CHAPTER XVIIITWO SIDES TO THE QUESTION
CHAPTER XVIII
TWO SIDES TO THE QUESTION
Lydia’s unmarried life had given her but few abstract ideas for the regulation of conduct, and fewer still ideals of self-discipline, but chief among the small assortment that she took away from her mother’s house had been the high morality of keeping one’s husband unworried by one’s domestic difficulties. “Domestic difficulties” meant, apparently, anything disagreeable that happened to one. Not only her mother, but all the matrons of her acquaintance had concentrated on the extreme desirability of this wifely virtue. “It pays! It pays!” Mrs. Emery had often thus chanted the praises of this quality in her daughter’s presence. “I’ve noticed ever so many times that men who have to worry about domestic machinery and their children don’t get on so well. Their minds are distracted. Their thoughtscan’tbe, in the nature of things, all on their business.” She was wont to go on, to whatever mother she was addressing, “We know, my dear Mrs. Blank, don’t we, how perfectly distracting the problems are in bringing up children—to say nothing of servants. How much energy would men have for their own affairs if they had to struggle as we do, I’d like to know! Besides, if one person’s got to be bothered with such things, she might as well do it all and be done with it. It’s easier, besides, to have only one head. Men that interfere about thingsin the house are an abomination. You can’t keep from quarreling with them—angels couldn’t.”
She had once voiced this universally recognized maxim before Dr. Melton, who had cut in briskly with a warm seconding of her theory. “Yes, indeed; in the course of my practice I have often thought, as you do, that it would be easier all around if husbands didn’t board with their wives at all.”
Mrs. Emery had stared almost as blankly as Mrs. Sandworth herself might have done. “I never said such a crazy thing,” she protested.
“Didn’t you? Perhaps I don’t catch your idea then. It seemed to be that every point of contact was sure to be an occasion for friction between husband and wife, and so, of course, the fewer they were—”
“Oh, bother take you, Marius Melton!” Mrs. Emery had quite lost patience with him. “I was just saying something that’s so old, and has been said so often, that it’s a bromide, actually. And that is that it’s a poor wife who greets her tired husband in the evening with a long string of tales about how the children have been naughty and the cook—”
“Oh, yes, yes; now I see. Of course. The happiest ideal of American life, a peaceful exterior presented to the husband at all costs, and the real state of things kept from him because it might interfere with his capacity to pull off a big deal the next day.”
Mrs. Emery had boggled suspiciously at this version of her statement, but finding, on the whole, that it represented fairly enough her idea, had given a qualified assent in the shape of silence and a turning of the subject.
Lydia had not happened to hear that conversation, but she heard innumerable ones like it without Dr. Melton’s footnotes. On her wedding day, therefore, she conceived it an essential feature of her duty toward Paul to keep entirely to herself all of the dismaying difficulties of housekeeping and keeping up a social position in America. She knew, as a matter of course, that they would be dismaying.The talk of all her married friends was full of the tragedies of domestic life. It had occurred to her once or twice that it was an odd, almost a pathetic, convention that they tried to maintain about their social existence—a picture of their lives as running smoothly with self-adjusting machinery of long-established servants and old social traditions; when their every word tragically proclaimed the exhausting and never-ending personal effort that was required to give even the most temporary appearance of that kind. “We all know what a fearful time everybody has trying to give course dinners—why need we pretend we don’t?” she had thought on several painful occasions; but this, like many of her fancies, was a fleeting one. There had been as little time since her wedding day as before it for leisurely speculation. The business of beingthebride of a season had been quite as exciting and absorbing as beingthedébutante.
The first of February, six months after her marriage, found her as thin and restlessly active as she had been on that date a year before. It was at that time that she had the first intimation of a great change in her life, and since the one or two obscure and futile revolts of her girlhood, nothing had moved her to more rebellious unresignation than the fact that her life left her no time to take in the significance of what was coming to her.
“Oh, my dear! Isn’t it too good!” said her mother, clasping her for a moment as they stood, after removing their wraps, in the dressing-room of a common acquaintance. “Aren’t you the lucky, lucky thing!”
“I don’t know. I don’t know a thing about it,” Lydia returned unexpectedly, though her face had turned a deep rose, and she had smiled tremulously. “Ever since Dr. Melton told me it was probably so, I’ve been trying to get a moment’s time to think it over, but you—”
“It’s something tofeel, not to think about!” cried her mother. “You don’t need time to feel.”
