Chapter 18

MID-SEASON NERVES

"If I should wait and read my paper here instead of on the cars, do you suppose Lydia would be up before I left?" asked the Judge as he put his napkin in the ring and pushed away from the breakfast table.

Mrs. Emery looked up, smiling, from a letter, "'Of course such a great favorite as Miss Emery,'" she read aloud, "'will be hard to secure, but both the Governor and I feel that our party wouldn't be complete without her. We're expecting a number of other Endbury young people.' And do you know who writes that?" she asked triumphantly of her husband.

"How should I?" answered the Judge reasonably.

"Mrs. Ex-Governor Mallory, to be sure. It's their annual St. Valentine's day house-party at their old family estate in Union County."

The Judge got up, laughing. "Old family estate," he mocked.

"They are one of the oldest and best families in this State," cried his wife.

"The Governor's an old blackguard," said her husband tolerantly.

"The Mallorys--the Hollisters--Lydia is certainly," began Mrs. Emery, complacently.

Lydia's father laughed again. "Oh, with you and Flora Burgess as manager and press agent--! You haven't answered my question about whether if I waited and--"

"No, she wouldn't," said Mrs. Emery decisively. "After dancing so late nights, I want her to sleep every minute she's not wanted somewhere. _I_ have the responsibility of looking after her health, you know. I hope she'll sleep now till just time to get up and dress for Marietta's lunch-party at one o'clock."

The father of the family frowned. "Is Marietta giving another lunch-party for Lydia? They can't afford to do so much. Marietta's--"

"This is a great chance for Marietta--poor girl! she hasn't many such chances--Lydia's carrying everything before her so, I mean."

"How does Marietta get into the game?" asked her father obtusely.

Mrs. Emery hesitated a scarcely perceptible instant, a hesitation apparently illuminating to her husband. He laughed again, the tolerant, indifferent laugh he had for his women-folks' goings-on. "She thinks she can go up as the tail to Lydia's kite, does she? She'd better not be too sure. If I don't miss my guess, Paul'll have a word or two to say about carrying extra weight. Gosh! Marietta's a fool some ways for a woman that has her brains."

He stated this opinion with a detached, impersonal irresponsibility, and began to prepare himself for the plunge into the damp cold of the Endbury January. His wife preserved a dignified silence, and in the middle of a sentence of his later talk, which had again turned on his grievance about never seeing Lydia, she got up, went into the hall, and began to use the telephone for her morning shopping. Her conversation gave the impression that she was ordering veal cutlets, maidenhair ferns, wax floor-polish, chiffon ruching, and closed carriages, from one and the same invisible interlocutor, who seemed impartially unable to supply any of these needs without rather testy exhortation. Mrs. Emery was one of the women who are always well served by "tradespeople," as she now called them, "and a good reason why," she was wont to explain with self-gratulatory grimness.

The Judge waited, one hand on the door-knob, squaring his jaw over his muffler, and listening with a darkening face to the interminable succession of purchases. After a time he released the door-knob, loosened his muffler, and sat down heavily, his eyes fixed on his wife's back.

After an interval, Mrs. Emery paused in the act of ringing up another number, looked over her shoulder, saw him there and inquired uneasily, "What are you waiting for? You'll catch cold with all your things on. Isn't Dr. Melton always telling you to be careful?"

She felt a vague resentment at his being there "after hours," as she might have put it, so definitely had long usage accustomed her to a sense of solitary proprietorship of the house except at certain fixed and not very frequent periods. She almost felt that he was eavesdropping while she "ran her own business." There was also his remark about Marietta and kites, unatoned for as yet. She had not forgotten that she "owed him one," as Madeleine Hollister light-heartedly phrased the connubial balanced relationship which had come under her irreverent and keen observation. A cumulative sharpness from all these causes was in her voice as she remarked, "Didn't I tell you that Lydia--"

Judge Emery's voice in answer was as sharp as her own. "Look-y here, Susan, I bet you've ordered fifty dollars' worth of stuff since you stood there."

