Lydia put Ariadne into her own bed, telling the docile little thing to stay there till Mother came back for her, and followed Paul, huddling together the remnants of her resolution which looked very wan in the morning light. Breakfast was not ready; the table was not even set, and when she went out into the kitchen she was met by a heavy-eyed cook, moving futilely about among dirty pots and pans and murmuring something about a headache. Lydia could not stop then to investigate further, but, hurrying about, managed to get a breakfast ready for Paul before his first interest in the morning paper had evaporated enough to make him impatient of the delay.

He fell to with a hearty appetite as soon as the food was set before him, not noticing for several moments that Lydia's breakfast was not yet ready. When he did so, he spoke with a solicitous sharpness: "Lydia, you need a guardian! You ought to eat as a matter of duty! I bet half your queer notions come from your just pecking around at any old thing when I'm not here to keep track of you."

He poured out another cup of coffee for himself as he spoke.

"Yes, dear; I know, I do. I will," Lydia assured him, with her quick acquiescence to his wishes. "But this morning Mary is sick, or something, and I got yours first."

Paul spoke briefly, with his mouth full of toast: "If you were more regular in the way you run the house, and insisted on never varying the—"

"But I was afraid you would be late," said Lydia. It was the daily terror of her life.

"I am late now," he told her, with his good-humored insistence on facts. "I've missed the 7:40, and I've just time to catch the next one if I hurry. Do you happen to know, dear, where I put that catalogue from Elberstrom and Company? The big red book with the picture of a dynamo on the cover. I was looking over it last night, and Heaven knows where I may have dropped it."

The opinion as to the proper answer to a speech like this was one of the sharply marked lines of divergence between Madeleine Lowder and her brother's wife. "Soak him one when you get a chance, Lydia," she was wont to urge facetiously, and her advice in the present case would unhesitatingly have been to answer as acrimoniously as possible that if he were more regular in the way he handled such things his wife would have to spend less time ransacking the house looking for them. But in spite of such practical and experienced counsel, Lydia was scarcely conscious of refraining from the entirely justifiable and entirely futile customary recriminations, and she was as unaware as Paul of the vast amount of embittering domestic friction which was spared them by her silence. She had some great natural advantages for the task of creating a better domestic life at which she was now so eagerly setting herself, and one of them was this incapacity to resent petty injustices done to herself. She was handicapped in any effort by her utter lack of intellectual training and by a natural tendency to mental confusion, but her lack of small vanities not only spared her untold suffering, but added much to her singleness of aim.

She now went about searching for the catalogue, finally finding it in the library under the couch. When she came back to the dining-room she saw Paul standing up by the table, wiping his mouth. Evidently he was ready to start. How absurd she had been to think of talking seriously to him in the morning!

"Mary brought your breakfast in," he said nodding toward an untidy tray. "I hate to seem to be finding fault all the time, but really her breath was enough to set the house on fire! Can't you keep her down to moderate drinking?"

"I'll try," said Lydia.

Paul took the catalogue from her hand and reached for his hat. They were in the hall now. "Good-by, Honey," he said, kissing her hastily and darting out of the house.

Lydia had but just turned back to the dining-room when he opened the door and came in again, bringing a gust of fresh winter air with him. "Say, dear, you forgot about something you wanted to tell me about. I've got eight minutes before the trolley, so now's your chance. What is it? Something about the plumbing?"

In the dusky hall Lydia faced him for a moment in silence, with so singular an expression on her face that he looked apprehensive of some sort of scene. Then she broke out into breathless, quavering laughter, whose uncertainty did not prevent Paul from great relief at her apparent change of mood. "Never mind," she said, leaning against the newel-post, "I'll tell you—I'll tell you some other time."

He kissed her again, and she felt that it was with a greater tenderness now that he no longer feared a possibly disagreeable communication from her.

After he had gone, she thought loyally, putting things in the order of importance she had been taught all her life, "Well, it is hard for him to have perplexities at home and not to be able to give the freshest and best of himself to business." It was not until later, as she was dressing Ariadne, that she swung slowly back to her new doubt of that view of the problem.

Ariadne was in one of her most talkative moods, and was describing at great length the dream that had frightened her so. There was a hen with six little chickens, she told her mother, and one of them was as big—as big—

"Yes, dear; and what did the big little chicken do?" Lydia laced up the little shoes, on her knees before the small figure, her mind whirling. "That was just the trouble, she couldn't make it seem right any more, that Paul's best and freshest should all go to making money and none to a consideration of why he wished to make it."

"Yes, Ariadne, and it flew over the house, and then?"

She began buttoning the child's dress, and lost herself in ecstasy over the wisps of soft curls at the back of the rosy neck. She dropped a sudden kiss on the spot, in the midst of Ariadne's narrative, and the child squealed in delighted surprise. Lydia was carried away by one of her own childlike impulses of gayety, and burrowed bear-like, growling savagely, in the soft flesh. Ariadne doubled up, shrieking with laughter, the irresistible laughter of childhood. Lydia laughed in response, and the two were off for one of their rollicking frolics. They were like a couple of kittens together. Finally, "Come, dear; we must get our breakfasts," said Lydia, leading along the little girl, still flushed and smiling from her play.

Her passion for the child grew with Ariadne's growth, and there were times when she was tempted to agree in the unspoken axiom of those about her, that all she needed was enough children to fill her heart and hands too full for thought; but sometimes at night, when Paul was away and she had the little crib moved close to her bed, very different ideas came to her in the silent hours when she lay listening to the child's quick, regular breathing. At such times, when her mind grew very clear in the long pause between the hurry of one day and the next, she had rather a sort of horror in bringing any more lives into a world which she could do so little to make ready for them. Ariadne was here, and, oh! She must do something to make it better for her! Her desire that Ariadne should find it easier than she to know how to live well, rose to a fervor that was a prayer emanating from all her being. Perhaps she was not clever or strong enough to know how to make her own life and Paul's anything but a dreary struggle to get ahead of other people, but somehow—somehow, Ariadne must have a better chance.

Something of all this came to her mind in the reaction from her frolic, as she established the child in her high-chair and sat down to her own cold breakfast; but she soon fell, instead, to pondering the question of Mary in the kitchen. She had not now that terror of a violent scene which had embittered the first year of her housekeeping, but she felt a qualm of revulsion from the dirty negress who, as she entered the kitchen, turned to face her with insolent eyes. It seemed a plague-spot in her life that in the center of her home, otherwise so carefully guarded, there should be this presence, come from she shuddered to think what evil haunts of that part of Endbury known as the "Black Hole." She thought, as so many women have thought, that there must be something wrong in a system that made her husband spend all his strength laboring to make money so much of which was paid, in one form or another, to this black incubus. She thought, as so many other women have thought, that there must be something wrong with a system of life that meant that, with rare exceptions, such help was all that could be coaxed into doing housework; but Lydia, unlike the other women she knew, did not—could not—stop at the realization that something was wrong. Some irresistible impulse moved her to try at least to set it right.

On this occasion, however, as she faced the concrete result of the system, she was too languid, and felt too acutely the need for sparing her strength, to do more than tell her cook briefly that if she did not stop drinking she would be dismissed. Mary made no reply, looking down at her torn apron, her face heavy and sullen. She prepared some sort of luncheon, however, and by night had recovered enough so that with Lydia's help the dinner was eatable.

Paul was late to dinner, and when he sat down heavily at the table Lydia's heart failed her at the sight of his face, fairly haggard with fatigue. She kept Ariadne quiet, the child having already learned that when Daddy came home from the city there must be no more noisy play; and she served Paul with a quickness that outstripped words. She longed unspeakably to put on one side forever all her vexing questions and simply to cherish and care for her husband physically. He had so much to burden him already—all he could carry. But she had been so long bringing herself to the point of resolution in the matter, she had so firmly convinced herself that her duty lay along that dark and obscure path, that she clung to her purpose.

After dinner, when she came downstairs from putting Ariadne to bed, she found him already bent over the writing-table, covering a sheet of paper with figures. "You remember, Paul, I have something to talk over with you," she began, her mouth twitching in a nervous smile.

He pushed the papers aside, and looked up at her with a weary tenderness. "Oh, yes; I do remember. We might as well have it over now, I suppose. Wait a minute, though." He went to the couch, piled the pillows at one end, and lay down, his hands clasped under his head. "I might as well rest myself while we talk, mightn't I?"

"Oh, yes, yes, poor dear!" cried Lydia remorsefully. "I wish I didn't have to bother you!"

"I wish so, too," he said whimsically. "Sure it's nothing you can't settle yourself?" He closed his eyes and yawned.

"I don't want to settle it myself!" cried Lydia with a rush, seeing an opening ready-made. "That's the point. I want you to be in it! I want you to help me! Paul, I'm sure there's something the matter with the way we live—I don't like it! I don't see that it helps us a bit—or anyone else—you're just killing yourself to make money that goes to get us things we don't need nearly as much as we need more of each other! We're not getting a bit nearer to each other—actually further away, for we're both getting different from what we were without the other's knowing how! And we're not getting nicer—and what's the use of living if we don't do that? We're just getting more and more set on scrambling along ahead of other people. And we're not even having a good time out of it! And here is Ariadne—and another one coming—and we've nothing to give them but just this—this—this—"

She had poured out her accumulated, pent-up convictions with passion, feeling an immense relief that she had at last expressed herself—that at last she had made a breach in the wall that separated her from Paul. At the end, as she hesitated for a phrase to sum up her indictment of their life, her eyes fell on Paul's face. Its expression turned her cold. She stopped short. He did not open his eyes, and the ensuing silence was filled with his regular, heavy breathing. He had fallen asleep.

Lydia folded her hands in her lap and sat looking at him intently. In the tumult of her emotions there was neither bitterness nor resentment. But a cloud had passed between her and the sun. She sat there a long time, her face very pale and grave. After a time she laid her hand on her husband's shoulder. She felt an intolerable need to feel him at least physically near.

