with her servant's arms around her, Lydia thought it the first prayer she had ever heard.

* * * * *

Ariadne grew well with the miraculous rapidity of children, and when Paul came back was almost herself again, if a little thinner.

It was upon Lydia that Paul's eyes fastened, Lydia very white, her face almost translucent, her starry eyes contradicting the tremor of her lips. He drew her to him, crying out: "Why, Lydia darling, you look as though you'd been drawn through a knot-hole! This has been enough sight harder on you than on the baby! What in the world wore you out so? I thought you had two nurses!"

He looked closely into her face, seeing more changes: "Why, you poor, poor, poor thing!" he said compassionately. "You look positively years older."

"Oh, I am that," she told him, seeming to speak, oddly enough, he thought, exultantly.

"You just shouldn't allow yourself to get so wrought up over Ariadne," he expostulated affectionately. "You'll wear yourself out! What earthly good did it do the baby? Sickness is a matter for professionals, I tell you what! You had the two nurses and your precious old Dr. Melton that you swear by! What more could be done? That's the reason I didn't come back. I knew well enough that there wasn't an earthly thing I could do to help."

Lydia looked at him so strangely that he noticed it. "Oh, of course I could have been company for you. But that was the only thing! Getting the baby well was the business of the hour, wasn't it now? And the doctor and nurses were looking out for that. Besides, you had 'Stashie to wait on you."

"Yes; I had 'Stashie," admitted Lydia.

Paul perceived uneasily some enigmatic quality in her quiet answer, and went on reasonably: "Now, Lydia, don't go making yourself out a martyr because I didn't come back. You know I'd have come if there was anything to be done! I'd have come from the ends of the earth to help you nurse her if we'd had to do that! But, thank the Lord, I make enough money so we could do better by the little tad than that!"

"Suppose I had gone to the theater that night," asked Lydia slowly. "There was nothing I could do here."

Paul was justifiably aggrieved. "Good Lord, Lydia! I wasn't off amusing myself! I was doing business!"

His special accent for the word was never more pronounced.

"Making money to pay for the trained nurses that saved her life," he ended. His conviction of the unanswerable force of this statement put him again in good humor. "Now, little madame, you listen to me. You're going to take a junketing honeymoon off with me, or I'll know the reason why! I'm going to take you up to Put-in-Bay for a vacation! Pretty near all our card-club gang are there now, and we'll have a gay old time and cheer you up! I bet you just let yourself go, and worried yourself into a fever, didn't you?"

During this speech Lydia stood leaning against him, feeling the cloth of his sleeve rough on her bare forearm, feeling the stir and life of his body, the warmth of his breath on her face. She had an impulse to scream wildly to him, as though to make him hear and stop and turn, before he finally disappeared from her sight; and she faced him dumbly. There were no words to tell him—she tried to speak, but before his absent, kind, wandering eyes, a foreknowledge of her own inarticulateness closed her lips. He had not been there, and so he would never know. She stirred, moved away, and rearranged the flowers in a vase. "Oh, yes; I worried, of course," she said. "The baby was awfully sick for three days."

She felt desperately that she was failing in the most obvious duty not to try to make him understand what had happened in his absence. She bethought herself of one fact, the mere statement of which should tell him a thousand times more eloquently than words, something of what she had suffered. "The doctor told me twice that she wouldn't have been sick if she hadn't been weaned." She said this with an accent of immense significance, clasping her hands together hard.

Paul was unpacking his suit-case. "Great Scott! You nursed her six months!" he said conclusively, over his shoulder. "Besides, you had to wean her—don't you remember?"

"Oh, yes; I remember," said Lydia. Her hands dropped to her sides.

"Don't they get over things quickly?" commented Paul, looking around at the baby. "To see her creeping around like a little hop-toad and squeaking that rubber bunny—why, I declare, I don't believe that anything's been the matter with her at all. You and the doctor lost your nerve, I guess."

Three or four days later he was called away again. Their regular routine began. The long, slow days, slid past the house in Bellevue in endless, dreamy procession. Ariadne grew fast, developing constantly new faculties, new powers. By the end of the summer she was no longer a baby, but a person. The young mother felt the same mysterious forces of change and growth working irresistibly in herself. The long summer, thoughtful and solitary, marked the end of one period in her life.

She looked forward shrinkingly to the winter. What would happen to this new self whose growth in her was keeping pace with her child's? What would happen next?