“But I’d like to think about everything!” cried Lydia, as they moved down the stairs. “I get things wrong just feeling about them. But I’m not quick to think, and Inever have any time—they’re always so many other things to do and to think about—the dinner, getting Paul off in time in the morning, how badly the washwoman does up the table linen—”
“Oh, Lydia! Why will you be so contrary? Everybody sayslaundressnow!”
“—And however Paul and I can pay back all the social debts we’ve incurred this winter. Everybody’s invited us. It makes me wild to think of how we owe everybody.”
“Oh, you can give two or three big receptions this spring and clear millions off the list. And then a dinner party or two for the more exclusives. You won’t need to be out of things till June—with the fashion for loose-fitting evening gowns; you’re so slender. And you’ll be out again long before Christmas. It’s very fortunate having it come at this time of year.”
Lydia looked rather dazed at this brisk and matter-of-fact disposing of the matter, and seemed about to make a comment, but the bell rang for card-playing to begin and Mrs. Emery hurried to her table.
Lydia had meant to ask her mother’s sympathy about another matter that for the time was occupying her own thoughts, but there was no other opportunity for further speech between them during the card party—Mrs. Emery devoting herself with her usual competent energy to playing a good game. She played much better bridge than did either of her daughters. She liked cards, liked to excel and always found easy to accomplish what seemed to her worth doing. Marietta also felt that to avoid being “queer” and “different” one had to play a good hand, but, as she herself confessed, it made her “sick” to give up to it the necessary time and thought. As for Lydia, she got rid of her cards as fast as possible, as if with the deluded hope that when they were all played, she might find time for something else. On the afternoon in question her game was more unscientific than usual. Criticism was deterred from articulate expression by the common feeling in regard to her, assiduously fostered by Flora Burgess’ continuous references toher inSociety Notesas the coming social ruler of Endbury’s smart set. There was as yet, to be sure, no visible indication whatever of such a capacity on Lydia’s part, but the printed word—particularly Miss Burgess’ printed word—was not to be doubted. Madeleine Hollister, however (now soon to be Madeleine Lowdor), was no respecter of personages, past or future. At the appearance of an especially unexpected and disappointing card from her sister-in-law’s hand, she pounced upon her with: “Lydia, whatareyou thinking about?”
“My washwoman’s grandson,” burst out Lydia, laying down her cards with a careless negligence, so that everyone could see the contents of her hand. “Oh, Madeleine! I’m so worried about her, and I wish you’d—”
She got no further. Madeleine’s shriek of good-natured laughter cut her short like a blow in the face. The other ladies were laughing, too.
“Oh, Lydia! You are the most original, unexpected piece in the world!” cried her sister-in-law. “You’ll be the death of me!” She appealed to the other players at their table: “Did you ever hear anything come out funnier?”
To the players at the next tables, who were looking with vague, reflected smiles at this burst of merriment, she called: “Oh, it’s too killing! Lydia Hollister just played a trump on a trick her partner had already taken, and when I asked what in the world she was thinking about—meaning, of course—”
Lydia sat silent, looking at her useless cards during the rest of the narration of her comic speech. She was reflecting rather sadly that she had been very foolish to think, even in a thoughtless impulse, of telling Madeleine the story she had so impetuously begun. After a time it came to her, as a commentary of the little incident, that neither could she get anything from Marietta in the matter. At the end of the party, she and her mother walked together to the street-cars, but she still said nothing of what was in her mind. She would not admit to herself that hermother would receive it as she felt sure Marietta and Madeleine would, but—she dared not risk putting her to the test. It was a period in Lydia’s life when she was constantly in fear of tests applied to the people she loved and longed to admire.
During the half-hour’s noisy journey out to Bellevue—the unhackneyed name that had been selected for the new and fashionable suburb she inhabited—she had eliminated from this crisis in her mind, one by one, all the people in her circle. Dr. Melton was out of town. Otherwise she would have gone to him at once. Mrs. Sandworth without her brother was a cipher with no figure before it. Her father?—she realized suddenly that it was the first time she had ever thought of going to her father with a perplexity. No; she knew too little about his view of things. She had never talked with him of anything but the happenings of the day. Flora Burgess—devoted Flora? Lydia smiled ruefully as she thought of the attitude Flora Burgess would be sure to take.