"Well, what if I have?" She was up in arms in an instant against his breaking a long-standing treaty between them--a treaty not tacit, but frequently and definitely stated.

They regulated their relations on a sound business basis, they were wont to say of themselves, the natural one, the right one. The husband earned the money, the wife saw that it was spent to the best advantage, and neither needed to bother his head or dissipate his energies about the other's end of the matter. They had found it meant less friction, they said; fewer occasions for differences of opinion. Once, when they had been urging this system upon their son George, then about to marry, Dr. Melton had made the suggestion that there would be still fewer differences of opinion if married people agreed never to see each other after the ceremony in the church. There would be no friction at all with that system, he added. It was one of his preposterous speeches which had become a family joke with the Emerys.

"Well, what if I have?" Mrs. Emery advanced defiantly upon her husband, with this remark repeated.

Judge Emery shared a well-known domestic peculiarity with other estimable and otherwise courageous men. He retreated precipitately before the energy of his wife's counter-attack, only saying sulkily, to conceal from himself the fact of his retreat, "Well, we're not millionaires, you know."

"Did I ever think we were?" she said, smiling inwardly at his change of front. "If you stand right up to men, they'll give in," she often counseled other matrons. She began to look up another number in the telephone book.

"If you order fifty dollars' worth every morning, besides--"

"Three-four-four--Weston," remarked his wife to the telephone. To her husband she said conclusively, "I thought we were agreed to make Lydia's first season everything it ought to be. And isn't she being worth it? There hasn't a girl come out in Endbury in _years_ that's been so popular, or had so much--" She jerked her head around to the telephone--"Three-four-four--Weston? Is this Mr. Schmidt? I want Mr. Schmidt himself. Tell him Mrs. Emery--"

The Judge broke in, with the air of launching the most startling of arguments, "Well, my salary won't stand it; that's sure! If this keeps up I'll have to resign from the bench and go into practice again."

His wife looked at him without surprise. "Well, I've often thought that might be a very good thing." She added, with good-humored impatience, "Oh, go along, Nathaniel. You know it's just one of your bilious attacks, and you will catch cold sitting there with all your--Mr. Schmidt, I want to complain about the man who dished up the ice-cream at my last reception. I am going to give another one next week, and I want a different--"

"I won't be back to lunch," said her husband. The door slammed.

As he turned into the front walk it opened after him, and his wife called after him, "I'm going to give a dinner party for Lydia's girl friends here this evening, so you'd better get your dinner down-town or at the Meltons'. I'll telephone Julia that--"

The Judge stopped, disappointment, almost dismay, on his face. "I'm going to keep track from now on," he called angrily, "of just how often I catch a glimpse of Lydia. I bet it won't be five minutes a week."

Mrs. Emery evidently did not catch what he said, and as evidently considered it of no consequence that she did not. She nodded indifferently and, drawing in her head, shut the door.

At the end of the next week the Judge announced that he had put down every time he and Lydia had been in a room together, and it amounted to just forty-five minutes, all told. Lydia, a dazzling vision in white and gold, had come downstairs on her way to a dance, and because Paul, who was to be her escort, was a little late, she told her father that now was his time for a "visit." This question of "visiting" had grown to be quite a joke. Judge Emery clutched eagerly at anything in the nature of an understanding or common interest between them.

"Oh, I don't know you well enough to visit with you," he now said laughingly, "but I'll look at you long enough so I'll recognize you the next time I meet you on the street-car."

Lydia sat down on his knee, lightly, so as not to crumple her gauzy draperies, and looked at her father with the whimsical expression that became her face so well. "I'm paying you back," she said gayly. "I remember when I was a little girl I used to wonder why you came all the way out here to eat your meals. It seemed so much easier for you to get them near your office. Honest, I did."