CHAPTER XXV

A BLACK MILESTONE

What happened was, in the first week of October, the sudden death of her father. It was sudden only to his wife and daughter, whom, as always, the Judge had tried to spare, at all costs, the knowledge of anything unpleasant. Dr. Melton thought that perhaps the strong man's incredulity of anything for him to fear had a good deal to do with his repeated refusals to allow his wife or daughter to be warned of the danger of apoplexy. Without that hypothesis, it seemed incredible, he told Mrs. Sandworth, that so kind a man could be so cruel.

"Everything's incredible," murmured Mrs. Sandworth, her handkerchief at her eyes, her loving heart aching for the newly-made widow, her lifelong friend.

Her brother did not answer. He sat, gnawing savagely on his finger nails, his thoughts centered, as always, on his darling Lydia—fatherless.

He had prided himself on his acute insight into human nature in general, and upon his specialized, intensified knowledge of those two women whom he had known so long and studied so minutely; but "I've been a conceited blockhead, and vanity's treacherous as well as damnable," he cried out to his sister some days later, amazed beyond expression at the way in which their loss affected Lydia and her mother.

Mrs. Emery's attitude was a revelation to him, a revelation that left him almost as angrily full of grief as she herself. He had thought best on the whole not to disclose to her the substance of the several conversations he had had with his dead friend on the subject of finances. With two prosperous sons, the widow would be well taken care of, he thought, perhaps adding with a little acridity, "just as she always has been, without a thought on her part." But when Mrs. Emery, divining the truth with an awful intuition, came flying to him after the settlement, he was not proof against the fury of her interrogations. If she wanted to know, he would tell her, he thought grimly to himself.

"There is nothing left," she began, bursting into his office, "but the house, which has a mortgage, and the insurance—nothing! Nothing!"

It was rather soon for her to be resentful, the doctor thought bitterly, misreading the misery on her face. "No," he said.

"Had the Judge lost any money—do you know?"

"No; I think not."

"But where—what—we had at one time five thousand dollars at least in the savings bank. I happened to know of that small account. I supposed of course there was more. There is no trace of even that, the administrator says."

"That went into the extra expenses of the year Lydia made her debut. And her wedding cost a great deal, he told me one day—and her trousseau—and other expenses at that time."

Used as the doctor was to the universal custom of divided interests among his well-to-do patients, it did not seem too strange to him to be giving information about her own affairs to this gray-haired matron. She was not the first widow to whom he had been forced to break bad news of her husband's business.

Mrs. Emery stared at him, her dry lips apart, a glaze over her eyes. He thought her expression strange. As she said nothing, he added, with a little sour pleasure in defending his dead friend, even if it should give a prick to a survivor, "The Judge was so scrupulously honest, you know." The widow sat down and laid her arms across the table, still staring hard at the doctor. It came to him that she was not looking at him at all, but at some devastating inner sight, which seared her heart, but from which she could not turn away her eyes. He himself turned away, beginning to be aware of some passion within her beyond his divination. There was a long silence.

Finally, "That was the reason he would not stop working," said the woman in a voice which made the physician whirl about. He looked sharply into her face, and what he saw there took him in one stride to her side. She kept her stony eyes still on the place where he had been—eyes that saw only, as though for the first time, some long procession of past events.

"I see everything now," she went on with the same flat intonation. "He could not stop. That was the reason why he would never rest."

She got slowly to her feet, smoothing over and over one side of her skirt with a strange automatic gesture. She was looking full into the doctor's face now. "I have killed him," she said quietly, and fell as though struck down by a blow from behind.

Her long, long illness was spent in the Melton's home, with the doctor in attendance and Julia Sandworth, utterly devoted, constantly at hand. The old Emery house, the outward symbol of her married life, was sold, and the big "yard" cut up into building lots long before she was able to sit up. Lydia came frequently, but, acting on the doctor's express command, never brought Ariadne. The outbreaks of self-reproach and embittered grief that were likely to burst upon the widow, even in the midst of one of her quiet, listless days, were not, he said, for a child to see or hear, especially such a sensitive little thing as Ariadne. Those wild bursts of remorse were delirious, he told Lydia, but to his sister he said he wished they were. "I imagine they are the only times when she comes really to herself," he added sadly.



The especial agony for the sick woman was that nothing of what had happened seemed to her now in the least necessary. "Why, if I had only known—if I had only dreamed how things were—" she cried incessantly to those about her. "What did I care about anything compared with Nat! I loved my husband! What did I care—if I had only dreamed that—if I had only known what I was doing!"

Dr. Melton labored in heartsick pity to remove her fixed idea, which soon became a monomania, that she alone was to blame for the Judge's death. It now seemed to him, in his sympathy with her grief, that she had been like a child entrusted with some frail, priceless object and not warned of its fragility. She herself cried out constantly with astonished hatred upon a world that had left her so.