It finally came to the point where there was no one left but Paul; and Paul ought not to be worried with domestic questions lest his capacity for business be impaired. She had a deep inculcated sense of the necessity and duty of “doing her share,” as the phrase had gone in the various exhortations addressed to her before her marriage. The next few years would be critical ones in Paul’s career, and the road must be straight and clear before his feet—the road that led to Success. No one had voiced a doubt that this road was not coincident with all other desirable ones; no one had suggested that the same years would be critical in other directions and would be certain to be terribly and irrevocably determinative of his future relation to his wife.
Lydia, ardently and naïvely anxious to find something “worth doing,” therefore had settled on this one definite duty. She had wrestled in a determined silence with the many incompetent and degenerate negresses, with the few impertinent Americans, with the drunken Irish and insolent Swedes, who had filed in and out of her kitchen ever sinceher marriage. Suburban life was a new thing in Endbury, and “help” could see no advantages in it. She had strained every nerve to make them appear to Paul, as well as to the rest of the world, the opposite of what they were; and to do herself, furtively, when Paul was not there, those of their tasks they refused or neglected. Every effort was concentrated, as in her mother’s and sister’s households, on keeping a maid presentable to open the door and to wait on the table, rather than to perform the heavier parts of the daily round. Those Lydia could do herself, or she could hire an unpresentable older scrubwoman to do them. She often thought that if she could but employ scrubwomen all the time, the problem would be half solved. But the achievement of each day was, according to Endbury standards, to keep or get somebody into the kitchen who could serve a course dinner, even if the mistress of the house was obliged to prepare it.
She had never dreamed of feeling herself aggrieved, or even surprised, by this curious reverse side to her outward brilliant life. All her married friends went through the same experience. Madeleine, it is true, announced that she was going to make Lowdor import two Japanese servants a year, and dismiss them when they began to get American ideas; but Madeleine was quite openly marrying Lowdor for the sake of this and similar advantages. Lydia felt that her own problems were only the usual lot of her kind, and though she was nearly always sick at heart over them, she did not feel justified in complaining—least of all to Paul.
But this present trouble—this was not just a question of help. For the last month they had been floating in the most unexpected lull of the domestic whirlwind. The intelligence office had sent out Ellen—Ellen, the deft-handed cook, the silent, self-effacing, competent servant of every housekeeper’s dreams. Her good luck seemed incredible. Ellen was perfection, was middle-aged and settled, never went out in the evenings, kept her kitchen spotlessly clean, trained the rattle-headed second girls who came and went,to be good waitresses and made pastry that moved Paul, usually little preoccupied about his food provided there was plenty of meat, to lyric raptures. The difference she made in Lydia’s life was inconceivable. It was as though some burdensome law of nature had been miraculously suspended for her benefit. She gauged her past discomfort by her present comfort.
And yet—
From the first Lydia had had an uneasy feeling in the presence of her new servant, a haunting impression when her back was turned to Ellen that if she could turn quickly enough, she would see her cook with some sinister aspect quite other than the decent, respectful mask she presented to her mistress. The second girl of the present was a fresh-faced, lively young country lass, whom Ellen herself had secured, and whose rosy child’s face had been at first innocence itself; but now sometimes Lydia overheard them laughing together, a laughter which gave her the oddest inward revulsion, and when she came into the kitchen quickly she often found them looking at books which were quickly whisked out of sight.
And then, a day or so before, old Mrs. O’Hern, her washwoman, had come directly to her with that revolting revelation of Ellen’s influence on her grandson, little Patsy. At the recollection of the old woman’s face of embittered anguish, Lydia shuddered. Oh, if she could only tell Paul! He was so loving and caressing to her—perhaps he would not mind being bothered this once—she did not know what to think of such things—she did not know what to do, which way to turn. She was startled beyond measure at having real moral responsibility put on her.
Perhaps Paul could think of something to do.
He was waiting for her when she entered the house, having come in from an out-of-town trip on an earlier train than he had expected to catch. He dropped his newspaper and sprang up from his chair to put his arms about her and gloat over her beauty. “You’re getting prettier every day of your life, Lydia,” he told her, ruffling her softhair, and kissing her very energetically a great many times. “But pale! I must get some color into your cheeks, Melton says—how’s this for a way?”
He seemed to Lydia very boyish and gay and vital. She caught at him eagerly—he had been away from home three days—and clung to him. “Oh, Paul! How much good it does me to have you here, close! You aresomuch nicer than a room of women playing the same game of cards they began last September!”
Paul shouted with laughter—his pleasant, hearty mirth. “I’m appreciated at my full worth,” he cried.
“Oh, how I loathe cards!” cried Lydia, taking off her hat.
