Chapter 21

CARD-DEALING AND PATENT CANDLES

Spring had come with its usual hotly advancing rush upon the low-lying, sheltered southerly city. There had been a few days of magical warmth, full of spring madness, when every growing thing had expanded leaves with furious haste, when the noise of children playing in the street sounded loud through newly-opened windows, when, even on city streets, every breath of the sweet, lively air was an intoxicating potion. Then, with a bound, the heat was there. Evenings and nights were still cool, but noons were as oppressive as in July. The scarcely expanded leaves hung limp in a summer heat.

All during that eventful winter, Mrs. Emery had frequently remarked to her sister-in-law that Lydia's social career progressed positively with such brilliancy that it was like "something you read about." Mrs. Sandworth invariably added the qualifying clause, "But in a very nice book, you know, with only nice people in it, where everything comes out nicely at the end." Her confidence in literature as a respectable source of pleasure was not so guileless as Mrs. Emery's. It had been cruelly shaken by dipping into some of the Russian novels of the doctor's.

Not infrequently the two ladies felt, with a happy importance, that they were the authors of the book and that the agreeable episodes and dramatic incidents which had kept the flow of the narrative so sparkling were the product of their own creative genius. When April came on, and Lydia agreed to the announcement of her engagement, they felt the need of some remarkable way of signaling that important event and of closing her season with a burst of glory. For her season had to end! Dr. Melton said positively that if Lydia had another month of the life she had been leading he would not be responsible for the consequences. "She has a fine constitution, inherited from her farmer grandparents," he said, smiling to see Mrs. Emery wince at this uncompromising statement of Lydia's ancestry, "but her nervous organization is too fine for her own good. And I warn you right now that if you get her nerves once really jangled, I shall take to the woods. You can just give the case to another doctor. It would be too much for _me_."

The girl herself insisted that she felt perfectly well and able to stand more than when she first began going out. She affirmed this with some impatience, her eyes very bright, her cheeks flushed, whenever her godfather protested against a new undertaking. "When you get going, you _can't_ stop," she told him, shaking off his detaining hand. Mrs. Emery told the doctor that he'd forgotten the time when he was young or he'd remember that all girls who'd been popular at all--let alone a girl like Lydia--looked thin and worn by the end of the season; but during the last week of April, when the first hot days had arrived, a small incident surprised her into thinking that perhaps the doctor had some right on his side.

Not that there was in itself anything so very alarming about a nervous explosion from a girl so high-strung and susceptible as Lydia. The startling thing was that this explosion proceeded, so far as her mother could see, from nothing at all, from the idlest of chance remarks by Mrs. Sandworth, as always, whitely innocent of the smallest intention to wound.

She and Mrs. Emery were much given to watching Lydia dress for the innumerable engagements that took her away from the house. They made a pretext of helping her, but in truth they were carried away by the delight in another's beauty which is more common among women than is generally imagined. They took the profoundest interest in the selection of the toilet she should wear, and regarded with a charmed surprise the particular aspect of Lydia's slim comeliness which it brought out. They could not decide whether they liked her best in clinging, picture costumes, big hats, plumes, trailing draperies, and the like, or dashing, jaunty effects. Once in the winter, after she had left them on her way to an evening skating party and they had seen her from the window join Hollister and add her skates to those glittering on his shoulder, Mrs. Sandworth promulgated one of her unexpected apothegms: "Do you know what we are, Susan Emery? We're a couple of old children playing with a doll." Mrs. Emery protested with an instant, reproving self-justification: "_You_ may be--you're not her mother; but I understand Lydia through and through."

Mrs. Emery felt that if Lydia had overheard that remark of her aunt's her excitement and resentment might have been natural; but the one which led to the distressing little scene in late April was as neutral as an ordinary morning salutation. The two were watching Lydia dress for a luncheon which Mrs. Hollister--_the_ Mrs. Hollister--was giving in her honor. It was about noon of a warm day, and the air that came in at the open windows was thrillingly alive with troubling, disquieting suggestions of the new life of spring. Lydia, however, showed none of the languor which the sudden heat had brought to the two elder women. She was a little late, and her hurry had sent a high color to her cheeks, the curves of which were refined to the most exquisite subtlety by the loss of flesh so deplored by Dr. Melton. She was used, by this time, to dressing in a hurry, but her fingers trembled a little, and she tried three times before she could coil her dark silky hair smoothly. She was frowning a little with the fixity of her concentration as she turned to snatch up her long gloves and she did not hear Mrs. Sandworth's question until it had been repeated,

"I said, Lydia, is it to be bridge this afternoon?"