"If anyone had warned me—had given me the least idea that it was so serious—I could have lived in three rooms—we had been poor—what did I care for anything but Nathaniel! I only did all those things because—because there was nothing else to do!"

Lydia tried to break the current with a reminder of the sweet memories of the past. "Father loved you so! He loved to give you what you wanted, Mother dear."

"What I wanted! I wanted my husband. I want my husband!" the widow screamed like a person on the rack.

The doctor sent Lydia away with a hasty gesture. "You must not see her when she is violent," he said. "You would never forget it."

It was something he himself never forgot, used as he was to pitiful scenes in the life of suffering humanity. He was almost like a sick person himself, going about his practice with sunken eyes and gray face. His need for sympathy was so great that he abandoned the tacit silence about the Emerys which had existed between him and Rankin ever since Lydia's marriage, and, going out to the house in the Black Rock woods, unburdened to the younger man the horror of his heart.

"She's suffering," he cried. "She's literally heartbroken! She is! It's real! And what has she had to make up for it? Oh, it's monstrous! One thing she says keeps ringing in my ears. That gray-haired woman, a human being my own age—the silly, tragic, childish thing she keeps saying—'I only did all those things—I only wanted all those things—because there was nothing else!' Nothing else!" He turned on his host with a fierce "Good God! She's right. What else was there ever for—for any woman of her class—"

Rankin pushed his shivering, fidgeting visitor into a chair and, laying a big hand on his shoulder, said with a faint smile: "Maybe I can divert your mind for an instant with a story—another one of my great-aunt's, only it's an old one this time; you've probably heard it—about the old man who said to his wife on his death-bed, 'I've tried to be a good husband to you, dear. It's been hard on my teeth sometimes, but I've always eaten the crusts and let you have the soft bread.' You remember what the wife's answer was?"

"No," said the doctor frowning.

"It's the epitome of tragedy. She said, 'Oh, my dear, and I like crusts so!'"

The doctor stared into the fire. "Do you mean—there's work for them?"

"I mean work for them," repeated the younger man.

The word echoed in a long silence.

"It's the most precious possession we have," said Rankin finally. "We ought to share more evenly."

The doctor rose to go. "Generally I forget that we're of different generations," he said with apparent irrelevance, "but there are times when I feel it keenly."

"Why now especially?" Rankin wondered. "I've stated a doctrine that is yours, too."

"No; you wouldn't see, of course. Yes; it's my doctrine—in theory. I believe it, as people believe in Christianity. I should be equally loath to see anybody doubt it, or practice it. Ah, I'm a fool! Besides, I was born in Kentucky. And I'm sixty-seven years old."

He shut the door behind him with emphasis.

He was on his way to Bellevue to see Lydia. Knowing her tender heart, he had expected to see her drowned in grief over her father's death. Her dry-eyed quiet made him uneasy. That morning, he found her holding Ariadne on her knees and telling her in a self-possessed, low tone, which did not tremble, some stories of "when grandfather was a little boy."

"I don't want her to grow up without knowing something of my father," she explained to the doctor.

Her godfather laid a hand on her arm. "Don't keep the tears back so, Lydia," he implored.

She gave him as great a shock of surprise as her mother had done.

"If I could cry," she said quietly, "it would be because I feel so little sorrow. I do not miss my father at all—or hardly at all."

The doctor caught at his chair and stared.

"How should I?" she went on drearily. "I almost never saw him. I never spoke to him about anything that really mattered. I never let him know me—or anything I really felt."

"What are you talking about?" cried the doctor. "You always lived at home."

"I never lived with my father. He was always away in the morning before I was up. I was away, or busy, in the evening when he was there. On Sundays he never went to church as Mother and I did—I suppose now because he had some other religion of his own. But if he had I never knew what it was—or anything else that was in his mind or heart. It never occurred to me that I could. He tried to love me—I remember so many times now—and that makes me cry!—how he tried to love me! He was so glad to see me when I got home from Europe—but he never knew anything that happened to me. I told you once before that when I had pneumonia and nearly died Mother kept it from him because he was on a big case. It was all like that—always. He never knew."

Dr. Melton broke in, his voice uncertain, his face horrified: "Lydia, I cannot let you go on! you are unfair—you shock me. You are morbid! I knew your father intimately. He loved you beyond expression. He would have done anything for you. But his profession is an exacting one. Put yourself in his place a little. It is all or nothing in the law—as in business."

"When you bring children into the world, you expect to have them cost you some money, don't you? You know you mustn't let them die of starvation. Why oughtn't you to expect to have them cost you thought, and some sharing of your life with them, and some time—real time, not just scraps that you can't use for business?"