“It’s better than the talk you’d get from most of the people there, I bet,” conjectured Paul, taking up his newspaper again. “Cards are a blessingthatway, compared with conversation.”
“Oh, dear, I suppose so!” Lydia stopped a moment in the doorway. “But doesn’t it seem a pity that you never see anybody but people who’d bore you to death if you didn’t stop their mouth with cards?”
“That’s the way of the world,” remarked Paul comfortably, returning to the news of the day.
The little friendly chat gave Lydia courage for her plan of asking her husband’s advice about her perplexity, but, mindful of traditional wisdom, she decided, as she thriftily changed her silk “party dress” for a house-gown of soft wool, that she would wait until the mollifying influence of dinner had time to assert itself. She wondered fearfully, with a quick throb of her heart, how he would receive her confidence. When she called him to the table she looked searchingly into his strong, resolute, good-natured face, and then, dropping her eyes, with an indrawn breath, began her usual fruitless endeavors to learn from him a little of what had occupied his day—his long, mysterious day, spent in a world of which he brought back but the scantiest tidings to her.
As usual, to-night he shook his shoulders impatiently ather questioning. “Oh, Lydia darling, don’t talk shop! I’m sick and tired of it after three days of nothing else. I want to leave all that behind me when I come home. That’s what a home is for!”
Lydia did not openly dissent from this axiom, though she murmured helplessly: “I feel so awfully shut out. It is what you think about most of the time, and I do not know enough about it even to imagine—”
Paul leaned across the table to lay an affectionate hand on his wife’s slim fingers. “Count your mercies, my dear. It’s all grab, and snap, and cutting somebody’s throat before he has a chance to cut yours. It wouldn’t please you if you did know anything about it—the business world.” He drew a long breath, and went on appreciatively with his cutlet—Lydia had learned something about meats since the year before—“You are a very good provider, little girl; do you know it?”
“Oh, I love to,” said Lydia. She added reflectively: “Wouldn’t it be nice if things were so I could do the cooking myself and not have to bother with these horrible creatures that are all you can get usually?”
Paul laughed at the fancy. “That’s a high ambition for my wife, I must say!”
“We’d have better things to eat even than Ellen gives us,” said Lydia pensively. “If I had a little more time to put on it, I could do wonders, I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t doubt that,” said her husband gallantly; “but did you ever know anybody whowasher own cook?”
“Well, not except in between times, when they couldn’t get anybody else,” confessed Lydia. “But lots of people I know who do go through the motions of keeping one would be better off without one. They can’t afford it, and—Oh, I wish we were poorer!”
Paul was highly amused by this flight of fancy. “But we’re as poor as poverty already,” he reminded her.
“We’re poor for buying hundred-dollar broadcloth tailor-made suits for me, and cut glass for the table, but we’d have plenty if I could wear ready-made serge at—”
Paul laughed outright. “Haven’t you ever noticed, my dear, that the people who wear ready-made serge are the ones who could really comfortably afford to wear calico wrappers? It goes right up and down the scale that way. Everybody is trying to sing a note above what he can.”
“I know it does—but does ithaveto? Wouldn’t it be better if everybody just—why doesn’t somebody begin—”
“It’s the law of progress, of upward growth,” pronounced Paul.
Lydia was impressed by the pontifical sound of this, though she ventured faintly: “Well, but does progress always mean broadcloth and cut glass?”
“Wehave the wherewithal to cultivate our minds!” said Paul, laughing again. “Weren’t the complete works of the American essayists among our wedding presents!” He referred to an old joke between them, at which Lydia laughed loyally, and the talk went on lightly until the meal was over.
As they walked away from the table together Lydia said to herself, “Now—now—” but Paul began to laugh as he told an incident of Madeleine’s light-hearted, high-handed tyranny over her elderly fiancé, and it seemed impossible for Lydia to bring out her story of mean and ugly tragedy.
As usual the evening was a lively one. Some acquaintances from the “younger married set” of Bellevue dropped in for a game of cards, Madeleine and “old Pete” Lowdor came out to talk over the plans for their new handsome house at the end of the street and at Paul’s suggestion Lydia hastily got together a chafing-dish supper for the impromptu party which prolonged itself with much laughter and many friendly wranglings over trumps and “post-mortems” until after midnight. Paul was in the highest of gay spirits as he stood with his pretty wife on the porch, calling good-nights to his guests disappearing down the starlit driveway. He inhaled the odor of success sweet and strong in his nostrils.