The telephone bell rang distinctly in the hall. Paul bounded to his feet, wide awake.

"I bet that's the Washburn superintendent!" he cried. "He said they might call me up here if they came to a decision." He had apparently forgotten Lydia's presence, or else the fact that she knew nothing of his affairs. He disappeared into the hall, his long, springy, active step resounding quickly as he hurried to the instrument. Lydia heard his voice, decisive, masterful, quiet, evidently dictating terms of some bargain that had been hanging in the balance. When he came back, his head was up, like a conqueror's. "I've got their contract!" he told her, and then, snatching her up, he whirled her about, shouting out a "yip! yip! yip!" of triumph.

In spite of herself Lydia's chin began to tremble. She felt a stinging in her eyes. Paul saw these signs of emotion and was conscience-stricken. "Oh, I'm a black-hearted monster!" he cried, in burlesque contrition. "I must have dropped off just as you began your spiel. But, Lydia, if you'd taken that West Virginia trip, you'd go to sleep if the Angel Gabriel were blowing his horn! I was gone three days, you know, and, honest, I didn't have three hours' consecutive sleep! Don't be too mad at me. Start over again. I'll listen to every word, honest to gracious I will. I feel as waked up as a fighting cock, anyhow, by this Washburn business! To think I've pulled that off at last!"

"I'm not mad at you, Paul," said Lydia, trying to speak steadily, and holding with desperate resolution to her purpose of communicating with her husband. "I'm mad at the conditions that made you so sleepy you couldn't keep awake! All I had to say is that I don't like our way of life—I don't see that it's making us any better, and I want Ariadne—I want our children to have a better one. I want you to help me make it so."

Paul stared at her, stupefied by this attack on axioms. "Good gracious, my dear! What are you talking about? 'Our way of life!' What do you mean? There's nothing peculiar about the way we live. Our life is just like everybody else's."

Lydia burned with impatience at the appearance of this argument, beyond which she had never been able to induce her mother or Marietta to advance a step. She cried out passionately: "What if it is! If it's not the right kind of life, what difference does it make if everybody's life is like it!"

The idea which her excitement instantly suggested to Paul was reassuring. Before Ariadne came, he remembered, Lydia had had queer spells of nervous tension. He patted her on the shoulder and spoke in the tone used to soothe a nervous horse. "There, Lydia! There, dear! Don't get so wrought up! Remember you're not yourself. You do too much thinking. Come, now, just curl up here and put your head on my—"

Lydia feared greatly the relaxing influence of his caressing touch. If once he put forth his personal magnetism, it would be so hard to go on. She drew away gently. "Can anybody do too much thinking, Paul? The trouble must be that I'm not thinking right. And, oh, I want to, so! Please help me! Everybody says you have such a wonderful head for organization and for science—if I were a dynamo that wasn't working, you could set me right!"

Paul laughed, and made another attempt to divert her. "I couldn't if the dynamo looked as pretty and kissable as you do!" He was paying very little attention to what she said. He was only uncomfortable and uneasy to see her so white and trembling. He wished he had proposed taking her out for the evening. She had been having too dull a time. He ought to see that she got more amusement. They said that comic opera now running in town was very funny.

"Paul, listen to me!" she was crying desperately as these thoughts went through his head. "Listen to me, and look honestly at the way we've been living since we were married, and you must see that something's all wrong. I never see you—never, never, do you realize that? except when you're in a raging hurry in the morning or tired to death at night, and when I'm just as tired as you are, so all we can do is to go to bed so we can get up in the morning and begin it all over again. Or else we tire ourselves out one degree more by entertaining people we don't really like—or rather people about whose real selves we don't know enough to know whether we like them or not—we have them because they're influential, or because everybody else entertains them, or because they can help us to get on—or can be smoothed over so they won't hinder our getting on. And there's no prospect of doing anything different from this all the days of our life—"

"But, look-y here, Lydia, that's the way things are in this world! The men have to go away the first thing in the morning—and all the rest of what you say! I can't help it! What do you come to me about it for? You might as well break out crying because I can't give you eyes in the back of your head. That's the way things are!"

Lydia made a violent gesture of unbelief. "That's what everybody's been telling me all my life—but now I'm a grown woman, with eyes to see, and something inside me that won't let me say I see what I don't—and I don't see that! I don't believe it has to be so. I can't believe it!"

Paul laughed a little impatiently, irritated and uneasy, as he always was, at any attempt to examine too closely the foundations of existing ideas. "Why, Lydia, what's the matter with you? You sound as though you'd been reading some fool socialist literature or something."

"You know I don't read anything, Paul. I never hear about anything but novels. I never have time for anything else, and very likely I couldn't understand it if I read it, not having any education. That's one thing I want you to help me with. All I want is a chance for us to live together a little more, to have a few more thoughts in common, and, oh! to be trying to be making something better out of ourselves for our children's sake. I can't see that we're learning to be anything but—you, to be an efficient machine for making money, I to think of how to entertain as though we had more money than we really have. I don't seem really to know you or live with you any more than if we were two guests stopping at the same hotel. If socialists are trying to fix things better, why shouldn't we have time—both of us—to read their books; and you could help me know what they mean?"

Paul laughed again, a scornful, hateful laugh, which brought the color up to Lydia's pale face like a blow. "I gather, then, Lydia, that what you're asking me to do is to neglect my business in order to read socialist literature with you?"

His wife's rare resentment rose. She spoke with dignity: "I begged you to be serious, Paul, and to try to understand what I mean, although I'm so fumbling, and say it so badly. As for its being impossible to change things, I've heard you say a great many times that there are no conditions that can't be changed if people would really try—"

"Good heavens! I said that of business conditions!" shouted Paul, outraged at being so misquoted.

"Well, if it's true of them—No; I feel that things are the way they are because we don't really care enough to have them some other way. If you really cared as much about sharing a part of your life with me—really sharing—as you do about getting the Washburn contract—"

Her indignant and angry tone, so entirely unusual, moved Paul, more than her words, to shocked protest. He looked deeply wounded, and his accent was that of a man righteously aggrieved. "Lydia, I lay most of this absurd outbreak to your nervous condition, and so I can't blame you for it. But I can't help pointing out to you that it is entirely uncalled for. There are few women who have a husband as absolutely devoted as yours. You grumble about my not sharing my life with you—why, I give it to you entire!" His astonished bitterness grew as he voiced it. "What am I working so hard for if not to provide for you and our child—our children! Good Heavens! What more can I do for you than to keep my nose on the grindstone every minute. There are limits to even a husband's time and endurance and capacity for work."

Lydia heard a frightened roaring in her ears at this unexpected turn to the conversation. Paul had never spoken so to her before. This was a very different tone from his irritation over defective housekeeping. She was as horrified as he over the picture that he held up with such apparently justified indignation, the picture of her as a querulous and ungrateful wife. Why, Paul was looking at her as though he hated her! For the first time in her married life, she conceived the possibility that she and Paul might quarrel, really seriously quarrel, about fundamental things. The idea terrified her beyond words. Her mind, undisciplined and never very clear, became quite confused, and only her long preparation and expectation of this talk enabled her to keep on at all, although now she could but falter ahead blindly. "Why, Paul dear—don't look at me so! I never dreamed of blaming you for it! It's just because I want things better for you that I'm so anxious to—"

"You haven't noticed me complaining any, have you?" put in Paul grimly, still looking at her coldly.

"—It's because I can't bear to see you work so hard to get me things I'd ever so much rather go without than have you grow so you can't see anything but business—it seems all twisted! I'd rather you'd pay an assistant to go off on these out-of-town trips, and we'd get along on less money—live in a smaller house, and not entertain."

"Oh, Lydia, you talk like a child! How can I talk business with you when you have such crazy, impractical ideas? It's not just the money an assistant would cost! Either he'd not be so good as I, and then I'd lose my reputation for efficiency and my chance for promotion, or else he would be as good and he'd get the job permanently and divide the field with me. A man has to look a long way ahead in business!"

"But, Paul, what if he did divide the field with you? What if you don't get ahead of everybody else, if you'd have time and strength to think of other things more—you said the other day that you weren't sleeping well any more, and you're losing your taste for books and music and outdoors—why, I'd rather live in four rooms right over your office, so that you wouldn't have that hour lost going and coming—"

Paul broke in with a curt scorn: "Oh, Lydia! What nonsense! Why don't you propose living in a tent, to save rent?"

"Why I would—I would in a minute if I thought it would make things any better!" Lydia cried with a desperate simplicity.

At this crowning absurdity, Paul began to laugh, his ill-humor actually swept away by his amusement at Lydia's preposterous fancies. It was too foolish to try to reason seriously with her. He put his hand on her shining dark hair, ruffling it up like a teasing boy. "I guess you'd better leave the economic status of society alone, Lydia. You might break something if you go charging around it so fierce."

A call came from the darkness of the hall: "Mis' Hollister!"

"It's Mary," said Paul; "probably you forgot to give her any instructions about breakfast, in your anxiety about the future of the world. If you can calm down enough for such prosaic details, do tell her for the Lord's sake not to put so much salt in the oatmeal as there was this morning."

Lydia found the negress with her wraps on, glooming darkly, "Mis' Hollister, I'm gwine to leave," she announced briefly.

Lydia felt for a chair. Mary had promised faithfully to stay through the winter, until after her confinement. "What's the matter, Mary?"

"I cyant stay in no house wheah de lady says I drinks."

"You will stay until—until I am able to be about, won't you?"

"My things is gone aready," said Mary, moving heavily toward the door, "and I'm gwine now." As she disappeared, she remarked casually, "I didn't have no time to wash the supper dishes. Good-by."

"What's the matter with Mary?" called Paul.

Lydia went back to him, trying to smile. "She's gone—left," she announced.

Paul opened his eyes with a look of keen annoyance. "You can't break in a new cook now!" he said. "She can't go now!"