"Ah, that was when I was still struggling to get my toes into a crack in the wall and climb up. I didn't have time for you then. And you're very ungrateful to bring it up against me, for all I was doing was to wear my nose clear off on the grindstone so's to be able to buy you such pretty trash as this." He stroked the girl's shimmering draperies, not thinking of what he was saying, smiling at her, delighted with her beauty, with her nearness to him, with this brief snatch of intimate talk.

"Ungrateful--yourself! What am I doing but wearing my nose off on the grindstone--Dr. Melton threatens nervous prostration every day--so's to show off your pretty trash to the best advantage. _I_ haven't any time to bother with _you_ now!" she mocked him laughingly, her hands on his shoulders.

"Well, that sounds like a bargain," he admitted, leaning back in his chair; "I suppose I've got to be satisfied if you are. _Are_ you satisfied?" he asked with a sudden seriousness. "How do you like Paul, now you know him better?"

Lydia flushed, and looked away in a tremulous confusion. "Why, when I'm with him I can't think of another thing in the world," she confessed in a low, ardent tone.

"Ah, well, then that's all right," said the Judge comfortably.

There was a pause, during which Lydia looked at the fire dreamily, and he looked at Lydia. The girl's face grew more and more absent and brooding.

The door-bell rang. "There he is, I suppose," said her father.

"But isn't it a pity we couldn't make connections?" she asked musingly. "Maybe I'd have liked you better with your nose on, better even than pretty trash."

"Eh?" said Judge Emery. His blankness was so acute that he slipped for an instant back into a rusticity he had long ago left behind him. "What say, Lydia?" he asked.

"Yes, yes, Paul; I didn't hear you come in," called the girl, jumping up and beginning to put on her wraps.

The young man darted into the room to help her, saying over his shoulder: "Much obliged to you, Judge, for your good word to Egdon, March and Company. I got the contract for the equipment of their new factory to-day."

The Judge screwed himself round in his chair till he could see Paul bending at Lydia's feet, putting on her high overshoes. "That's quite a contract, isn't it?" he asked, highly pleased.

"The biggest I ever got my teeth into," said Paul, straightening up. "I'm ashamed to have Lydia know anything about it, though. I didn't bring a hack to take her to the dance."

"Oh, I never thought you would," cried Lydia, standing up and stamping her feet down in her overshoes--an action that added emphasis to her protest. "I'd rather walk, it's such a little way. I like it better when I'm not costing people money."

"You're not like most of your sex," said Paul. "Down in Mexico, when I was there on the Brighton job, I heard a Spanish proverb: 'If a pretty woman smiles, some purse is shedding tears.'"

The two men exchanged laughing glances of understanding. Lydia frowned. "That is hateful--and horrid--and a _lie_!" she cried energetically, finding that they paid no attention to her protest.

"_I_ didn't invent it," Paul exonerated himself lightly.

"But you laughed at it--you think it's so--you--" She was trembling in a sudden resentment at once inexplicable and amusing to the other two.

"Highty-tighty! you little spitfire!" cried her father, laughing. "I see _your_ finish, my boy!"

"Good gracious, Lydia, how you do fly at a man! I take it back. I take it back." Paul looked admiringly at his pretty sweetheart's flashing eyes and crimson cheeks as he spoke.

She turned away and picked up her cloak without speaking.

"To tell the truth," said Paul, going on with the conversation as though it had not been interrupted, and addressing his father-in-law-to-be, "every penny I can rake and scrape is going into the house. Lydia's such a sensible little thing I knew she'd think it better to have something permanent than an ocean of orchids and candy now. Besides, such a belle as she is gets them from everybody else."

Mrs. Emery often pointed out to Lydia's inexperience that it was rare to see a man so magnanimously free from jealousy as her fiancé.

"The architect and I were going over it to-day," the young electrician went on, "and I decided, seeing this new contract means such a lot, that I would have the panels in the hall carved, after all--of course if you agree," he turned to Lydia, but went on without waiting for an answer. "The effect will be much handsomer--will go with the rest of the house better."