As the doctor faced her, open-mouthed and silent, she went on, still dry-eyed, but with a quaver in her voice that was like a sob: "But, oh, the worst of my blame is for myself! I was a blind, selfish, self-centered egotist. I could have changed things if I had only tried harder. I am paying for it now. I am paying for it!"

She took her child up in her arms and bent over the dark silky hair. She whispered, "It's not that I have lost my father. I never had a father—but you!" She put out her hand and pressed the doctor's hard. "And my poor father had no daughter."

She set the child on the floor with a gesture almost violent, and cried out loudly, breaking for the first time her cheerless calm, "And now it is too late!"

Ariadne turned her rosy round face to her mother's, startled, almost frightened. Lydia knelt down and put her arms about the child. She looked solemnly into her godfather's eyes, and, as though she were taking a great and resolute oath, she said, "But it is not too late for Ariadne."



CHAPTER XXVI

A HINT FROM CHILDHOOD

As the spring advanced and Judge Emery's widow recovered a little strength, it became apparent that life in Endbury, with its heartbreaking associations, would be intolerable to her. In anxious family councils many futile plans were suggested, but they were all brushed decisively away by the unexpected arrival from Oregon of the younger son of the family.

One day in May, a throbbingly sunshiny day, full of a fierce hot vigor of vitality, Lydia was with her mother in the Melton's darkened parlor. As so often, the two women had been crying and now sat in a weary lethargy, hand in hand. There came a step on the porch, in the hall, and in the doorway stood a tall stranger. Lydia looked at him blankly, but her mother gave a cry and flung herself into his arms.

"I've come to take you home with me, Momma dear," he said quietly, using the old name for her, which had been banished from the Emery household since Lydia's early childhood. The sound of it went to her heart.

The newcomer smiled at her over his mother's head. It was her father's smile, the quaint, half-wistful, humorous smile, which had seemed so incongruous on the Judge's powerful face. "I'm your brother Harry, little Lyddie," he said, "and I've come to take care of poor Momma."

During all that summer it was a bitter regret to Lydia that she had seen her brother so short a time. He had decreed that the sooner his mother was taken away from Endbury, the better for her, and Mrs. Emery had clung to him, assenting passively to all he said, and peering constantly, with tear-blurred eyes, into his face to see again his astonishing resemblance to his father. They had left the day after his arrival.

He had found time, however, to go out to Bellevue for a brief visit, to see Lydia's home and her little daughter—Paul was away on a business trip—and the half-hour he spent there was one that Lydia never forgot. The tall, sunburned Westerner, with his kind, humorous eyes, his affectionate smile, his quaint, homely phrases, haunted the house for the rest of the summer. The time of his stay had been too breathlessly short for any serious talk. He had looked about at the big, handsome house with a half-mocking awe, inspected the "grounds" with a lively interest in the small horticultural beginnings Lydia had been able to achieve, told her she ought to see his two hundred acres of apple-trees; and for the time that was left before his trolley-car was due he played with his little niece and talked over her head to his sister.

"She's a dandy, Lyddie! She's a jim-dandy of a little girl! She ought to come out and learn to ride straddle with her cousins. I got a boy about her age—say, they'd look fine together! He's a towhead, like all the rest of 'em—like their mother."

For months afterward Lydia could close her eyes and see again the transfigured expression that had come over his face at the mention of his wife. "Talk about luck!" he said, after a moment's pause, "there never was such luck as my getting Annie. Say, I wish you could know her, Lyddie. I tell you what—shoulder to shoulder, every minute, she's stood up to things right there beside me for twelve years—Lord! It don't seem more than six months when I stop to think about it. We had some hard sledding along at the first, but with the two of us pulling together—. She's laughed at sickness and drought and bugs and floods. We're all through that now, we're doing fine; but, honest, it was worth it, to know Annie through and through as I do. There isn't a thing about the business she doesn't know as well as I do, and good reason why, too. We've worked it all out together. We've stuck close, we have. I've helped in the house and with the kids, and she's come right out into the orchards with me. Share and share alike—that's our motto."

He was silent a moment, caressing Ariadne's dark hair gently, and reviewing the past with shining eyes. "Lord! Lord! It's been a good life!" He turned to his sister with a smile. "Well, Lyddie, I expect you know something about it, too. You certainly are fixed fine, and everybody says you've married a splendid fellow."

Lydia leaned forward eagerly, the impulse to unburden herself overwhelming. "Oh, Paul is the best man—" she began, "so true and kind and—and—pure—but Harry, we don't—we can't—his business—" She turned away from her brother's too keen eyes and stared blindly at the wall, conscious of an ache in her heart like a physical hurt.