"She's gone," repeated Lydia wearily. "I don't know how anybody could make her stay."

Paul got up from the couch with his lips closed tightly together, and, sitting down in a straight chair, took Lydia on his knee as though she were a child. "Now, see here, my wife, you mustn't get your feelings hurt if I do some plain talking for a minute. You've been telling me what you think about things, and now it's my turn. And what I think is that if my dear young wife would spend more time looking after her own business she'd have fewer complaints to make about my doing the same. The thing for you to do is to accept conditions as they are and do your best in them—and, really, Lydia, make your best a little better."

Lydia was on the point of nervous tears from sheer fatigue, but she clung to her point with a tenacity which in so yielding a nature was profoundly eloquent. "But, Paul, if everybody had always settled down and accepted conditions, and never tried to make them better—"

"There's a difference between conditions that have to be accepted and those that can be changed," said Paul sententiously.

Lydia tore herself away from him and stood up, trembling with excitement. She felt that they had stumbled upon the very root of the matter. "But who's to decide which our conditions are?"

Paul caught at her, laughing. "I am, of course, you firebrand! Didn't you promise to honor and obey?" He went on with more seriousness, a tender, impatient, condescending seriousness: "Now, Lydia, just stop and think! Do you, can you, consider this a good time for you to try to settle the affairs of the universe—still all upset about your father's death, and goodness knows what crazy ideas it started in your head—and with an addition to the family expected! And the cook just left!"

"But that's the way things always are!" she protested. "That's life. There's never a time when something important hasn't just happened or isn't just going to happen, you have to go right ahead, or you never—why, Paul, I've waited for two years for a really good chance for this talk with you—"

"Thank the Lord!" he ejaculated. "I hope it'll be another two before you treat me to another evening like this. Oh, pshaw, Lydia! You're morbid, moping around the house too much—and your condition and all. Wait till you've got another baby to play with—I don't remember you had any doubts of anything the first six months of Ariadne's life. You ought to have a baby a year to keep you out of mischief! Just you wait till you can entertain and live like folks again. In the meantime you hustle around and keep busy and you won't be so bothered with thinking and worrying."

Unknowingly, they had drawn again near to the heart of their discussion. Unknowingly Lydia stood before the answer from her husband, the final statement that she wished to hear.

"But to hustle and keep busy—that's good only so long as you keep at it. The minute you stop—"

Paul's answer was an epoch in her thought.

"Don't stop!" he cried, surprised at her overlooking so obvious a solution.

At this bullet-like retort, Lydia shivered as though she had been struck. She turned away with a blind impulse for flight. Her gesture brought her husband flying to her. He took her forcibly in his arms. "What the devil—what is the matter now?" he asked, praying for patience. She hung unresponsive in his grasp. "What's the matter?" he repeated.

"You've just told me a horrible thing," she whispered; "that life is so dreadful that the only way we can get through it at all is by never looking at—"

Paul actually shook her in his exasperation. "Gee whiz, Lydia! you're enough to drive a man to drink! I never told you any such melodramatic nonsense. I told you straight horse sense, which is that if you took more interest in your work, in the work that every woman of your class and position has to do, you'd have less time to think foolishness—and your husband would have an easier life."

Her trembling lips opened to speak again, but he closed them with a firm hand. "And now, as your natural guardian, I'm not going to let you say another word about it. You dear little silly! However did you get us so wound up! Blessed if I have any idea what it's all been about!"

He was determined to end the discussion. He was relieved beyond expression that he had been able to get through it without saying anything unkind to his wife. He never meant to do that. He now went on, shaking a finger at her:

"You listen to me, Lydia-Emery-that-was! Do you know what we are going to do? We're going out into that howling desolation that Mary has probably left in the kitchen, and we're going to see if we can find a couple of clean glasses, and we're going to have a glass of beer apiece and a ham sandwich and a piece of the pie that's left over from dinner. You don't know what's the matter with you, but I do! You're starved! You're as hungry as you can be, aren't you now?"

Lydia had sunk into a chair during this speech and was now regarding him fixedly, her hands clasped between her knees. At his final appeal to her, she closed her eyes. "Yes," she said with a long breath; "yes, I am."



CHAPTER XXVIII

"THE AMERICAN MAN"

A ripple from the surging wave of culture which, for some years, had been sweeping over the women's clubs of the Middle West, began to agitate the extremely stationary waters of Endbury social life. The Women's Literary Club felt that, as the long-established intellectual authority of the town, it should somehow join in the new movement. The organization of this club dated back to a period now comparatively remote. Mrs. Emery, who had been a charter member, had never been more genuinely puzzled by Dr. Melton's eccentricities than when he had received with a yell of laughter her announcement that she had just helped to form a "literary club," which would be the "most exclusive social organization" in Endbury. It had lived up to this expectation. To belong to it meant much, and both Paul and Flora Burgess had been gratified when, on her mother's resignation, Lydia had been elected to the vacant place.

This close corporation, composed of ladies in the very inner circle, felt keenly the stimulating consciousness of its importance in the higher life of the town, and had too much civic pride to allow Endbury to lag behind the other towns in Ohio. Columbus women, owing to the large German population of the city, were getting a reputation for being musical; Cincinnati had always been artistic; Toledo had literary aspirations; Cleveland went in for civic improvement. The leading spirits of the Woman's Literary Club of Endbury cast about for some other sphere of interest to annex as their very own property.

They were hesitating whether to undertake a campaign of municipal house-cleaning, or to devote themselves to the study of the sonnet form in English verse, when an unusual opportunity for distinction opened before them. The daughter of the club's president was married to a professor in the State University of Michigan, and on one of her visits home she suggested that her mother's club invite to address it the Alliance Francaise lecturer of that year. He had to come out to Ann Arbor, anyhow—Ann Arbor was not very far from Endbury—not far, that is, as compared with the journey the lecturer would have made from Columbia and Harvard to "Michigan State." One of the club husbands was a railroad man and, maybe, could give them transportation. Frenchmen were always anxious to make all the money they could—she was sure that M. Buisine could be induced to come for a not extravagant honorarium. Why should not Endbury go in for cosmopolitanism? That certainly would be something new in Ohio.

And so it was arranged for an afternoon for the first week in December, a very grand "house-darkened-and-candle-lighted performance," as Madeleine Lowder labeled this last degree of Endbury ceremonious elaboration. It was held at the house of Paul's aunt, so that, naturally, Lydia could by no means absent herself. Madeleine came for her, and together they took Ariadne to Marietta's house and left her there for safe-keeping. Lydia was intensely conscious, under her sister's forbearing silence, that Marietta had never been asked to join the Woman's Literary Club. Even the jaunty Madeleine was aware of a tension in the brief conversation over the child's head, and remarked as she and Lydia walked away from the house: "Well, really now, was that the most tactful thing in the world?"

"What else could I do?" asked Lydia, at her wit's end. "I don't dare leave Ariadne with those awful things from the employment agencies, and 'Stashie's not coming back till next week."

"Oh, she's coming again, is she?" commented her companion. "Well, that'll mean lots of fun watching Paul squirm. But don't mind him, Lydia." Madeleine was one of the women who prided herself on her loyal sense of solidarity among her sex. "If he says a word, you poke him one in the eye. Keep her till after your confinement, anyhow. A woman ought to be allowed to run her house without any man butting in. We let them alone; they ought to let us."

There never was a person in the world, Lydia thought, in whom marriage had made less difference than in Paul's sister. She was exactly the same as in her girlhood. Lydia wondered at her with an ever-growing amazement. The enormous significance of the marriage service, the mysteries of the dual existence, her new responsibilities,—they all seemed non-existent. Paul said approvingly that Madeleine knew how to get along with less fuss than any woman he ever saw. Her breezy high spirits were much admired in Endbury, and her good humor and prodigious satisfaction with life were considered very cheerfully infectious.

The two women had reached Madame Hollister's house while Madeleine was expounding her theory of matrimony, and now took their places in the throng of extremely well-dressed women sitting on camp chairs, the rows of which filled the two parlors. The lecturer with the president of the club, occupied a dais at the other end of the room. He was a tall, ugly man, with prominent blue eyes, gray hair upstanding in close-cropped military stiffness, and a two-pronged grizzled beard. He was looking over his audience with a leisurely smiling scrutiny that roused in Lydia a secret resentment.

"He's very distinguished looking, isn't he?" whispered Madeleine. "So different! And cool! I'd like to see Pete Lowder sit up there to be stared at by all this gang of women."

"Oh, he's probably used to it," said her neighbor on the other side. "They say he's spoken before any number of women's clubs. He does two a day sometimes. He's seen lots of American society women before now."

Madeleine stared at him curiously. "I wonder what he thinks of us! I wonder! I'd give anything to know!" she said. She repeated this sentiment in varying forms several times.

Lydia wondered why Madeleine should care so acutely about the opinion of a stranger and a foreigner, and finally, in her naive, straightforward way, she put this question to her. Madeleine was not one of the many who evaded Lydia's questions, or answered them only with a laugh at their oddity. She was very straightforward herself and generally had a very clear idea of what underlay any action or feeling on her part. But this time her usual rough-and-ready methods of analysis seemed at fault.

"Oh, because," she said indefinitely. "Don't you always want to know what men are thinking of you?"

"Men that know something about me, maybe," Lydia amended.

Madeleine laughed. "They're the ones that don't think at all, one way or the other," she reminded her sister-in-law.

The president of the club rose. Her introduction of the speaker was greeted with cordial, muted applause from gloved hands. There was a scraping of chairs, a stir of draperies, and little gusts of delicate perfumes floated out, as the hundred or more women settled themselves at the right angle, all their keen, handsome, nervous faces lifted to the speaker in a pleasant expectancy. Not only were they agreeably aware that they were forming part of one of the most recherche events of Endbury's social life, but they were remembering piquant rumors of M. Buisine's sensational attacks on American materialism. The afternoon promised something more interesting than their usual programme of home-made essays and papers.