As they looked back into the house, they saw the faithful Ellen clearing away the soiled dishes, her large, white, disease-scarredface impassive over her immaculate and correct maid’s dress.
“Isn’t she a treasure!” cried the master of the house. “To sit up to this hour!” He started, “What’s that?”
From the shadow of the house a slim lad’s figure shambled out into the driveway. As he passed the porch where Paul stood, one strong arm protectingly about Lydia, he looked up and the light from the open door struck full on a white, purposeless, vacant smile. The upward glance lost for him the uncertain balance of his wavering feet. He reeled, flung up his arms and pitched with drunken soddenness full length upon the gravel, picking himself up clumsily with a sound of incoherent, weak lament. “Why, it’s a drunken man—inour driveway!” cried Paul, with proprietary indignation. “Get out of here!” he yelled angrily at the intruder’s retreating back. When he turned again to Lydia he saw that one of her lightning-swift changes of mood had swept over her. He was startled at her pale face and burning, horrified eyes, and remembering her condition with apprehension, picked her up bodily and carried her up the stairs to their bedroom, soothing her with reassuring caresses.
There, sitting on the edge of their bed, her loosened hair falling about her white face, holding fast to her husband’s hands, Lydia told him at last; hesitating and stumbling because in her blank ignorance she knew no words even to hint at what she feared—she told him who Patsy was, the blue-eyed, fifteen-year-old boy, just over from Ireland, ignorant of the world as a child of five, easily led, easily shamed, by his fear of appearing rustic, into any excess—and then she told him what the boy’s grandmother had told her about Ellen. It was a milestone in their married life, her turning to him more intimately than she would have done to her mother, her breaking down the walls of her lifelong maiden’s reserve and ignorance. She finished with her face hidden in his breast. What should she do? Whatcouldshe do?
Paul took her into the closest embrace, kissed her shuteyes in a passion of regret that she should have learned the evil in the world, of relieved belittling of the story, Lydia’s portentous beginning of which had quite startled him, and of indignation at “Mrs. O’Hern’s foul mouth—for you can just be sure, darling Lydia, that it’s all nothing but rowings among the servants. Probably Ellen won’t let Mrs. O’Hern take her usual weekly perquisite of sugar and tea. Servants are always quarreling and the only way to do is to keep out of their lies about each other and let them fight it out themselves. You never can have any idea of who’s telling the truth if you butt in and try to straighten it, and the Lord knows that Ellen’s too good a cook and too much needed in this family until the new member arrives safely, to hurt her feelings with investigating any of Mrs. O’Hern’s yarns. Just you refuse to listen to servants’ gossip. If you’d been a little less of a darling, inexperienced school-girl, you’d have cut off such talk at the first words. Just you take my word for it, you dear, you sweetheart, you best of—” he ran on into ardent endearments, forgetting the story himself, blinding and dazzling Lydia with the excitement which always swept her away in those moments when Paul was her passionate, youthful lover.
She tried to revert to the question once or twice later, but now Paul alternated between shaming her laughingly for her gullibility and making fun of her “countrified” interest in the affairs of her servants. “But, Paul, Mrs. O’Hern says that Patsy doesn’twantto drink and—and go to those awful houses—his father died of it—only Ellen makes him, by—”
Paul tried to close the discussion with a little impatience at her attempt to press the matter. “Every Irish boy drinks more or less, you little goose. That’s nothing! Of course it’s too bad to have youseea drunken man, but it’s nothing so tragic. If he didn’t drink here, he would somewhere else. The only thing we have to complain about that I can see, is having the cook’s followers drunk—but Ellen’s such a miracle of competence we must overlook that. As for the rest of Mrs. O’Hern’s dirty stories, they’re spite workevidently.” As Lydia looked up at him, her face still anxious and drawn, he ended finally, “Good gracious, Lydia, don’t you suppose I know—that my experience of the world has taught me more about human nature than you know? You act to me as though you trusted your washwoman’s view of things more than your husband’s. And now what you want to do, anyhow, is to get some rest. You hop into bed, little rabbit, and go to sleep. Don’t wait for me; I’ve got a lot of figuring to do.”
When he went to bed, a couple of hours later, Lydia was lying quietly with closed eyes, and he did not disturb her; but afterward he woke out of a sound sleep and sat up with a sense that something was wrong. He listened. There was not a sound in the room or in the house. Apparently Lydia was not wakened by his startled movement. She lay in a profound immobility.