Later, as they were talking of old memories, of Lydia's childhood, Harry asked suddenly: "How'd you happen to give your little girl such a funny name?"

It was a question that had not been put to Lydia before. Her family had taken for granted that it was a feverish fancy of her sick-bed. She gazed at her brother earnestly, and was about to speak when he looked at his watch and stood up, glancing uneasily down toward the trolley track. It was too late—he would be gone so soon—like something she had dreamed. "Oh, I liked the name," she said vaguely; adding, "Harry! I wish you could stay longer! There's so much I should like to talk over with you. Oh, how I wish you'd never gone away."

"You come out and see us," he urged. "It'd do you good to get away from this old hole-in-the-ground! We live six miles from a neighbor, so you'd have to get along without tea-parties, but I bet Annie and the kids would give you a good time all right."

He kissed Lydia good-by, tossed Ariadne high in the air, and as he hurried down the driveway he called back over his shoulder: "Take good care of my little niece for me! I tell you it's the kids that count the most!" It was a saying that filled ringingly for Lydia the long, hot days of the quiet summer that ensued. As for Ariadne, she did not for months stop talking of "nice, laughy, Unkie Hawy." Her fluency of speech was increasing out of all proportion to her age.

Whatever slow changes might be taking place in Lydia, went on silently and obscurely during that summer; but in the fall a new moral horizon burst upon her with the realization that she was again to become a mother. Another life was to be entrusted to her hands, to hers and Paul's, and with the knowledge came the certainty that she must now begin to take some action to place her outer life more in accord with her new inner self. It would be the worst moral cowardice longer to evade the issue.

Thus bravely did she exhort herself, and, though shrinking with apprehension at the very thought of entering upon a combat, attempted to shame herself into a little courage.

When Paul heard of his wife's hopes, he was enchanted. He cried out jubilantly: "I bet you it'll be a boy this time!" and caught her to him in an embrace of affection so ardent that for a moment she glowed like a bride. She clung to him, happy in the warmth of feeling that, responsive, as always, to his touch, sprang up in her; and when in his good-natured, half-laughing, dictatorial way he made her lie down at once and promise to rest and be quiet, the boyish absurdity of his solicitude was sweet to her.

He disappeared in answer to a telephone call, and she closed her eyes, savoring the pleasure of the little scene. How she needed Paul to reconcile her to life! How kind he really was! How good! His was the clean, honorable affection he had promised her on their wedding day. If she were to have any faith in the novels she read (like most American women of the leisure class, her education after her marriage consisted principally in reading the novels people talked about), if there was any truth in what she read in these stories, she felt she was blest far above most women in that there had come to her since her marriage no revelation of a hidden, unclean side to her husband's nature.

But Lydia had never felt herself closely touched by reading; it all seemed remote from her own life and problems. The sexual questions on which the plots invariably turned, which formed the very core and center of the lives of the various female characters, had, as a matter of fact, according to her honest observation of her acquaintances, a very subordinate place in the average American life about her. The marital unhappiness, estrangement, and fragmentary incompleteness in the circle she knew, over which she had grieved and puzzled, had nothing to do with what novels mean by "unfaithfulness." The women of Endbury, unlike the heroines of fiction, did not fear that their husbands would fall in love with other women. The men of Endbury spent as little time in sentimentalizing over other men's wives as they did over their own.

She often wondered why writers did not treat of the other problems that beset her class—for instance, why it was only women in frontier conditions, like Harry's wife, who could share in their husband's lives; why nobody tried to change things so that they could do more of their part in the work of the world; why they could not have a share in the activities that gave other men, even little boys like Walter, so much closer knowledge of their husbands' characters than they, their wives, had. She had a dim notion, caught from stray indications in the magazines, that writers were considering such questions in books other than novels, but she had no idea how to search them out. The woman's club to which she belonged was occupied with the art of Masaccio, who was, so a visitor from Chicago's aesthetic circles informed them, the "latest thing" in art interests.

She decided to ask Paul if he had heard of such books. She would ask him so many such questions in the new life that was to begin. They had been married more than three years and, so far as their relations to each other went, they were by no means inharmonious; but of the close-knit, deep-rooted intimacy of soul and mind that had been her dream of married life, there had not been even a beginning. Well, she told herself bravely, four years were but a short period in a lifetime. They were both so young yet. They could begin now.

Paul came back from the telephone, note-book in hand, jotting down some figures. He smiled at her over the top of the book, and before he sat down to his desk he covered her carefully with a shawl, stroked her hair, and closed her eyes, saying with an absent tenderness: "There! take a nap, dear, while I finish these notes."