"I don't know," said Lydia with the full stop of absent indifference.

"Didn't Mrs. Hollister say?"

"Maybe she did. I didn't notice." The girl was tugging at her glove.

"Well, anyhow," said her mother, "since everybody's giving you card-parties, I should think you'd want to practice up and learn how to deal better. It's queer," she went on to Mrs. Sandworth, "Lydia's so deft about so many things, that she should deal cards so badly."

"Oh, goodness! As if there was nothing better to do than that!" cried Lydia, beginning on the other glove.

"Well, what _have_ you to do that's better?" asked her aunt in some astonishment. "Lydia, my dear, your collar is pinned the least bit crooked. Here, just let me--"

Lydia had stopped short, her glove dangling from her wrist. "Why, what a horrible thing to say!" She brought this out with a tragic emphasis, immensely disconcerting to her two elders.

"Horrible!" protested Mrs. Sandworth.

"Yes, horrible," insisted the girl. She had turned very pale. "The very way you say it and don't think anything about it, _makes_ it horrible."

Mrs. Sandworth began to doubt her own senses. "Why, what did I say?" she appealed to Mrs. Emery in bewildered interrogation, but before the latter could answer Lydia broke out: "If I really believed that, why, I'd--I'd--" She hesitated, obviously between tragic consequences, and then, to the great dismay of her companions, began to cry, still standing in the middle of the floor, her glove dangling from her slim, white wrist.

"Don't Lydia! Oh, don't, dear! You'll make yourself look like a fright for the luncheon." Mrs. Emery ran to her daughter with a solicitude in which there was considerable irritation. "You're perfectly exhausting, taking everything that deadly serious way. Don't be so _morbid_! You know your Aunt Julia didn't mean anything. She never does!"

Lydia pulled away and threw herself on the bed, still sobbing, and protesting that she could not go to the luncheon; and in the end Mrs. Emery was obliged to make the profoundest apologies over the telephone to a justly indignant hostess.

In the meantime Lydia was undressed and put to bed by Mrs. Sandworth, who dared not open her mouth. The girl still drew long, sobbing breaths, but before her aunt left the room she lay quiet, her eyes closed. The other was struck by the way her pallor brought out the thinness of her lovely face. She hovered helplessly for a moment over the bed. "Is there anything I can do for you, dearie?" she asked humbly.

Lydia shook her head. "Just let me be quiet," she murmured.

At this, Mrs. Sandworth retreated to the door, from which she ventured a last "Lydia darling, you know I'm sorry if I said anything to hurt--"

Lydia raised herself on her elbow and looked at her solemnly. "It wasn't what you _said_; it was what it _meant_!" she said tragically.

With this cryptic utterance in her ears, Mrs. Sandworth fled downstairs, to find her sister-in-law turning away from the telephone with a frown. "Mrs. Hollister was very much provoked about it, and I don't blame her. It's hard to make her understand we couldn't have given her a _little_ warning. And--that's the most provoking part--I didn't dare say Lydia is really sick, when, as like as not, she'll be receiving company this evening."

"You wouldn't want her sick, just so it would be easier to explain, would you?" asked Mrs. Sandworth with her eternal disconcerting innocence.

Mrs. Emery relieved her mind by snapping at her sister-in-law with the violence allowed to an intimate of many years' standing, "Good gracious, Julia! you're as bad as Lydia! Turning everything people say into something quite different--"

Mrs. Sandworth interrupted hastily, "Susan, tell me, for mercy's sake, what did I say? The last thing I remember passing my lips was about her collar's being a little crooked,--and just now she told me, as though it was the crack of Doom, that it wasn't what I said, but what it meant, that was so awful. What in the world does she mean?"

Mrs. Emery sank into a seat with a gesture of utter impatience. "Mean? Mean nothing! Didn't you ever know an engaged girl before?"

"Well, I'm sure when I was engaged I never--"

"Oh, yes, you did; you _must_ have. They all do. It's nerves."

But a moment later she contradicted her own assurance with a sigh of unresignation. "Oh, dear! why can't Lydia be just bright and wholesome and fun-loving and _natural_ like Madeleine Hollister!" She added darkly, "I just feel in my bones that this has something to do with that Rankin and his morbid ideas."