Their expectation was not disappointed. In fluent English, apparently smooth with long practice on the same theme, he wove felicitous and forceful elaborations on the proverb relating to people who are absent and the estimation in which they are held by those present. He had seen in America, he said, everything but the American man. He had seen hundreds and thousands of women as well-dressed as Parisiennes (and, as a rule, much more expensively), as self-possessed as English great ladies, as cultivated as Russian princesses, as universally and variously handsome as visions in a painter's dream—("He's not afraid of laying it on thick, is he?" whispered Madeleine with an appreciative laugh)—but, except for a few professors in college, he had seen no men. He had inquired for them everywhere and was told that he did not see them because he was a man of letters. If he had been the inventor of a new variety of railroad brake he would have seen millions. He was told that the men, unlike their wives, had no intellectual interests, had no clubs with any serious purposes, had no artistic aims, had no home life, no knowledge of their children, no interest in education—that, in short, they left the whole business of worthy living to their wives, and devoted themselves exclusively to the wild-beast joys of tearing and rending their business competitors.

He gave many picturesque instances of his contention, he sketched several lively and amusing portraits of the one or two business men he had succeeded in running down; their tongue-tied stupefaction before the ordinary topics of civilization, their scorn of all aesthetic considerations; their incapacity to conceive of an intellectual life as worthy a grown man; the Stone-age simplicity with which they referred everything to savage cunning; their oblivion to any other standard than "success," by which they meant possessing something that they had taken away by force from somebody else.

It was indeed a very entertaining lecture, a most stimulating, interesting experience to the crowd of well-dressed women; although perhaps some of them found it a little long after the dining-room across the hall began to be filled with waiters preparing the refreshments and an appetizing smell of freshly-made coffee filled the air. Still, it was a lecture they had paid for, and it was gratifying to have it so full and conscientiously elaborated.

The ideas promulgated were not startlingly new to them, since they had read magazine articles on "Why American Women Marry Foreigners" and similar analyses of the society in which they lived; but to have it said to one's face, by a living man, a tall, ugly, distinguished foreigner, with the ribbon of the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole,—that brought it home to one! They nodded their beautifully-hatted heads at the truth of his well-chosen, significant anecdotes, they laughed at his sallies, they applauded heartily at the end when the lecturer sat down, the little smile, that Lydia found so teasing, still on his bearded lips.

"Well, he hit things off pretty close, for a foreigner, didn't he?" commented Madeleine cheerfully, gathering her white furs up to the whiter skin of her long, fair throat and preparing for a rush on the refreshment room. "He must have kept his eyes open pretty wide since he landed."

Lydia did not answer, nor did she join in the stampede to the dining-room. She sat still, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, her eyes very bright and dark in her pale face. She was left quite alone in the deserted room. Across the hall was the loud, incessant uproar of feminine conversation released from the imprisonment of an hour's silence. From the scraps of talk that were intelligible, it might have been one of her own receptions. Lydia heard not a mention of the opinions to which they had been listening. Apparently, they were regarded as an entertaining episode in a social afternoon. She listened intently. She looked across at the crowd of her acquaintances as though she were seeing them for the first time. In their midst was the tall foreigner, smiling, talking, bowing, drinking tea. He was being introduced in succession to all of his admiring auditors.

Lydia rose to go and made her way to the dressing-room on the second floor for her wraps. As she returned toward the head of the stairs she saw a man's figure ascending, and stood aside to let him pass. He bowed with an unconscious assurance unlike that of any man Lydia had ever seen, and looked at her pale face and burning eyes with some curiosity. A faint aroma of delicate food and fading flowers and woman's sachet-powder hung about him. It was the lecturer, fresh from his throng of admirers. Lydia's heart leaped to a sudden valiant impulse, astonishing to her usual shyness, and she spoke out boldly, hastily: "Why did you tell us all that about our men? Didn't you think any of us would realize that they are good—our men are—good and pure and kind! Didn't you think we'd know that anything that's the matter with them must be the matter with us, too? They had mothers as well as fathers! It's not fair to blame everything on the men! It's not fair, and it can't be true! We're all in together, men and women. One can't be anything the other isn't!"

She spoke with a swift, grave directness, looking squarely into the man's eyes, for she was as tall as he. They were quite alone in the upper hall. From below came the clatter of the talking, eating women. The Frenchman did not speak for a moment. For the first time the faint smile on his lips died away. He paid to Lydia the tribute of a look as grave as her own. Finally, "Madame, you should be French," he told her.

The remark was so unexpected an answer to her attack that Lydia's eyes wavered. "I mean," he went on in explanation, "that you are acting as my wife would act if she heard the men of her nation abused in their absence. I mean also that I have delivered practically this same lecture over thirty times in America before audiences of women, and you are the first to—Madame, I should like to know your husband!" he exclaimed with another bow.

"My husband is like all other American men," cried Lydia sharply, touched to the quick by this reference. "It is because he is that I—" She broke off with her gesture of passionate unresignation to her lack of fluency. Already the heat of the impulse that had carried her into speech was dying away. She began to hesitate for words.

"Oh, I can't say what I mean—you must know it, anyhow! You blame the fathers for leaving all the bringing-up of the children to their wives, and yet you point out that the sons keep growing up all the time to be—to be—to be all you blame their fathers for being! If we women were half so—fine—as you tell us, why haven't we changed things?"

The foreigner made a vivid, surprised, affirmatory gesture. "Exactly! exactly! exactly, Madame!" he cried. "It is the question I have asked myself a thousand times: Why is it—why is it that women so strong-willed, so unyielding in the seeking what they desire, why is it that apparently they have no influence on the general fabric of the society in—"

"Perhaps it is," said Lydia unsparingly, her latent anger coming to the surface again and furnishing her fluency, "perhaps it is because people who see our faults don't help us to correct them, but flatter us by telling us we haven't any, and all the time think ill of us behind our backs."

The lecturer began to answer with aplomb and an attempt at graceful cynicism: "Ah, Madame, put yourself in my place! I am addressing audiences of women. Would it be tactful to—" but under Lydia's honest eyes he faltered, stopped, flushed darkly under his heavy beard, up over his high, narrow forehead to the roots of his gray hair. He swallowed hard. "Madame," he said, "you have rebuked me—deservedly. I—I demand your pardon."

"Oh, you needn't mind me," said Lydia humbly; "my opinion doesn't amount to anything. I oughtn't to talk, either. I don't do anything different from the rest—the women downstairs, I mean. I can only see there's something wrong—" She found the other's gaze into her troubled eyes so friendly that she was moved to cry out to him, all her hostility gone: "What is the trouble, anyhow?"

The lecturer flushed again, this time touched by her appeal. "I proudly put at your service any reflections I have made—as though you were my daughter. I have a daughter about your age, who is also married—who faces your problems. Madame, you look fatigued—will you not sit down?" He led her to a sofa on one side of the hall and took a seat beside her. "Is not the trouble," he began, "that the women have too much leisure and the men too little—the women too little work, the men too much?"

"Oh, yes, yes, yes!" Lydia's meditations had long ago carried her past that point; she was impatient at his taking time to state it. "But how can we change it?"

"You cannot change it in a day. It has taken many years to grow. It has seemed to me that one way to change it is by using your leisure differently. Even those women who use their leisure for the best self-improvement have not used it well. Many of my countrymen say that the culture of American women is like a child's idea of ornamentation—the hanging on the outside of all odd bits of broken finery. I have not found it always so. I have met many learned women here, many women more cultivated than my own wife. But listen, Madame, to the words of an old man. Culture is dust and ashes if the spiritual foundations of life are not well laid; and, believe me, it takes two, a man and a woman, to lay those foundations. It can not be done alone."

"But how, how—" began Lydia impatiently.

"In the only way that anything can be accomplished in this world, by working! Your women have not worked patiently, resolutely, against the desertion of their men. Worse—they have encouraged it! Have you never heard an American, woman say: 'Oh, I can't bear a man around the house! They are so in the way!' Or, 'I let my husband's business alone. I want him to let—'"

He imitated an accent so familiar to Lydia that she winced. "Oh, don't!" she said. "I see all that."

"You must find few to see with you."

"But how to change it?" She leaned toward him as though he could impart some magic formula to her.

"With the men, work to have them share your problems—work to share theirs. Do not be discouraged by repeated failure. Defeat should not exist for the spirit. And, oh, the true way—you pointed it out in your first words. You have the training of the children. Their ideals are yours to make. A generation is a short—"

His face answered more and more the eager intentness of her own. He raised his hand with a gesture that underlined his next words: "But remember always, always, what Amiel says, that a child will divine what we really worship, and that no teaching will avail with him if we teach in contradiction to what we are."

They were interrupted by a loud hail from the stairs. Madeleine Lowder's handsome head showed through the balustrade, and back of her were other amused faces.

"I started to look you up, Lydia," she said, advancing upon them hilariously, "I thought maybe you weren't feeling well, and then I saw you monopolizing the lion so that everybody was wondering where in the world he was, and you were so wrapped up that you never even noticed me, so I motioned the others to see what a demure little cat of a sister I have."

She stood before them at the end of this facetious explanation, laughing, frank, sure of herself, and as beautiful as a great rosy flower.

"Your sister," said the lecturer incredulously to Lydia.

"My husband's sister," Lydia corrected him, and presented the newcomer in one phrase.

"Isn't she a sly, designing creature, Mr. Buisine?" cried Madeleine, in her usual state of hearty enjoyment of her situation. "You haven't met many as up-and-coming, have you now?"

"I do not know the meaning of your adjective, Mademoiselle; but it is true that I have met few like your brother's wife."

"I'm not Mademoiselle!" Madeleine was greatly amused at the idea.

The lecturer looked at her with a return to his enigmatic smile of the earlier afternoon. "I never saw a person who looked more unmarried than yourself, Mademoiselle," he persisted.