He looked supremely satisfied with himself in the instant before he plunged into his calculations, and Lydia guessed that he was congratulating himself on having remembered her in the midst of absorbing business cares. She lay looking at him as he worked, her mind full of busy thoughts.

Chiefly, as she went over their situation, she felt guilty to think how entirely apart from him all her real life was passed. The doubts, the racking spiritual changes, that had come to her, she had kept all to herself; and yet she could say honestly that her silence had been involuntary, instinctive, she fancied whimsically, like the reticence as to emotions that one keeps in the hurly-burly of a railway station. With tickets to be bought and trunks to be checked and time-tables to be consulted, it is absurd to try to communicate to a busy and preoccupied companion inexplicable qualms of soul-sickness. Any sensible woman—and Lydia, like most American women, had been trained by precept and example to desire above all things to be sensible and not emotionally troublesome to the men of her family—any sensible woman kept her thoughts to herself till the time came when she could talk them over without interfering with the business on hand.

As she lay on the sofa and watched Paul's face sharpen in his concentration, it occurred to her that the point of the whole matter was that for her and Paul the suitable and leisurely time for mutual discussion had never come. That was all! That was the whole trouble! It was not any inherent lack of common feeling between them. Simply, there was always business on hand with which she must not interfere.

Paul lifted his head, his eyes half closed in a narrowed, speculative gaze upon some knotty point in his calculation. This long, sideways look happened to fall upon Lydia, and she turned cold before the profound unconsciousness of her existence in those eyes apparently fixed so piercingly upon her. She had a quick fancy that the blank wall of abstraction at which that vacant stare was directed really and palpably separated her husband from her.

For a moment she wondered if she were growing like the women she had heard her father so unsparingly condemn—silly, childish, egotistic women who could not bear to have their husbands think of anything but themselves, who were jealous of the very business which earned them and their children a living. She acquitted herself of this charge proudly. She did not want all of Paul's time; she wanted only some of it. And then, it was not to have him thinking of her, but with her about the common problems of their life; it was to think with him about the problems of his life; it was to have him help her by his sound, well-balanced, well-trained mind, which, so everyone said, worked such miracles in business; to have him help her through the thicket of confusion into which she was plunged by her inability to accept the plainly-marked road over which all of her world was pressing forward. Perhaps it was all right, she thought, the way Endbury people "did." She asked nothing better than to be convinced that it was; she longed for a satisfying answer. But Paul did not even know she had doubts! How could he, she asked herself, exonerating him from blame. He was away so many hours of the day and days of the year; and when he came home he was so tired!

It was characteristic of her temper that she had learned quickly and without bitterness the lesson every wife must learn, that neither tenderness nor delicate perceptions of shades of feeling can be extorted from a very tired or very preoccupied man. Masculine fatigue brings with it a healthy bluntness as to what is being expected in the way of emotional responsiveness, and men will not allow their sense of duty to spur their jaded affection to the point of exhaustion. Lydia noted this, felt that she could not with any show of reason resent it, since it showed a state of things as hard for Paul as for her; but she could not blind herself to the fact that the inevitable result was Paul's complete ignorance of her real life. She felt herself to be so different from the girl he had married as scarcely to be recognizable, and yet there was no way by which he could have caught even a glimpse of the changes that had made her so. The short periods they spent with each other were necessarily more than filled by consultations about matters of household administration and plans for their social life, and about the way to spend the money that Paul earned. Paul was a very good-natured and consciously indulgent husband, but Lydia seldom emerged from an hour's conversation with him without an uneasy feeling that she was not by any means getting out of the money he furnished her the largest amount possible of what he wanted; and this sensation was scarcely conducive to an expression of what was, after all, on her part nothing but a vague aspiration toward an ideal—an aspiration that came to her clearly only at times of great tranquillity and peace, when her mind was quite at rest.

She was going around and around the treadmill of her familiar perplexities when a trifling incident, so small, so dependent on its framing of situation, accent, expression and gesture as scarcely to be recordable, gave her a sudden glimpse of quite another side to the matter. She was shocked into realizing that just as their way of life hid from Paul what was going on in her mind, so he also, in all probability, was rapidly changing without her knowledge.

Paul finished his figuring, pushed the papers to one side with a sigh of fatigue, and turned his eyes thoughtfully on his wife. "That's very good news of yours, Lydia dear, about the expected son and heir. But it's rather a pity it didn't come last winter, isn't it?"

"How so?" she asked.

"Why, you had to be out of things on account of being in mourning, anyhow. If this had happened the year your father died, you could have killed two birds with one stone, don't you see?"