But something about her very motionlessness struck a chill to his heart. Women in her condition sometimes had seizures in the night, he had heard. With a shaking hand, he struck a match and leaned over her. He gave a loud, shocked exclamation to see that her eyes were open, steady and fixed, like wide, dark pools. He threw the match away, and took her in his arms with a fond murmur of endearments. “Why, poor little girl! Do you lie awake and worry about what’s to come?”
Lydia drew a painful breath. “Yes,” she said; “I worry a great deal about what’s to come.”
He kissed her gently, ardently, gently again. “You mustn’t do that, darling! You’re all right! Melton said there wasn’t one chance in a thousand of anything but just the most temporary illness, without any complications. It won’t be so bad—it’ll be soon over, and think what it means to us—dearest—dearest—dearest!”
Lydia lay quiet in his arms. She had been still so long that he thought her asleep, when she said, in a whisper: “I hope it won’t be a girl!”
CHAPTER XIXLYDIA’S NEW MOTTO
CHAPTER XIX
LYDIA’S NEW MOTTO
Lydia’s two or three big receptions, of which her mother had spoken with so casual a confidence, came off, while not exactly with nonchalant ease, still, on the whole, creditably. It is true that Dr. Melton had stormed at Lydia one sunny day in spring, finding her bent over her desk, addressing invitations.
“It’s April, child!” he cried, “April! The crocuses are out and the violets are almost here—and, what is more important, your day of trial gets closer with every tick of the clock. Come outdoors and take a walk with me.”
“Oh, I can’t!” Lydia was aghast at the idea, looking at a mountain of envelopes before her.
“Here! I’ll help you finish those, and then we’ll—”
“No, no,no!” In Lydia’s negation was a touch of the irritation that was often during these days in her attitude toward her godfather. “I can’t! Please don’t tease me to! The curtains to the spare room have to be put up, and the bed draperies somehow fixed. A stray dog got in there when he was wet and muddy and went to sleep on my best lace bedspread.”
Dr. Melton had not practiced for years among Endbury ladies without having some knowledge of them and a corresponding readiness of mind in meeting the difficulties they declared insurmountable. “I’ll buy you a white marseilles bedspread on our way back from the walk,” he offered gravely.
“Oh, I’ve got plenty of plain white ones,” she admitted incautiously, “but they don’t go with the scheme of the room—and the first reception’s only two days off.”
Dr. Melton fixed her with an ironical and melancholy smile: “Now, Lydia, I did think you had it in you to realize that your health and the strength of your child are worth more than—”
Lydia sprang up and confronted him with an apparent anger of face and accent that was contradicted by her trembling chin and suffused eyes. “Oh, go away!” she commanded him, shaking her head and motioning him off. “Don’t talk so to me! I can’t help it—what I do! Everything’s a part of the whole system, and I’m in that up to my neck—you know I am. If that’s right, why, everything’s all right, just the way everybody thinks it is. And if it’s wrong—” She caught her breath, and turned back to her desk. “If it’s wrong, what good would be done by little dribbling compromises of an occasional walk.” She sat down wearily, and leaned her head on her hand. “I just wish you wouldn’t keep me so stirred up—when I’m trying sohardto settle down!”
Dr. Melton seemed to divine perfectly the significance of this incoherent outbreak. He thrust out his lips in his old grimace that denoted emotion, and observed the speaker in a frowning silence. When she finished, he nodded: “You are right, Lydia, I do no good.” He twirled his hat about between his fingers, looking absently into the crown, and added, “But you must forgive me, I love you very dearly.”
Lydia ran over to him, conscience-stricken. He took her embrace and remorseful kiss quietly. “Don’t be sorry, Lydia dear. You have just shown me, as in a flash of lightning, how much more powerful a grasp on reality you have than I.”
Lydia recoiled from him with an outcry of exasperation. “I! Why, I’m almost an idiot! I haven’t a grasp on anything! I can’t see an inch before my nose. I’m in a perfect nightmare of perplexity all the time because I can’t make out what I’m driving at—or ought to—”
She went on more quietly, with a reasoning air: “Only look here, Godfather, it came over me the other night, whenI couldn’t sleep, that perhaps what’s the trouble with me is that I’mlazy! I believe that’s it! I don’t want to work the way Marietta does, and Mother does, and even Madeleine does over her dresses and parties and things. It must be I’m a shirk, and expect to have an easier time than most people. Thatmustbe it. What else can it be?”