"Oh, we American women know the secret of not looking married," said Madeleine proudly.

"You do indeed," said the Frenchman with the manner of gallantry. "All of you look unmarried."

Lydia rose to go. The lecturer looked at her, his eyes softening, and made a silent gesture of farewell.

He turned back to Madeleine. "But I am," she assured him, pleased and flattered with the centering of their persiflage on herself. She made a gesture toward Lydia, disappearing down the stairs. "I'm as much married as she is!"

M. Buisine continued smiling. "That is quite, quite incredible," he told her.



CHAPTER XXIX

"... in tragic life, God wot, No villain need be. Passions spin the plot."

"Say, Lydia," said Madeleine with her bluff good humor, coming into the house a few days after the French lecture, "say, I'm awfully sorry I told Paul! I never supposed he'd go and get mad. It was just my fool notion of being funny."

Lydia was dusting the balustrade, her back to her visitor. She tingled all through at this speech, and for an instant went on with her work, trying to decide if she should betray the fact that she knew nothing of the incident to which Madeleine's remark seemed to refer, or if she should, as she had done so many times already, conceal under a silence her ignorance of what her husband told other people. She never learned of matters pertaining to Paul's profession except from chance remarks of his business associates. He had not even told her, until questioned, about his great inspiration for rearranging the territory covered in that region by his company; a plan that must have engrossed his thoughts and fired his enthusiasm during months of apparently common life with his wife. And Paul had been genuinely surprised, and a little put out at her desire to know of it.

She decided that she dared not in this instance keep silent. She was too entirely in the dark as to what Madeleine had done. "I don't know what you're talking about, Madeleine," she said, turning around, dust-cloth in hand, trying to speak casually.

Her sister-in-law stared. "Didn't Paul come home and give it to you? He looked as though he were going to."

Lydia's heart sank in a vague premonition of evil. "Paul hasn't said anything to me. Why in the world should he? Is it about 'Stashie? She's been back several days now, but I thought he hadn't noticed her much."

"Well, he hasn't said anything, that's a fact!" exclaimed Madeleine, with the frank implication in her voice that she had not before believed Lydia's statement. "My, no! It's not about 'Stashie. It's about the French lecturer."

Lydia's astonishment at this unexpected answer quite took away her breath. "About the—" she began.

"Why, look-y here, it was this way," explained Madeleine rapidly. "I told you I was only joking. I thought it would be fun to tease Paul about the mash you made on old What's-his-name—about your sitting off on a sofa with him, and being so wrapped up you didn't even notice when the whole gang of us came to look at you—and maybe I stretched it some about how you looked leaning forward and gazing into his eyes—" She broke off with a laugh, cheerfully unable to continue a serious attitude toward life. "Oh, never you mind! It does a married man good to make him jealous once in a while. Keeps 'em from getting too stodgy and husbandy."

"Jealous!" cried Lydia. "Paul jealous! Of me! Never!" Her certainty on the point was instant and fixed.

"Well, you'd ha' thought he was, if you'd seen him. I was jollying him along—we were in the trolley, going to Endbury. I had to take that early car so's to keep a date with Briggs, and, oh, Lydia! that brown suit he's making for me is a dream, simply a dream! He's put a little braid, just the least little bit, along—"

"What did Paul say?"

"Paul? Oh, yes—How'd I get switched off onto Briggs? Why, Paul didn't say anything; that was what made me see he wasn't taking it right. He just sat still and listened and listened till it made me feel foolish. I thought he'd jolly me back, you know. He's usually a great hand for that. And then when I looked at him I saw he looked as black as a thundercloud—that nasty look he has when he's real mad. When we were children and he'd look that way, I'd grab up any old thing and hit him quick, so's to get it in before he hit me. Well, I was awfully sorry, and I said, 'Why, hold on a minute, Paul, let me tell you—' but he said he guessed I'd told him about enough, and before I could open my mouth he dropped off the car. We'd got in as far as Hayes Avenue. I wanted to explain, you know, that the Frenchman was old enough to be our grandfather!"

"When did this happen?"

"Oh, I don't know; three or four days ago—why, Thursday, it must have been, for after I got through with Briggs I went on to that—"

"And this is Monday," said Lydia; "four days."

At the sight of her sister-in-law's troubled eyes, Madeleine was again overcome with facile remorse. She clapped her on the shoulder hearteningly. "I'm awfully sorry, Lyd, but don't you go being afraid of Paul. You're too gentle with him, anyhow. A married woman can't afford to be. You have to keep the men in their places, and you can't do that if you don't knock 'em the side of the head once in so often. It's good for 'em. Honest! And about this, don't you worry your head a minute. Like as not Paul's forgot everything about it. He'd forget anything, you know he would, if an interesting job came up in business. And if he ever does say anything, you just laugh and tell him about old Thingamajig's white hair and pop eyes, and he'll laugh at the joke on himself."

Lydia drew back with a gesture of extreme repugnance. "Don't talk so—as though Paul could be so—so vulgar."

Madeleine laughed. "I guess you won't find a man in this world that isn't 'vulgar' that way."

"Why, I've been married to Paul for years—he wouldn't think I—no matter what you told him, he couldn't conceive of my—"

Mrs. Lowder, as usual, found her brother's wife very diverting. "Of your doing a little hand-holding on the side? Oh, go on! Flirting's no crime! And you did—honest to goodness, you did, turn that old fellow's head. You ought to have seen the way he looked after you."

Lydia cut her off with a sharp "Oh, don't!" She was now sitting, still absently grasping the dust-cloth.

Madeleine stood for a moment looking at her in a meditative silence rather unusual for her. "Lydia, you don't look a bit well," she said kindly. "Are you still bothered with that nausea?" She sat down by her sister-in-law and put her arms around her with an impulse of affectionate pity that almost undid Lydia, always so helplessly responsive to tenderness. "What's the matter, Lyd?" Madeleine went on. "Something's not going just right. Are you scared about this second confinement? Is Paul being horrid about something? You just take my advice, and if you want anything out of him, you fight for it. Nobody gets anything in this world if they don't put up a fight for it."

Lydia began to say that there were some things which lost their value if obtained by fighting, but suddenly she stopped her faltering words, drew a long breath, and laid her head on the other's shoulder. More than wifely loyalty kept her silent. All her lifelong experience of Madeleine crystallized into a certainty of her limitations, and with this certainty came the realization that Madeleine stood for all the circle of people about her. Lydia had learned one lesson of life. She knew, she now knew intensely, that there was no cry by which she could reach the spiritual ear of the warm human beings so close to her in the body. She knew there was no language in which she could make intelligible her travail of soul. In the moment the two women sat thus, she renounced, once for all, any hope of outside aid in her perplexities. They lay between herself and Paul. She could hope to find expression and relief for them only through that unique privilege of marriage, utter intimacy.

She kissed her husband's sister gently, comforted somewhat by the mere fact of her presence. "You're good to bother about me, Maddely," she said, using a pet name of their common childhood. "I guess I'm not feeling very well these days. But that's to be expected."

"Well, I tell you what, I wouldn't be so patient about it as you are!" cried the other wife. "It's simply horrid to have all this a second time, and Ariadne so little yet. It's mean of Paul."

She continued voicing an indignant sympathy with her usual energy. Lydia looked at her with a vague smile. At the first words of the childless woman, she had been filled with the mother-hunger which gave savor to her life during those days. As Madeleine went on, she sat unheeding, lost in a fond impatience to feel the tiny body on her knees, the downy head against her cheek. Her arms ached with emptiness. For an instant, so vivid was her sense of it, the child seemed to be there, in her arms. She felt the eager tug of the soft lips at her breast. She looked down—"Well, anyhow, you poor, dear thing! I hope you will bottle-feed this one! It would be just a little too much if they made you nurse it!"

Lydia did not even attempt a protest. Her submissive, entire acceptance of spiritual isolation seemed an answer to many of the conflicting impulses which had hitherto distracted her. She wished that she could reassure Madeleine by telling her that she would never again make another "odd" speech to her. She renounced all common life except the childlike, harmless, animal-like one of mutual material wants, and this renunciation brought her already a peace which, though barren, was infinitely calming after her former struggling uncertainties. "How did those waists come out that you sent to the cleaner's, Madeleine?" she asked, in a bright, natural tone of interest. "I hope the blue one didn't fade."

Madeleine reported to her husband that Lydia had seemed in one of her queer notional moods at first, but cheered up afterward and talked more "like folks," and seemed more like herself than she had since her father died. They had a real good visit together she said, and she began to think she could get some good satisfaction out of having Lydia for a neighbor, after all.

But after Lydia was alone, there sprang upon her the terror of living on such terms with Paul. No, no! Never that! It would be dying by inches! Beaten back to this last inner stronghold of the dismantled castle of her ideals of life, she prepared to defend it with the energy of desperation.

She did not believe Madeleine's story, or, at least, not her interpretation of Paul's attitude, but she felt a dreary chill at his silence toward her. It seemed to her that their marriage ought to have brought her husband an irresistible impulse to have in all their relations with each other a perfect openness. She resolved that she would begin to help him to that impulse that very day; now, at once.

When Paul came in, he seemed abstracted, and went directly upstairs to pack a satchel, stating with his usual absence of explanatory comment that he was called to Evanston on business. He ate his dinner rather silently, glancing furtively at the paper. Only at the breakfast-table—such was their convention—did he allow himself to become absorbed in the news.

Ariadne prattled to her mother of her adventures in the kitchen, where Patsy O'Hern, 'Stashie's cousin Patsy, was visiting her, and he made Ariadne a "horse out of a potato and toothpicks for legs, and a little wagon out of a matchbox, and a paper doll to sit and drive, and Patsy was perfectly loverly, anyhow, and he was making such a lot of money every day, and, oh, he made the wheels out of potato, too, as round as could be he cut it, and he gave every cent of it to his grandmother and she loved him as much as she did 'Stashie, and wasn't it good to have 'Stashie back, and—"

Paul frowned silently over his pie.