"They'd be lots harder to dust," said Lydia dubiously, putting a spangled web of gold over her hair. The contrast between her aspect and the dingy suggestions of her speech made both men laugh tenderly. "When Titania takes to being practical--" laughed Paul.

Lydia went on seriously. "Honestly, Paul, I'm afraid the house is getting too handsome, anyhow--everything in it. It's too expensive, I'm--"

"Nothing's too good for you." Paul said this with conviction. "And besides, it's an asset. The mortgage won't be so very large. And if we're in it, we'll just have to live up to it. It'll be a stimulus."

"I hope it doesn't stimulate us into our graves," said Lydia, as she kissed her father good-night.

"Well, your families aren't paupers on either side," said Paul.

A casual remark like this was the nearest approach he ever made to admitting that he expected Lydia to inherit money. He would have been shocked at the idea of allowing any question of money to influence his marriage, and would not have lifted a hand to learn the state of his future father-in-law's finances. Still, it was evident to the most disinterested eye that there were plenty of funds behind the Emery's ample, comfortable mode of life, and on this point his eyes were keen, for all their delicacy.

As the young people paused at the door, Judge Emery took a note-book out of his pocket and elaborately made a note. "Fifty-five minutes in eight days, Lydia," he called.

At the end of a fortnight he proclaimed aloud that the record was too discouraging to keep any longer; he was losing ground instead of gaining. He had followed Mrs. Emery to her room one afternoon to make this complaint, and now moved about uneasily, trying to bestow his large, square figure where he would not be in the way of his wife, who was hurrying nervously about to pack Lydia's traveling bag. She looked very tired and pale, and spoke as though near a nervous outbreak of some sort. Didn't he know that Lydia had to start for the Mallory Valentine house-party this afternoon, she asked with an asperity not directed at the Judge's complaint, for she considered that negligible, but at Lydia for being late. She often became so absorbed and fascinated by her own managerial capacity that she was vastly put out by lapses on the part of the object of it. She did not spare herself when it was a question of Lydia's career. Without a thought of fatigue or her own personal tastes, she devoted herself with a fanatic zeal to furthering her daughter's interests. It sometimes seemed very hard to bear that Lydia herself was so much less zealous in the matter.

When the girl came in now, flushed and guiltily breathless, Dr. Melton trotted at her heels, calling out excuses for her tardiness. "It's my fault. I met her scurrying away from a card-party, and she was exactly on time. But I walked along with her and detained her."

"It was the sunset," said Lydia, hurrying to change her hat and wraps. "It was so fine that when Godfather called my attention to it, I just _stood_! I forgot everything! There may have been sunsets before this winter, but it seems as though I hadn't had time to see one before--over the ironworks, you know, where that hideous black smoke is all day, and the sun turned it into such loveliness--"

"You've missed your trolley-car," said her mother succinctly.

"Oh, I'm _sorry_!" cried Lydia, in a remorse evidently directed more toward displeasing her mother than the other consequences of her delay, for she asked in a moment, very meekly, "Will it make so very much difference if I don't go till the next one?"

"You'll miss the Governor. He was coming down to meet those on this car. You'll have to go all alone. All the rest of the party were on this one."

"Oh, I don't care about that," cried Lydia. "If that's all--I'd ever so much rather go alone. I'm never alone a single minute, and it'll rest me. The crowd would have been so noisy and carried on so--they always do."

Her mother's aggrieved disappointment did not disappear. She said nothing, bringing Lydia's traveling wraps to her silently, and emanating disapproval until Lydia drooped and looked piteously at her godfather.

Dr. Melton cried out at this, "Look here, Susan Emery, you're like the carpenter that was so proud of his good planing that he planed his boards all away to shavings."

Mrs. Emery looked at him with a lack of comprehension of his meaning equaled only by her evident indifference to it.