Lydia's perception of a thousand reasonable explanations and excuses for this speech was so quick that it was upon her almost before she was aware of her resentment. She hurried to shut the door on a blighting new vision of her husband, by telling herself loudly that it was to be expected Paul should feel so; but, rapid as her loyal, wifely movement had been, she had felt a gust of hot revulsion against something in her husband which her affection for him forbade her to name.

She could not put out of her mind, his look, his accent, his air of taking for granted that the speech was a natural one. The knowledge that Marietta would be too bewildered by her dwelling on the incident even to laugh at her, did not avail to free her of the heavy doubts that filled her. Was she mistaken in feeling that it indicated an alarming increase of materialism in Paul? She was really too fanciful, she told herself many times a day, surprised to find herself going over it again. Was it a mere chance remark—a little stone in the garden path—or was it the first visible outcropping of a stratum of unconquerable granite which grimly underlay all the flower beds of his good nature?

The final impression on her mind was of a new motive for coming to a better, closer understanding with Paul about the fundamentals of their life. It had not occurred to her before, in spite of all her struggles "to be good," as she put it to herself with her childlike naivete, that Paul might be needing her as much as she needed him! Spurred on by this new reason for breaking through the impalpable wall that separated their inner lives, she resolved that she would no longer let herself be dominated by the inconsequent multiplicity of the trifling incidents that filled their days.

If she could only get close to Paul she was sure that all would be well. She made herself hope, with a brave belittling of the tangle that baffled her, that perhaps just one long, serious talk with Paul would be all that was needed. If she could just make Paul see what she saw, he could tell her how to set to work to remedy things. Paul was so clever. Paul was always so kind—when he saw!

She began watching for a favorable opportunity for this long, serious talk, and as day after day fled past with only a glimpse of Paul desperately in a hurry in the morning and desperately tired at night, she was aware that her idea of the shape their life was taking had not exaggerated the extent of the broad flood of trivialities that separated them. Although the light laugh of her girlhood was rarer than before her marriage, life had not proved it to be the result of mere animal spirits. She still saw a great deal to laugh at, though sometimes it was tremulous laughter, carrying her to the edge of tears. And she often laughed to herself during these days at the absurd incongruity of what her heart was swelling to utter and the occasions on which she would have to speak.

'Stashie was away, tending her aunt who was ill, away for an indefinite period, for Patsy's steady wages quite sufficed to keep his cousin at home to care for his grandmother. Lydia sometimes feared the satisfaction she took in Patsy's exemplary career was tinctured with vainglory for her own share in it, but, if so, she was punished for it now, since it was his very prosperity that took away from her the only steady domestic help she had ever been able to keep. She had now only a cook, a slatternly negress, with a gift for frying chicken and making beaten biscuit, and a total incapacity to conceive of any other activity as possible for her. Lydia had telephoned to the two employment agencies in Endbury and had been informed, by no means for the first time, that the supply of girls willing to work in the suburbs had entirely given out. For the time being there was simply not one to be had, so for the next few days Lydia, as well as Paul, was more than usually occupied; but her fixed intention to "talk things over with him" was not shaken. And yet—day after day went by with the routine unvaried—there was no time in the morning; in the evening Paul was too tired, and on Sundays there was always "Company," it being practically their only time for daylight entertainment. Often Paul brought a business associate home for dinner; his family or hers came in; there were always callers in the afternoon; and they were usually invited out to supper or had guests themselves. It was the busiest day of the week.

Ever since her father's death she had been reviving in her mind, shocked to find them so few, her positive, personal recollections of him, and one of them now came back to her with a symbolic meaning. It had been a not uncommon occurrence in her childhood—a school picnic in the Black Rock woods; but this one stood out from all the others because, by what freak of chance she never knew, her father had gone with her instead of her mother. How proud she had been to have him there! How eagerly she had done the honors of the "entertainment"! How anxiously she had hoped that he would be pleased with the recitations, the songs, the May-day dance!

One of the events of the day was to be the recitation of a fairy poem by a boy in one of the upper grades. He was to step out of the bushes in the character of a Brownie. The child had but just thrust his head through the leaves and begun, "I come to tell ye of a world ye mortals wot not of," when a terrific clap of thunder overhead, followed by lightning, and rain in torrents, broke up the picnic and sent everyone flying for shelter to a near-by barn. Lydia had been very much afraid of thunderstorms, and she could still remember how, through all her confusion and terror, she had admired the fixity of purpose of the little Brownie, piteous in his drenched fairy costume, gasping out, as they ran along: "I come to tell ye—I come to tell ye, mortals—" to his scurrying audience.