The doctor made no protest against this theory, taking himself off in a silence most unusual with him. Lydia did not notice this; nor did she in the next two or three months remark that her godfather took quite literally and obeyed scrupulously her exhortation to leave her in peace.
She was in the grasp of this new idea. It seemed to her that in phrasing it she had hit upon the explanation of her situation which she had been so long seeking, and it was with a resolve to scourge this weakness out of her life that she now faced the future.
She found a satisfaction in the sweeping manner in which this new maxim could be applied to all the hesitations that had confused her. All her meditations heretofore had brought her nothing but uncertainty, but this new catchword of incessant activity drove her forward too resistlessly to allow any reflections as to whether she were going in the right direction. She yielded herself absolutely to that ideal of conduct which had been urged upon her all her life, and she found, as so many others find, oblivion to the problems of the spirit in this resolute refusal to recognize the spirit. It was perhaps during these next months of her life that she most nearly approximated the Endbury notion of what she should be.
She had yielded to Paul on the subject of the cook not only because of her timid distrust of her own inexperienced judgment but because of her intense reaction from the usual Endbury motto of “Husbands, hands off!” She had wanted Paul to be interested in the details of the house as she hoped to know and be interested in what concerned him, and when he showed his interest in a request she could not refuse it. She hoped that she had made a good beginning for the habit of taking counsel with each other on allmatters. But she thought and hoped and reflected very little during these days. She was enormously, incredibly busy, and on the whole, she hoped, successfully so. The receptions, at least, went off very well, everybody said.
Dr. Melton did not see his goddaughter again until he came with Mrs. Sandworth to the last of these events. She was looking singularly handsome at that time, her color high, her eyes very large and dark, almost black, so dilated were the pupils. With the nicety of observation of a man who has lived much among women, the doctor noticed that her costume, while effective, was not adjusted with the exquisite feeling for finish that always pervaded the toilets of her mother and sister. Lydia was trying with all her might to make herself over, but with the best will in the world she could not attain the prayerful concentration on the process of attiring herself, characteristic of the other women of her family.
“She forgot to put the barrette in her back hair,” murmured Mrs. Sandworth mournfully, as she and her brother emerged from the hand-shake of the last of the ladies assisting in receiving, “and there are two hooks of her cuff unfastened, and her collar’s crooked. But I don’t dare breathe a word to her about it. Since that time before her marriage when she—”
“Yes, yes, yes,” her brother cut her short; “don’t bring up that tragic episode again. I’d succeeded in forgetting it.”
“You can call it tragic if you like,” commented Mrs. Sandworth, looking about for an escape from the stranded isolation of guests who have just been passed along from the receiving line; “but what it was all about was more than I ever could—” Her eyes fell again on Lydia, and she lost herself in a sweet passion of admiration and pride. “Oh, isn’t she the loveliest thing that ever drew the breath of life! Was there ever anybody else that could look so as though—as though they still had dew on them!”
She went on, with her bold inconsequence: “There is a queer streak in her. Sometimes I think she doesn’t care—”She stopped to gaze at a striking costume just entering the room.
“What doesn’t she care about?” asked the doctor.
Mrs. Sandworth was concentrating on sartorial details as much of her mind as was ever under control at one time, and, called upon for a development of her theory, was even more vague than usual. “Oh, I don’t know—about what everybody cares about.”
“She’s likely to learn, if it’s at all catching,” conjectured the doctor grimly, looking around the large, handsome room. An impalpable effluvium was in the air, composed of the scent of flowers, the odor of delicate food, the sounds of a discreetly small orchestra behind palms in the hallway, the rustling of silks, and the pleasurable excitement of the crowd of prosperous-looking women, pleasantly elated by the opportunity for exhibiting their best toilets.
“To think of its being our little Lydia who’s the center of all this!” murmured Mrs. Sandworth, her loving eyes glistening with affectionate pride. “It really is a splendid scene, isn’t it, Marius?”
“If they were all gagged, it might be. Lord! how they yell!”
“Oh, at areception!” Mrs. Sandworth’s accent denoted that the word was an explanation. “People have to, to make themselves heard.”
“And why should they be so eager to accomplish that?” inquired the doctor. “Listen!”
Standing as they were, tightly pressed in between a number of different groups, their ears were assaulted by a disjointed mass of stentorian conversation that gave a singular illusion as if it all came from one inconceivably voluble source, the individuality of the voices being lost in the screaming enunciation which, as Mrs. Sandworth had pointed out, was a prerequisite of self-expression under the circumstances.