"I mean--I thought what you were going in for was giving Lydia a good time this winter. You're running her as though she were a transcontinental railway system."

"You can't accomplish anything without system in this world," said Mrs. Emery. She added, "Perhaps Lydia will find, when she comes to ordering her own life, that she will miss her old mother's forethought and care."

Lydia flung herself remorsefully on her mother's neck. "I'm so _sorry_, Mother dear," she almost sobbed. Dr. Melton's professional eye took in the fact that everyone in the room was high-strung and tense. "The middle-of-the-social-season symptom," he called it to himself. "I'm so sorry, Mother," Lydia went on. "I will be more careful next time. You are _so_ good to--to--"

"Good Heavens!" said Dr. Melton. "All the child did was to give herself a moment's time to look at a fine spectacle, after spending all a precious afternoon on such a tragically idiotic pursuit as cards."

"Oh, _sunsets_!" Mrs. Emery disposed of them with a word. "Come, Lydia."

"I'll go with her, and carry her bag," said the doctor.

"You made such a good job of getting her here on time," said Mrs. Emery, unappeased.

The Judge offered to go, as a means of one of his rare visits with Lydia, but his wife declared with emphasis that she didn't care who went or didn't go so long as she herself saw that Lydia did not take to star-gazing again. It ended by all four proceeding down the street together.

"You're sure you remember everything, Lydia?" asked her mother.

"Let me see," said the girl, laughing nervously. "Do I? The Governor's wife is his second, so I'm to waste no time admiring the first set of children. They're Methodists, so I'm to keep quiet about our being Episcopalians--"

"I guess we're not Episcopalians enough to hurt," commented her father, who had never taken the conversion of his women-folks very seriously.

"And it's my pink crêpe for dinner and tan-colored suit if they have afternoon tea. And Mrs. Mallory is to be asked to visit us, but not her daughter, because of her impossible husband, and I'm to play my prettiest to the Governor, because he's always needing dynamos and such in the works, and Paul--"

The big car came booming around the corner, and she stopped her category of recommendations. The doctor rushed in with a last one as they stepped hurriedly toward the rear platform: "And don't forget that your host is the most unmitigated old rascal that ever stood in with two political machines at once."

The Judge swung her up on the platform, the doctor gave her valise to the conductor, her mother waved her hand, and she was off.

The two men turned away. Not so Mrs. Emery. She was staring after the car in a fierce endeavor to focus her gaze on the interior. "Who was that man that jumped up so surprised to speak to Lydia?"

"I didn't notice anybody," said the Judge.

Dr. Melton spoke quickly. "Lydia's getting in a very nervous state, my friends; I want you to know that. This confounded life is too much for her."

"She doesn't kill herself getting up in the morning," complained her father. "It is a month now since I've seen her at breakfast."

"I don't _let_ her get up," said Mrs. Emery. "I guess if you'd been up till two every morning dancing split dances because you were _the_ belle of the season, you'd sleep late! Besides," she went on, "she'll be all right as soon as her engagement is announced. The excitement of that'll brace her up."

"Good Lord! It's not more excitement she needs," began Dr. Melton; but they had reached the house, and Mrs. Emery, obviously preoccupied, pulled her husband quickly in, dismissing the doctor with a nod.

She drew the Judge hurriedly into the hall, and, "It was that Rankin!" she cried, the slam of the door underscoring her words, "and _I_ believe Marius Melton knew he was going on that car and made Lydia late on purpose."

Judge Emery was in the state in which of late the end of the day's work found him--overwhelmingly fatigued. He had not an ounce of superfluous energy to answer his wife's tocsin. "Well, what if it was?" he said.

"They'll be an hour and a half together--alone--more alone than anywhere except on a desert island. Alone--an hour and a half!"