"Come, dear; it's seven o'clock and bedtime," said Lydia, leading the little girl away.

When she came back she noticed by the clock that she had been gone almost half an hour. She was surprised to see Paul still in the dining-room, as though he had not stirred since she left him. He was sitting in an attitude of moody idleness, singular with him, his elbows on the table, his chin in his hands. He looked desperately, tragically tired.

No inward monitor gave any warning to Lydia of what the next few moments were to be in her life. She crossed the room quickly to her husband, feeling a great longing to be close to him.

As she did so, a rattling clatter of tin was heard from the kitchen, followed by a shout of roaring laughter. Something in Paul's tense face snapped. He started up, overturning his chair. "Oh, damn that idiot!" he cried.

The door opened behind them. 'Stashie stood there, her red hair hidden in a mass of soft dough that was beginning to ooze down over her perspiring, laughing face. "I just wanted to show you what a comycal thing happened, Mis' Hollister," she began, in her familiar way. "'Twould make a pig laugh, now! I'd begun my bread dough, and put it on a shelf, an'—"

"Oh, get out of here!" Paul yelled at her furiously. "And less noise out of you in the kitchen!"

He slammed the door shut on her retreat, and turned to Lydia with a face she did not recognize. The room grew black before her eyes.

"I suppose you still prefer that dirty Irish slut to my wishes," he said.

His words, his accent, the quality of his voice, were the zigzag of lightning to his wife. The storm burst over her head like thunder.

She was amazed to feel a great wave of anger surge up in her, responsive to his own. She cried, in outraged resentment at his injustice: "You know very well—" and stopped, horrified at the passion which rose clamoring to her lips.

"I know very well that my home is the last place where my wishes are consulted," said Paul, catching her up.

"I will dismiss 'Stashie to-morrow," returned Lydia with a bitter, proud brevity.

"You're rather slow to take a hint. How long has she been with us? As for your saying that you can't get anyone else, and can't keep house decently as other decent people do, there isn't a word of truth in it! You can do whatever you care enough about to try to do. You didn't make an incompetent mess of taking care of the baby as you did out of that disgusting dinner party!"

It was the first time he had ever spoken outright to her of that experience. Lydia was transfixed to hear the poison of the memory as fresh in his voice as though it had happened yesterday.

"I'm simply not worth putting yourself out for," went on Paul, turning away and picking up his overcoat. "I'm only a common, ignorant, materialistic beast of an American husband!" He added in an insulting tone: "I suppose you'd like two husbands; one to earn your living for you, and one to talk to about your soul and to exchange near-culture with!"

He had not looked at Lydia as he poured out this sudden flood of acrimony, but at her quick, fierce reply, he faced her.

"I'd like one husband," she cried white with indignation.

"And I'd like a wife!" Paul flashed back at her hotly. "A wife that'd be a help and not a hindrance to everything I want to do—a wife that'd be loyal to me behind my back, and not listen to sneaking foreigners telling her that she's a misunderstood martyr—martyr!" His sense of injury exalted him. "Yes; all you American wives are martyrs, all right, I must say. While your husbands are working like dogs to make you money, you're sitting around with nothing to do but drink tea and listen to a foreigner who tells you—in summer time, while you're enjoying the cool breeze out here on a—maybe you think a dynamo-room's a funny place to be, with the thermometer standing at—what am I doing when I'm away from you? Enjoying myself, no doubt. Maybe you think it's enjoyment to travel all night on a—maybe you think it's nice to make yourself conspicuous with another man that's been abusing your—"

Lydia could hear no more for a loud roaring in her ears. She knew then the blackest moment of her life—a sickening scorn for the man before her. Madeleine had been right, then. They were of the same blood. His sister knew him better than—she, his wife, his wedded wife, was not to be spared the pollution of having her husband—

"I didn't take any stock in Madeleine's nasty insinuations about your flirting with him, of course, but it showed me what you've been thinking about me all this time I've been working like a—"

Lydia drew the first conscious breath since the beginning of this nightmare. The earth was still under her feet, struck down to it though she was. The roaring in her ears stopped. She heard Paul say:

"Maybe you think I'm made of iron! I tell you I'm right on my nerves every minute! Dr. Melton threatens me with a breakdown every time I see him!" There was a sort of angry pride in this statement. "I can't sleep! I'm doing ten men's work! And what do I get from you? Any rest? Any quiet? Why, these first years, when you might have made things easier for me by taking all other cares off my mind and leaving me free for business—they've actually been harder because of you!"

He thrust his arms into his overcoat and caught up his satchel. "I haven't wanted anything so hard to give! Good Lord! All I asked for was a well-kept house where I could invite my friends without being ashamed of it, and to live like other decent people!" He moved to the door, and put one hand, one strong, thin hand, on the knob. With the unearthly clearness of one in a terrible accident, Lydia noticed every detail of his appearance. He was flushed, a purple, congested color, singularly unlike his usual indoor pallor; hurried pulses throbbed visibly, almost audibly, at his temples; one eyelid twitched rapidly and steadily, like a clock ticking. With a gesture as automatic as drawing breath, he jerked out his watch and looked at it, apparently to make sure of catching his trolley, although his valedictory was poured out with such a passionate unpremeditation that the action must have been involuntary and unconscious. "But I don't even ask that now—since it doesn't suit you to bother to give it! All I ask now ought to be easy enough for any woman to do—not to bother me! Leave me alone! Keep your everlasting stewing and fussing and hysterical putting-on to yourself! I don't bother you with my affairs—I haven't, and I never will—why, for God's sake, can't you— Some men marry women who help them, and pull with them loyally, instead of pulling the other way all the time! Such a woman would have made me a thousand times more successful than I—"

Lydia broke in with a loud voice of anguished questioning: "Do they make them better men?" she asked piercingly.

Her husband looked at her over his shoulder. "Oh, you and your goody-goody cant!" he said, and going out without further speech, closed the door behind him.

The clock struck the half-hour. Their conversation had lasted less than five minutes.



CHAPTER XXX

TRIBUTE TO THE MINOTAUR

The scene of Paul's departure was no worse than many an outbreak in the ordinary married life of ordinary, quick-tempered, over-tired married people, for whom an open quarrel brings relief like the clearing of the air after an electric storm, but to Lydia it was no such surface manifestation of nerves. The impulse that had made them both break out into the cruel words came from some long-gathering bitterness, the very existence of which was like the end of all things to her. A single flash of lightning had showed her to the edge of what a terrifying precipice they had strayed, and then had left her in darkness.

That was how it seemed to her; she was in the most impenetrable blackness, though the little girl played on beside her with a child's cheerful blindness to its elder's emotion, and Anastasia detected nothing but that her mistress had a better color than before and stepped about quite briskly.

It was the restless activity of a tortured animal which drove Lydia from one household task to another, hurrying her into a trembling physical exhaustion, which, however, brought with it no instant's cessation of the tumult in her heart. The night after Paul's departure was like a black eternity to her turning wildly on her bed, or rising to walk as wildly about the silent house. "But I can't stand this!—to hate and be hated! I can not bear it! I must do something—but what? but what?" Once she feared she had screamed out these ever-recurring words, so audibly like a cry of agony did they ring in her ears; but, forcing herself to an instant's immobility, she heard Ariadne's light, regular breathing continue undisturbed.

She sat down on her bed and told herself that she would go out of her mind if she could not think something different from this chaos of angry misery. She fell on her knees, she sent her soul out in a supreme appeal for help and, still kneeling, she felt the intolerable tension within her loosen. She began to cry softly. The unnatural strength which had sustained her gave way; she sank together in a heap, her head leaning against the bed, her arms thrown out across it. Here Anastasia found her the next morning, apparently asleep, although upon being called she seemed to come to herself from a deeper unconsciousness.

Whatever it had been, the hour or two of oblivion that lay back of her was like a wall between her soul and the worst phase of her suffering. In answer to her cry for help, perhaps an appeal to the best in her own nature, there had come a cessation of what was to her the only unbearable pain—the bitter, blaming anger which had flared up in her, answering her husband's anger like the reflection of a torch in a mirror. In that silent hour before dawn, she had seen Paul suddenly as a victim to forces outside himself quite as much as she was; poor, tired Paul, with his haggard face, flushed with a wrath that was not his own, but an involuntary expression of suffering, the scream of a man caught in the cogs of a great machine. She hung before her mental vision now, constantly, the picture of Paul as she had seen him when she came downstairs; Paul leaning his chin on his hands, his jaded face white and drawn under his thinning, graying hair.

The alleviation which came through this conception of her husband was tempered by the final disappearance of her old feeling that Paul was stronger, clearer-headed, than she, and that if she could but once make him stop and understand the forces in their life which she feared, he could conquer them as easily as he conquered obstacles in the way of their material success. She now felt that he was not even as strong as she, since he could not get even her faint glimpse of their common enemy, this Minotaur of futile materialism which had devoured the young years of their marriage and was now threatening to destroy the possibility of a great, strongly-rooted affection which had lain so clearly before them. She felt staggered by the responsibility of having to be strong enough for two; and as another day wore on this new preoccupation became almost as absorbing an obsession as her anger of the night before.

But this was steadying in the very velocity with which her mind swept around the circle of possible courses of action. Her thoughts hummed with a steady, dizzy speed around and around the central idea that something must be done and that she was now the only one to do it. 'Stashie thought to herself that she had never seen Mrs. Hollister look so well, her eyes were so bright, her cheeks so pink.

Lydia had set herself the task of getting down and sorting the curtains in the house, preparatory to sending them to the cleaner. Above the piles of dingy drapery, her face shone, as 'Stashie had noted, with a strange, feverish brightness. Her knees shook under her, but she walked about quickly. Ariadne ran in and out of the house, chirping away to her mother of various wonderful discoveries in the world of outdoors. Lydia heard her as from a distance, although she gave relevant answers to the child's talk.