They heard: “—For over a month and the sleeves were too see you again at Mrs. Elliott’s I’m pouring there from four I’ve got to dismiss one with little plum-colored bowsall along five dollars a week and the washing out, and still impossible! I was there myself all the time and they neither of thirty-five cents a pound for the most ordinary ferns and red carnations was all they had, and we thought it rather skimpy under the brought up in one big braid and caught down with at the Peterson’s they were pink and white with—”
“Oh, no, Madeleine! that was at the Burlingame’s.” Mrs. Sandworth took a running jump into the din and sank from her brother’s sight, vociferating: “The Petersons had them of old-gold, don’t you remember, with little—”
The doctor, worming his way desperately through the masses of femininity, and resisting all attempts to engage him in the vocal fray, emerged at length into the darkened hall where the air was, as he told himself in a frenzied flight of the imagination, less like a combination of a menagerie and a perfume shop. Here, in a quiet corner, sat Lydia’s father, alone. He held in one hand a large platter piled high with wafer-like sandwiches, which he was consuming at a Gargantuan rate, and as he ate he smiled to himself.
“Well, Mr. Ogre,” said the doctor, sitting down beside him with a gasp of relief; “let a wave-worn mariner into your den, will you?”
Provided with an auditor, Judge Emery’s smile broke into an open laugh. He waved the platter toward the uproar in the next rooms: “A boiler factory ain’t in it with woman, lovely woman, is it?” he put it to his old friend.
“Gracious powers! There’s nothing to laugh at in that exhibition!” the doctor reproved him, with an acrimonious savagery. “I don’t know which makes me sicker; to stay in there and listen to them, or come out here and find you thinking they’refunny!”
“Theyarefunny!” insisted the Judge tranquilly. “I stood by the door and listened to the scraps of talk I could catch, till I thought I should have a fit. I never heard anything funnier on the stage.”
“Look-y here, Nat,” the doctor stared up at him angrily, “they’re not monkeys in a zoo, to be looked at only on holidaysand then laughed at! They’re the other half of a whole that we’re half of, and don’t you forget it! Why in the world should you think it funny for them to do this tomfool trick all winter and have nervous prostration all summer to pay for it? You’d lock up amanas a dangerous lunatic if he spent his life so. What they’re like, and what they do with their time and strength concerns us enough sight more than what the tariff is, let me tell you!”
“I admit that what your wife is like concerns you a whole lot!” The Judge laughed good-naturedly in the face of the little old bachelor. “Don’t commence jumping on the American woman now! I won’t stand it! She’s the noblest of her sex!”
“Do you know why I am bald?” said Dr. Melton, rubbing his hand over his shining dome.
“If I did, I wouldn’t admit it,” the Judge put up a cautious guard, “because I foresee that whatever I say will be used as evidence against me.”
“I’ve torn out all my hair in desperation at hearing such men as you claim to admire and respect and wish to advance the American woman. You don’t give enough thought to her—real thought—from one year’s end to another to know whether you think she has an immortal soul or not!”
“Oh, you can’t get anywhere, trying to reason about those sort of things. You have to take souls for granted. Besides, I give her as fair a deal in that respect as I give myself,” protested Lydia’s father reasonably, smiling and eating.
“There’s something inthat, now!” cried his interlocutor, with an odd Celtic lilt which sometimes invaded his speech; “but shehasan immortal soul, and I’m by no means sure that yours is still inside you.”
The Judge stood up, brushed the crumbs of his stolen feast from his well-fitting broadcloth, and smiled down indulgently at the unquiet little doctor. “She’s all right, Melton, the American woman, and you’re an unconscionably tiresome old fanatic. That’s whatyouare! Come along and have a glass of punch with me. Lydia’s cook has agenius for punch—and for sandwiches!” he added reflectively, setting down the empty platter.
Dr. Melton apparently was off on another tangent of excitability. “Did you ever see her?” he demanded with a fiercely significant accent.
The Judge made a humorous wry mouth. “Yes, I have; but what concern is a cook’s moral character to her employer any more than an engineer’s to the railroad—”
“Well, it mightn’t hurt the railroad any if it took more cognizance of its engineers’ morals—” began the doctor dryly.
The Judge cut him short with a great laugh. “Oh, Melton! Melton! You bilious sophomore! Take a vacation from finding everything so damn tragic. Take a drink on me. You’re all right! Everybody’s all right!”
The doctor nodded. “And the reception is the success of the season,” he said.