Mrs. Sandworth was startled. "Good gracious! You don't suppose she--"

"No; of course I don't! I never thought of such a thing. You ought to see her when she is with Paul. She's just _fascinated_ by him! But you know as well as I do that ideas go right on underneath all that!" Her tone implied a disapproval of their tenacity of life. "And yet, Lydia's really nothing unusual! Before they get married and into social life, and settled down and too busy to think, most girls have a queer spell. Only most of them take it out on religion. Oh, why couldn't she have met that nice young rector--if she had to meet somebody to put ideas into her head--instead of an anarchist."

"Well, it's certainly all past now," Mrs. Sandworth reassured her.

"Yes; hasn't it been a lovely winter! Everybody's been so good to Lydia. Everything's succeeded so! But I suppose Dr. Melton's right. We ought to call her season over, except for the announcement party--and the wedding, of course--and oh, dear! There are so many things I'd planned to do I can't possibly get in now. It seems strange a child of mine should be so queer and have such notions."

However, after the two had talked over the plans for a great evening garden-party in the Emery "grounds" and Mrs. Emery's creative eye had seen the affair in a vista of brilliant pictures, she felt more composed. She went up quietly to Lydia's door and looked in.

The girl was lying on her back, her wide, dark eyes fixed on the ceiling. Something in the expression of her face gave her mother a throb of pain. She yearned over the foolish, unbalanced young thing, and her heart failed her, in that universal mother's fear for her child of the roughnesses of life, through which she herself has passed safely and which have given savor to her existence. In her incapacity to conceive other roughnesses than those she could feel herself, she was, it is probable, much like the rest of humankind. She advanced to the bed, her tenderest mother-look on her face, and cut Lydia off from speech with gentle wisdom. "No, no, dear; don't try to talk. You're all tired out and nervous and don't know--"

Lydia had begun excitedly: "I've been feeling it for a long time, but when Aunt Julia said right out that I didn't know how to do anything better than--that I was only good to--"

Her mother laid a firm, gentle hand over the quivering mouth, and said in a soothing murmur, "Hush, hush! darling. It wasn't anything your poor foolish Aunt Julia said. It isn't anything, anyhow, but being up too much and having too much excitement. People get to thinking all kinds of queer things when they're tired. Mother knows. Mother knows best."

She had prepared a glass of bromide, and now, lifting Lydia as though she were still the child she felt her to be, she held it to her lips. "Here, Mother's poor, tired little girl--take this and go to sleep; that's all you need. Just trust Mother now."

Lydia took the draught obediently, but she sighed deeply, and fixed her mother with eyes that were unrelentingly serious.

When Mrs. Emery looked in after half an hour, she saw that Lydia was still awake, but later she fell asleep, and slept heavily until late in the afternoon.

On her appearance at the dinner-table, still languid and heavy-eyed, she was met with gentle, amused triumph. "There, you dear. Didn't I tell you what you needed was sleep. There never was a girl who didn't think a sick headache meant there was something wrong with her soul or something."

Judge Emery laughed good-naturedly, as he sliced the roast beef, and said, with admiration for his wife, "It's a good thing my high-strung little girl has such a levelheaded mother to look after her. Mother knows all about nerves and things. She's had 'em--all kinds--and come out on top. Look at her now."

Lydia took him at his word, and bestowed on her mother a long look. She said nothing, and after a moment dropped her eyes listlessly again to her plate. It was this occasion which Mrs. Emery chose to present to the Judge her plans for the expensive garden-party, so that in the animated and, at times, slightly embittered discussion that followed, Lydia's silence was overlooked.

For the next few days she stayed quietly indoors, refusing and canceling engagements. Mrs. Emery said it was "only decent to do that much after playing Mrs. Hollister such a trick," and Lydia did not seem averse. She sewed a little, fitfully, tried to play on the piano and turned away disheartened at the results of the long neglect--there had been no time in the season for practice--and wandered about the library, taking out first one book then another, reading a little and then sitting with brooding eyes, staring unseeingly at the page. Once her mother, finding her thus, inquired with some sharpness what book she was reading to set her off like that. "It's a book by Maeterlinck," said Lydia, "that Godfather gave me ever so long ago, and I've never had time to read it."

"Do you like it? What's it about?" asked her mother, suspiciously.