"It has come down," she was saying to herself, "to a life-and-death struggle. It isn't a question now of how much of the best in Paul, in me, in our life, we can save. It's whether we can save any! How dirty lace curtains get! It must be the soft coal—yes, it is a life and death struggle—I must see to Ariadne's underwear. It is too warm for these sunny days.—Oh! Oh! Paul and I have quarreled! And what about! About such sickeningly trivial things—how badly 'Stashie dusts! There are rolls of dust under the piano—but I thought people only quarreled—quarreled terribly—over great things: unfaithfulness, cruelty, differences in religion! Oh, if I only now had a religion, a religion which would—Yes, Ariadne; but only to the edge of the driveway and back. How muddy the driveway is! Paul said it should have more gravel—Paul! How can he come back to me after such—Madeleine says married people always quarrel—how can they look into each other's eyes again! We must escape that sort of life! We must! We must!"

The thought of what she had hoped from her marriage and of what she had, filled her with the most passionate self-reproach. It must be at least half her fault, since she and Paul made up but one whole. As she helped 'Stashie sort the dingy curtains, she was saying over and over to herself that she was responsible, responsible as much as for Ariadne's health. This conception so possessed her now that she felt herself able to accomplish anything, even the miracle needed.

To have achieved this state of passionate resolution gave her for a moment the sense of having started upon the straight road to escape from her nightmare; and for the first time since the door had slammed behind Paul she drew a long breath and was able to give more than a blind gaze to the world about her.

She noticed that, though it was after twelve o'clock, Ariadne had not been told to come to luncheon. When the little girl came running at her mother's call, her vivid face flushed with happy play, Lydia knew a throb of that exquisite, unreasoning parent's joy, lying too near the very springs of life for any sickness of the spirit to affect it. Like everything else, however, the touch of the child's tight-clinging arms about her neck brought her back to her preoccupation. Ariadne must not be allowed to grow up to such a regret as she felt, that she had never known her father. There were moments, she saw them clearly, when Paul realized with difficulty the fact of his daughter's existence, and he never realized it as a fact involving any need for a new attitude on his part.

"When is Daddy coming back to us vis time?" asked Ariadne over her egg.

Anastasia paused furtively at the door. She had had a divination of trouble in the last talk between her master and mistress. The door had slammed. Mr. Hollister had not called for the tie she was pressing for him in the kitchen—'Stashie told herself fiercely that "killing wud be too good for her, makin' trouble like the divil's own!" She listened anxious for Lydia's answer.

"Daddy's coming back to us as soon as his business is done," said Paul's wife. At the turn of her phrase she turned cold, and added with a quick vehemence: "No, no! before that! Long before that!" She went on, to cover her agitation and get the maid out of the room, "'Stashie, get the baby a glass of milk."

"The front door bell's ringin'," said 'Stashie, departing in that direction, with the assurance of her own ability to choose the proper task for herself, so exasperating to her master.

She came back bringing Miss Burgess in her wake, Miss Burgess apologizing for "coming right in, that way," exclaiming effusively at the pretty picture made by mother and child,—"She must be such company for you, Miss Lydia"—Miss Burgess, deferential, sure of her own position and her hostess', and determinedly pleased with the general state of things. Lydia repressed a sigh of impatience, but, noting the tired lines in the little woman's face, told Anastasia to make another cup of tea for Miss Burgess and cook her an egg.

"Oh, delighted, I'm sure! Quite an honor to have the same lunch with little Miss Hollister."

Ariadne did not smile at this remark, though from the speaker's accent it was meant as a pleasantry.

Miss Burgess cast about in her mind for another bit of suitable badinage, but finding none, she began at once on the object of her visit.

"Now, my dear, I want you to listen to all I have to say before you make one objection. It's an idea of my very own. You'll let me get through without interruption?"

"Yes, oh, yes," murmured Lydia, lifting Ariadne down from her high-chair and untying the napkin from about her thin little neck.

The introduction of a new element in her surroundings had for a moment broken the thread of her exalted resolutions. She wondered with a sore heart, as though it had been a common lovers' quarrel, how she and Paul could ever get over the first sight of each other again. She was wondering how, with the most passionate resolve in the world, she could do anything at all under the leaden garment of physical fatigue which would weigh her down in the months to come.

Miss Burgess began in her best style, which she so evidently considered very good indeed, that she could not doubt Lydia's attention. It was all about a home for working-women she explained; a new charity which had come from the East, had caught on like anything among the Smart Set of Columbus, and was about to be introduced into Endbury. The most exclusive young people in Columbus—the East End Set (Miss Burgess had a genius for achieving oral capitalization) gave a parlor play for the first benefit there, in one of the Old Broad Street Homes, and they were willing to repeat it in Endbury to introduce it there. A Perfectly splendid crowd was sure to come, tickets could be Any Price, and the hostess who lent her house to it could have the glory of a most unique affair. Mrs. Lowder would be overwhelmed with delight to have the pick of the Society of the Capital at her house, but Miss Burgess had thought it such an opportunity for Miss Lydia to come out of mourning with, since it was for charity. She motioned Lydia, about to speak, sternly to silence: "You said you wouldn't interrupt! And you haven't let me say half yet! That's your side of it—the side your dear mother would think of if she were only here; but there's another side that you can't, you oughtn't to resist!" She finished her tea with a hasty swallow and, going around the table, sat down by Lydia, laying her hand impressively on the young matron's slim arm. "You're the sweetest thing in the world, of course, but, like other people of your fortunate class, you can't realize how perfectly awfully lucky you are, nor how unlucky poor people are! Of course it stands to reason that you can't even imagine the life of a working-woman—you, a woman of entire leisure, with every want supplied before you speak of it by a husband who adores you! Why, Miss Lydia, to give you some idea let me tell you just one little thing. Lots and lots of the working-women of Endbury live with their families in two or three rooms right on that horrid Main Street near their work because they can't afford carfares!"

Lydia looked at her without speaking. She remembered her futile, desperate, foolish proposition to Paul to get more time together by living near his work. With a roar, the flood of her bewilderment, diverted for a time, broke over her again. She braced herself against it. Through her companion's dimly-heard exhortations that, from her high heaven of self-indulgence, she stoop to lend a hand to her less favored sisters, she repeated to herself, clinging to the phrase as though it were a magic formula: "If I can only wish hard enough to make things better, nothing can prevent me."

The telephone bell rang, and Miss Burgess interrupted herself to say: "It's for me, I know. I told them at the office to call me up here." She got herself out of the room in her busy way, her voice soon coming in a faint murmur from the far end of the hall.

Lydia walked to the window to call Ariadne in to put on a wrap, the thought and action automatic. She had buttoned the garment about the child's slender body before she responded again to the little living presence. Then she took her in a close embrace. With the child's breath on her face, with her curls exhaling the fresh outdoor air, there came to pass for poor Lydia one of the strange, happy mysteries of the contradictory tangle that is human nature. She had felt it often with Paul after one of their long separations—how mere physical presence can sometimes bring a consolation to the distressed spirit.

As she held her child to her heart, things seemed for a moment quite plain and possible. Why, Paul was Ariadne's father! As soon as he was with her again, all would be well. It must be. Nothing could separate her from the father of her baby! They were one flesh now. There was still all their lifetime to grow to be one in spirit. She had only to try harder. They had simply started on a false track. They were so young. So many years lay before them. There was plenty of time to turn back and start all over again—there was plenty of time to—

"Oh, my dear! my dear!" Miss Burgess faltered weakly into the room and sank upon a chair.

Lydia sprang up, Ariadne still in her arms, and faced her for a long silent instant, searching her face with passion. Then she set the little girl down gently. "Run out and play, dear," she said, and until the door had shut on the child she did not stir. Her hand at her throat, "Well?" she asked.

Miss Burgess began to cry into her handkerchief.

"It's Paul!" said Lydia with certainty. She sat down.

The weeping woman nodded.

"He has left me," Lydia continued in the same dry tone of affirmation. "I know. We had a quarrel, and he has left me."

Miss Burgess looked up, quite wild with surprise, her sobs cut short, her face twisted. "Oh, no—no—no!" she cried, running across the room and putting her arms about the other. "No; it's not that! He—he—the man who telephoned said they were testing the dynamo, and your husband insisted on—"

Lydia came to life like a swimmer emerging into the air after a long dive. "Oh, he's hurt! He's hurt!" she cried, bounding to her feet. "I must go to him. I must go to him!"

She tore herself away from the reporter and darted toward the door. The older woman ran after her, stumbling, sobbing, putting hands of imploring pity on her.

Although no word was spoken, Lydia suddenly screamed out as though she had been stabbed. "NO! Not that!" she cried.

"Yes, yes, my poor darling!" said the other.

Lydia turned slowly around. "Then it is too late. We never can do better," she said.

Miss Burgess tried helplessly to unburden her kind heart of its aching sympathy. "You spoke of a little disagreement, but, oh, my dear, don't let that be the last thought. Think of the years of perfect love and knowledge you had together."

"We never knew each other," said Lydia. Her voice did not tremble.

"Oh, don't! don't!" pleaded Miss Burgess, alarmed. "You mustn't let it unhinge you so! Such a perfect marriage!"

"We were never married," said Lydia. She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes.

"Oh, help! Someone!" called the poor reporter. "Somebody come quick."

Lydia opened her eyes. She spoke still in a low, steady voice, but in it now was a shocking quality from which the other shrank back terrified. "I could have loved him!" she said.

"Quick—'Stashie—hurry—keep the baby out of the room! Your mistress has fainted!"

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

BOOK IV

"BUT IT IS NOT TOO LATE FOR ARIADNE"



CHAPTER XXXI

PROTECTION FROM THE MINOTAUR

Dr. Melton burst open the door of the house in the Black Rock woods, and running to the owner caught hold of his bared brown arm. "Paul Hollister is dead!" he cried.