"Oh, Susan! If Paul can't in three months make more headway than Rankin can tear down in an hour and a half--"

She raged at him, revolted at the calmness with which he was unbuttoning his overcoat and unwinding his muffler, "You don't understand--_anything_! I'm not afraid she'll elope with him--Paul's got her too solid for that--Rankin probably won't say anything of _that_ kind! But he'll put notions in her head again--she's so impressionable. And she says queer things now, once in a while, if she's left alone a minute. She needs managing. She's not like that levelheaded, sensible Madeleine Hollister. Lydia has to be guided, and you don't see anything--you leave it all to me."

She was almost crying with nervous exhaustion. That Lydia's course ran smooth through a thousand complications was not accomplished without an incalculable expenditure of nervous force on her mother's part. Dr. Melton had several times of late predicted that he would have his old patient back under his care again. Judge Emery, remembering this prophecy, was now moved by his wife's pale agitation to a heart-sickening mixture of apprehension for her and of recollection of his own extreme discomfort whenever she was sick. He tried to soothe her. "But, Susan, there's nothing we can do about it," he said reasoningly, hanging up his overcoat, blandly ignorant that her irritation came largely from his failure to fall in with her conception of the moment as a tragic one.

"You could _care_ something about it," she said bitterly, standing with all her wraps on. The telephone bell rang. She motioned him back. "No; I might as well go first as last. It'll be something I'd have to see about, anyway."

As he hesitated in the middle of the hall, longing to betake himself to a deep easy chair and a moment's relaxation, and not daring to do so, he was startled by an electric change in his wife's voice. "You're at Hardville, you say? Oh, Flora Burgess, I could go down on my knees in thanksgiving. I want you to run right out as fast as you can and get on the next Interurban car from Endbury. Lydia's on it--" she cast caution from her desperately--"and I've just heard that there's somebody I don't want her to talk to--you know--_carpenters_--run--fly--never mind what they say! Make them talk to you, too!"

She turned back to her husband, transfigured with triumph. "I guess that'll put a spoke in _his_ wheel!" she cried. "Flora Burgess's at Hardville, and that's only half an hour from here. I guess they can't get very far in half an hour."

The Judge considered the matter with pursed lips. "I wish it hadn't happened," he mused, as unresponsive to his wife's relief as he had been to her anxiety. "At first, I mean--last autumn--at all."

His wife caught him up with a good humor gay with relief. "Oh, give you time, Nat, and you come round to seeing what's under your nose. I was wishing it hadn't happened long before I knew it had. I breathed it in the air before we ever knew she'd so much as seen him."

"Melton says he thinks the fellow has a future before him--"

"Oh, Marius Melton! How many of his swans have stuffed feather pillows!"

The Judge demurred. "I often wish I could think he _was_--but Melton's no fool." He added, uneasily, "He's been pestering me again about taking a long rest--says I'm really out of condition."

"Perhaps a change of work would do you good--to be in active practice again. You could be your own master more--take more vacations, maybe."

The Judge surveyed her with a whimsical smile. "I'd make a lot more money in practice," he admitted.

If she heard this comment she made no sign, but went on, "You do work too constantly, too. I've always said so! If you'd be willing to take a little more relaxation--go out more--"

Judge Emery shuddered. "Endbury tea-parties--!"

His wife, half-way up the stairs, laughed down at him. "Tea-parties! There hasn't been a tea-party given in Endbury since we were wearing pull-backs."

The laugh was so good-natured that the Judge hoped for a favorable opening and ventured to say irrelevantly, as though reverting automatically to a subject always in his mind, "But, honest, Susie, can't we shave expenses down some? This winter is costing--"

She turned on him, not resentfully this time, but with a solemn appeal. "Why, Nat! Lydia's season! The last winter we'll have her with us, no doubt! I'd go on bread and water afterward to give her what she wants now--wouldn't _you_? What are we old folks good for but to do our best by our children?"

The Judge looked up at her, baffled, inarticulate. "Oh, of course," he agreed helplessly, "we want to do the best by our children."