"I can't understand it," said Lydia, "when I'm reading it. But when I look away and think, I can, a little bit. I love it. It makes me feel like crying. It's all about our inner life."

"My dear Lydia, you put your hat right on and go over to have a little visit with Marietta. What you need is a little fresh air and some sensible talk. I've been too busy with my invitation list to visit with you as I ought. Marietta'll be real glad to see you. Here's your hat. Now, you run right along, and stop at Hallam's on the way and get yourself an ice-cream soda. It's hot, and that'll do you good."

As Lydia was disappearing docilely out of the door, her mother stopped before going back to her desk and the list of guests for the garden-party, which had been torturing her with perplexity, to say, "Oh, Lydia, don't forget to ask Marietta to order the perforated candles."

"Perforated--!" said Lydia blankly, pausing at the door.

"Yes; don't you remember, the last time Mrs. Hollister called here she told us all about them."

"No, I don't remember," said Lydia, with no shade of apology in her tone.

"Why, my dear! You're getting so absent-minded! Do you mean to say you didn't take in anything of what she was talking about? It's a new kind, that has holes running through it so the melted wax runs down the inside! Why, we were talking about them the whole time she was here that last call."

Lydia opened the door, observing vaguely, "Oh, yes; I do seem to remember something. It was a very dull visit, anyhow."

Mrs. Emery returned to her list, pursing up her lips and wagging her head. "You'll have to learn, dearie, that it's little details like that that make the difference between success and failure."

"We have electric light and gas," said Lydia.

Mrs. Emery looked up in astonishment and a little vexation. She, too, had nerves these days. "Why, Lydia, what's the matter with you? You know nobody uses those for table decoration."

"_We_ could," said Lydia.

"Why, my dear child, I never knew before there was a contrary streak in you, like your father. What in the world possesses you all of a sudden to object to candles?"

"It's not candles--it's the idea of--Oh, all the fuss and bother, when everybody's so tired, and the weather's so hot, and it's going to cost too much anyhow."

"Well, what would you have us fuss and bother about, if not over having everything nice when we entertain?" Mrs. Emery's air of enforced patience was strained.

Lydia surveyed her from the hall in silence. "That's just it--that's just it," she said finally, and went away.

Mrs. Emery laid down her pen to laugh to herself over the queer ways of children. "They begin to have notions with their first teeth, and I suppose they don't get over them till _their_ first baby begins to teethe."

When Lydia arrived at her sister's house, she found that competent housekeeper engaged in mending the lace curtains of her parlor. She had about her a battery of little ingenious devices to which she called Lydia's attention with pride. "I've taught myself lace-mending just by main strength and awkwardness," she observed, fitting a hoop over a torn place, "and it's not because I have any natural knack, either. If there's anything I hate to do, it's to sew. But these curtains do go to pieces so. I wash them myself, to be careful, but they are so fine. Still," she cast a calculating eye on the work before her, "I'll be through by the end of this week, anyhow--if that new Swede will only stay in the kitchen that long!"

She bent her head over her work again, holding it up to the light from time to time and straining her eyes to catch the exact thread with her almost impalpably fine needle. Lydia sat and fanned herself, looking flushed and tired from the walk in the heat, and listening in silence to Mrs. Mortimer's account of the various happenings of her household: "And didn't I find that good-for-nothing negro wench had been having that man--and goodness knows how many others--right here in the house. I told Ralph I never would have another nigger--but I shall. You can't get anything else half the time. I tell you, Lydia, the servant problem is getting to be something perfectly terrible--it's--"

Lydia broke in to say, "Why don't you buy new ones?"

Mrs. Mortimer paused with uplifted needle to inquire wildly, "New _what_?"

"New curtains, instead of spending a whole week in hot weather mending those."

"Good gracious, child! Will you ever learn anything about the cost of living! I think it's awful, the way Father and Mother have let you grow up! Why, it would take half a month's salary to reproduce these curtains. I got them at a great bargain--but even then I couldn't afford them. Ralph was furious."

"You could buy muslin curtains that would be just as pretty," suggested Lydia.

"Why, those curtains are the only things with the least distinction in my whole parlor! They _save_ the room."

"From what?"