When they reached the barn and were huddled in the hay, wet and forlorn, and deafened by the peals of thunder, the determined little boy had stood up on a farm wagon on the barn floor, and the instant the storm abated began again with his insistent tidings of a world they wot not of. With her father's death fresh in her mind, Lydia could not without a throb of pain recall his rare outburst of hearty laughter at the child's perseverance. "I bet on that kid!" he had cried out, applauding vigorously at the end. "Who is he?"

"Paul Hollister," she had told him, proud to know the bigger children. "He's a very especial friend of mine."

"Well, you can bet he'll get on," her father had assured her.

The opening of the Brownie's speech had come to be one of the humorous catchwords of the Emery household, to express firmness of purpose, and it was now with a mixture of laughter and tears that Lydia recalled the scene—the dusky interior of the barn, the sweet, strong scent of the hay, the absurd little figure grimacing and squeaking on the farm wagon, and her big, little-known, all-powerful father, one strong arm around her, protecting her from all she feared, as nothing in the world could protect her now.

She was grown up now, and must learn how to protect her own children against dangers less obvious than thunderstorms. It was her turn now to insist on making herself heard above uproar and confusion. Her little Brownie playmate shamed her into action. She would not wait for a pause in the clatter of small events about Paul and herself; she would raise her voice and shout to him, if necessary, overcoming the shy reluctance of the spirit to speak aloud of its life.



CHAPTER XXVII

LYDIA REACHES HER GOAL AND HAS HER TALK WITH HER HUSBAND

Paul was still asleep when Lydia opened her eyes one morning and said to herself with a little laugh, but quite resolutely: "I come to tell ye of a world ye mortals wot not of."

As she dressed noiselessly, she fortified herself with the thought that she had, in her nervousness, greatly overestimated the seriousness of her undertaking. There was nothing so formidable in what she meant to do, after all. She only wished to talk reasonably with her husband about how to avoid having their life degenerate into a mere campaign for material advancement. She did not use this phrase in her thoughts about the matter. She thought more deeply, and perhaps more clearly, than during her confused girlhood, but she had no learned or dignified expressions for the new ideas dawning in her. As she coiled her dark hair above her face, rather pale these days, like a white flower instead of the glowing rose it had been, she said to herself, like a child: "Now, I mustn't get excited. I must remember that all I want is a chance for all of us, Paul and the children and me, to grow up as good as we can, and loving one another the most for the nicest things in us and not because we're handy stepping-stones to help one another get on. And we can't do that if we don't really put our minds to it and make that the thing we're trying hardest to do. The other things—the parties and making money and dressing better than we can really afford to—they're only all right if they don't get to seeming the things to look out for first. We must find out how to keep them second."

A golden shaft of winter sunshine fell on Paul's face. He opened his eyes and yawned, smiling good-naturedly at his wife. Lydia summoned her courage and fairly ran to the bed, sitting down by him and taking his strong hand in hers.

"Oh, you india-rubber ball!" he cried in humorous despair at her. "Don't you know a woman with your expectations oughtn't to go hurling herself around that way?"

"I know—I'm too eager always," she apologized. "But, Paul, I've been waiting for a nice quiet time to have a long talk with you about something that's troubling me, and I just decided I wouldn't wait another minute."

Paul patted her cheek. He was feeling very much refreshed by his night's sleep. He smiled at his young wife again. "Why, fire away, Lydia dear. I'm no ogre. You don't have to wait till I'm in a good temper, do you? What is it? More money?"

"Oh, no, no!" She repudiated the idea so hotly that he laughed, "Well, you can't scare me with anything else. What's up?"

Lydia hesitated, distracted, now that her chance had come, with the desire to speak clearly. "Paul dear, it's very serious, and I want you to take it seriously. It may take a great effort to change things, too. I'm very unhappy about the way we are—"

A wail from Ariadne's room gave warning that the child had wakened, as she not infrequently did, terrified by a bad dream. Lydia fled in to comfort her, and later, when she came back, leading the droll little figure in its pink sleeping-drawers, Paul was dressing with his usual careful haste. He stopped an instant to laugh at Ariadne's face of determined woe and tossed her up until an unwilling smile broke through her pouting gloom. Then he turned to Lydia, as to another child, and rubbed his cheek on hers with a boyish gesture. "Now, you other little forlornity, what's the matter with you?"

Lydia warmed, as always, at the tenderness of his tone, though she noticed with an inward laugh that he continued buttoning his vest as he caressed her and that his eyes wandered to the clock with a wary alertness. "Perhaps you'd better wait and tell me at the table," he went on briskly. "I'm all ready to go down." He pulled his coat on with his astonishing quickness, and ran downstairs.