"I read the papers," said Rankin, looking down at him without stirring.

"The damn fool!" cried the doctor, his face working. "Just now! There's another child expected."

Rankin's inscrutable gravity did not waver at this speech. He felt the hand that rested on his arm tremble, and he was thinking, as Judge Emery had so often thought, that perhaps one reason for the doctor's success in treating women was a certain community of too-responsive nerves. "You can hardly blame a man because the date of his death is inconvenient," he said reasonably. He drew up one of his deep chairs and pushed the doctor into it. "Sit down and get your breath. You look sick. How do you happen to be up so early? It's hardly daylight."

"Up! You don't suppose I've been to bed! Lydia—" His voice halted.

Rankin's quiet face stirred. "She feels it—terribly?"

"I can't make her out! I can't make her out!" The doctor flung this confession of failure before him excitedly. "I don't know what's in her mind, but she's evidently dangerously near—women in her condition never have a very settled mental poise, anyhow, and this sudden shock—they telephoned it—and there was nobody there but that fool Flora—"

"Do you mean that Mrs. Hollister is out of her mind?" asked Rankin squarely.

"I don't know! I don't know, I tell you! She says strange things—strange things. When I got there yesterday afternoon, she was holding Ariadne—you knew, didn't you? that she called their little girl Ariadne—?"

Rankin sat down, white to the lips. "No," he said, "I didn't know that. I never heard anything about—about her married life."

"Well, she was holding Ariadne as close as though she was expecting kidnapers. I came in and she looked up—God! Rankin, with what a face of fear! It wasn't grief. It was terror! She said: 'I must save the children—I mustn't let it get the children, too.' I asked her what she meant, and she went on in a whisper that fairly turned the blood backward in my veins, 'The Minotaur! He got Paul—I must hide the children from him!' And that's all she would say. I managed to put Ariadne to bed, though Lydia screamed at the idea of having her out of her sight, and I gave Lydia a bromide and made her lie down. I think she knew me—oh, yes, I'm sure she did—why, she seemed like herself in every way but that one—but all night long she has wakened at intervals with a shriek and would not be quieted until she had felt of Ariadne. Nothing I said has had the slightest effect. I'm at my wits' end! If she doesn't get quieted soon—I finally gave her an opiate—enough to drug her senseless for a time—I don't know what to do! I don't know what to do!" He dropped his head into his hands and sat silent, shivering.

Rankin was looking at him, motionless, his powerful hands gripping his knees. He did not seem to breathe at all.

The doctor sprang up and began to trot about, kicking at the legs of the furniture and biting his nails. "Yes, I can, too! I do blame him for the date of his death!" He went back angrily to an earlier remark. "Hollister killed himself as gratuitously as if he had taken a pistol! And he did it out of sheer, devilish vanity—ambition! He had worked himself almost insane, anyhow. I'd warned him that he must take it easy, get all the rest he could. His nerves were like fiddle-strings. And what did he do? Made a night trip to Evanston to superintend a job entirely outside his work. The inspector gave the machines the regular test; but Paul wasn't satisfied. Said they hadn't come up to what he'd guaranteed to get the contract; took charge of the test himself, ran the speed up goodness knows how high. The inspector said he warned him, but Paul had got going and nothing could stop him—speed-mad—efficiency-mad—whatever you call it. And at last the fly-wheel on the engine couldn't stand it. It went through four floors and tore a hole in the roof—they say, in their ghastly phrase, there isn't enough left of him for a funeral! The other men left widows and children, too, I suppose—Oh, damn! damn! damn!" He stopped short in the middle of the floor, his teeth chattering, his hand at his mouth.

Rankin's face showed that he was making a great effort to speak. "Would I be allowed to see her?" he asked finally.

The doctor spun round on him, amazed. "You? Lydia? Why in the world?"

"Perhaps I could quiet her. I have been able to quiet several delirious sick people when others couldn't."

"I don't even know she's delirious—that's what puzzles me. She seems—"

"Will you let me try?" asked Rankin again.

* * * * *

When they reached the house in Bellevue, Lydia was still in a heavy stupor, so Mrs. Sandworth told them, showing no surprise at Rankin's appearance. The two men sat down outside the door of her room to wait. It was a long hour they passed there. Rankin sat silent, holding on his knee little Ariadne, who amused herself quietly with his watch and the leather strap that held it. He took the back off, and let her see the little wheel whirring back and forth. His eyes never left the child's serious, rosy face. Once or twice he laid his large, work-roughened hand gently on her dark hair.

Dr. Melton fidgeted about, making excursions into the sick room and downstairs to look after his business by telephone, and, when he sat by the door, relieving his overburdened heart from time to time in some sudden exclamation. "Paul hasn't left a penny, of course," one of these ran, "and he hadn't finished paying for the house. But she'll come naturally to live with Julia and me." At these last words, in spite of his painful preoccupation, a tender look of anticipation lighted his face.

Again, he said: "What crazy notion can it be about the whatever-it-was getting Paul?" Later, "Was there ever such a characteristic death?" Finally, with a long sigh: "Poor Paul! Poor Paul! It doesn't seem more than yesterday that he was a little boy. He was a brave little boy!"

Mrs. Sandworth came to the door. "She's beginning to come to herself, I think. She stirs, and moves her hands about."

As she spoke, there was a scream from the bedroom: "My baby! My baby!"

Rankin sprang to his feet, holding Ariadne on one arm, and stepped quickly inside. "Here is the baby," he said in a quiet voice. "I was holding her all the time you slept. I will not let the Minotaur come near her."

Lydia looked at him long, with no sign of recognition. The room was intensely silent. A drop of blood showed on Dr. Melton's lower lip where his teeth gripped it.

"Nobody else sees it," said Lydia in a hurried, frightened tone. "They won't believe me when I say it is there. They won't take care of Ariadne. They can't—"

"I see it," Rankin broke in. He went on steadily: "I will take care that it does not hurt Ariadne."

"Do you promise?" asked Lydia solemnly.

"I promise," said Rankin.

Lydia looked about her wonderingly, with blank eyes. "I think, then, I will lie down and rest a little," she said, in a thin, weak voice. "I feel very tired. I can't seem to remember what makes me so tired." She sank back on the pillows and closed her eyes. Her face was like a sick child's in its appealing, patient look of suffering. She looked up at Rankin again. "You will not go far?" she asked.

"I shall be close at hand," he answered.

"You are very kind," murmured Lydia, closing her eyes again. "I am sorry to be so much trouble to you—but it is so important about Ariadne. I am sorry to be so—you are—very—"

Melton touched the other man's arm and motioned him to the door.



CHAPTER XXXII

AS ARIADNE SAW IT

All that day, the tall, ruddy-haired man in working clothes sat in the hall, within sight, though not within hearing, of the sick room, playing with the rosy child, and exerting all his ingenuity to invent quiet games that they could play there "where Muvver tan see us"; Ariadne soon learned the reason for staying in one place so constantly. She was very happy that day. Never in her life had she had so enchanting a playfellow. He showed her a game to play with clothespins and tin plates from the kitchen—why, it was so much fun that 'Stashie herself had to join in as she went past. And he told one story after another without a sign of the usual grown-up fatigue. They had their lunch there at the end of the hall, on the little sewing-table with two dolls beside them and the new man made Ariadne laugh by making believe feed the dolls out of her doll's tea-set.

It was a little queer, of course, to stay right there all the time, and to have Muvver staring at them from the bedroom at the other end of the hall, and not to be allowed to do more than tiptoe in once or twice and kiss her without saying a word; but when Ariadne grew confused with trying to think this out, and the little eyes drooped heavily, the new man picked her up and tucked her away in his arms so comfortably that, though she meant to reach up and feel if his beard felt as red as it looked, she fell asleep before she could raise her hand.

When she woke up it was twilight, but she was still in his arms. She stirred sleepily, and he looked down and smiled at her. His face looked like an old friend's—as though she had always known it. He had a friendly smile. She was very happy. Uncle Marius came toward them, teetering on his toes, the way he always did. "I think it's safe to leave now, Rankin," he said. "She has fallen into a natural sleep."

The new man stood up, still holding Ariadne. How tall he was! She kept going up and up, and when she peered over his shoulder she found herself looking down on Uncle Marius' white head.

"How about to-morrow?" asked the new man.

"We'll see. We'll see," said Dr. Melton; and then they all went downstairs and had toast and boiled eggs for supper. Ariadne informed her companions, looking up from her egg with a yolky smile, "Daddy told Muvver the other day that 'Stashie had certainly learned to boil eggs something fine! And he laughed, but Muvver didn't. Was it a joke?"

"They are very good eggs indeed, and well boiled," the new man answered. She loved the way in which he conversed with her.

"Ought we to give her some idea?" asked the doctor in a low voice.

"I would wait until she asks," said the other.

But Paul's child never asked. Once or twice she remarked that Daddy was away longer than usual "vis time," but he had never been a very steadily recurrent phenomenon in her life, and soon her little brain, filled with new impressions, had forgotten that he ever used to come back.

There were many new impressions. A great deal was happening nowadays. Every morning something different, every day new people going and coming. Aunt Marietta, Auntie Madeleine, Uncle George from Cleveland, whom she'd seen only once or twice before, and Great-Aunt Hollister, whom she knew very well and feared as well as she knew her. After a time even the husbands began to appear, the husbands she had seen so rarely; Aunt Marietta's husband, and Aunt Madeleine's—fat, bald Mr. Lowder, who smelled of tobacco and soap and took her up on his lap—as much as he had—and gave her a big round dollar and kissed her behind her ear and smiled at her very kindly and held her very close. He said he liked little girls, and he wished Auntie Madeleine would get him one some day for a Christmas present. She informed him, filled with admiration at the extent of her own knowledge, that he couldn't get a Christmas present some day, but only just Christmas Day.