"From showing that there's almost nothing in it that cost anything, to be sure! With them at the window, it would never enter people's heads to think that I upholstered the furniture myself, or that the pictures are--"

"Why shouldn't they think so, if you did?" Lydia proffered this suggestion with an air of fatigued listlessness, which, her sister thought, showed that she made it "simply to be contrary." Acting on this theory, she answered it with a dignified silence.

There was a pause. Lydia tilted her head back against the chair, and looked out of the window at the new green leaves of the piazza vine. Mrs. Mortimer's thin, white, rather large hands drew the shining little needle back and forth with a steady, hurrying industry. It came into her mind that their respective attitudes were symbolical of their lives, and she thought, glancing at Lydia's drooping depression, that it would be better for her if she were obliged to work more. "Work," of course, meant to Marietta those forms of activity which filled her own life. "_I_ never have any time for notions," she thought, the desperate, hurrying, straining routine of her days rising before her and moving her, as always, to rebellion and yet to a martyr's pride.

Lydia stirred from her listless pose and came over to her sister, sitting down on a stool at her feet. "Marietta, dear, please let me talk to you. I'm so miserable these days--and Mother won't let me say a word to her. She says it's spring fever, and being engaged, and the end of the season, and everything. Please, _please_ be serious, and let me tell you about it, and see if you can't help me."

Her tone was so broken and imploring that Mrs. Mortimer was startled. She was, moreover, flattered that Lydia should come to her for advice rather than to her parents. She put her arm around her sister's shoulders, and said gently, "Why, yes, dear; of course; anything--"

"Then stop sewing and listen to me--"

"But I can sew and listen, too."

"Oh, Etta, _please_! That's just the kind of thing that gets me so wild. Just a little while!"

The harassed housekeeper cast an anxious eye on the clock, but loyally stifled the sigh with which she laid her work aside. Lydia apologized for interrupting her. "But I do want you to really think of what I am saying. Everybody's always so busy thinking about _things_! Oh, Etta, I'm just as unhappy as I can be--and so scared when I think about--about the future."

Mrs. Mortimer's face softened wonderfully. She stroked Lydia's dark hair. "Why, poor dear little sister! Yes, yes, darling, I know all about it. I felt just so myself the month before I was married, and Mother couldn't help me a bit. Either she had forgotten all about it, or else she never had the feeling. I just had to struggle along through without anybody to help me or to say a word. Oh, I'm so glad I can help my little sister. _Don't_ be afraid, dear! There's nothing so terrible about it; nothing to be scared of. Why, once you get used to it you find it doesn't make a bit of difference to you. Everything's just the same as before."

Lydia lifted a wrinkled brow of perplexity to this soothing view of matrimony. "I don't know what you're talking about, Etta!" she cried in a bewilderment that seemed to strike her as tragic.

"Why--why, being married! Wasn't that what you meant?"

"Oh, no! _No!_ Nothing so definite as that! I couldn't be afraid of Paul--why should I be? I'm just frightened of--everything--what everybody expects me to do, and to go on doing all my life, and never have any time but to just hurry faster and faster, so there'll be more things to hurry about, and never talk about anything but _things_!" She began to tremble and look white, and stopped with a desperate effort to control herself, though she burst out at the sight of Mrs. Mortimer's face of despairing bewilderment, "Oh, don't tell me you don't see at all what I mean. I can't say it! But you _must_ understand! Can't we somehow all stop--_now_! And start over again! You get muslin curtains and not mend your lace ones, and Mother stop fussing about whom to invite to that party--that's going to cost more than he can afford, Father says--it makes me _sick_ to be costing him so much. And not fuss about having clothes just so--and Paul have our house built little and plain, so it won't be so much work to take care of it and keep it clean. I would so much rather look after it myself than to have him kill himself making money so I can hire maids that you _can't_--you say yourself you can't--and never having any time to see him. Perhaps if we did, other people might, and we'd all have more time to like things that make us nicer to like--"

At this perturbing jumble of suggestions, Mrs. Mortimer's head whirled. She took hold of the arms of her chair as if to steady herself, but, conscientiously afraid of discouraging the girl's confidence, she nodded gravely at her, as if she were considering the matter. Lydia sprang up, her eyes shining. "Oh, you dear! You _do_ see what I mean! You see how dreadful it is to look forward to just that--being so desperately troubled over things that don't really matter--and--and perhaps having children, and bringing them up to the same thing--when there must be so many things that do matter!"

To each of these impassioned statements her sister had returned an automatic nod. "I see what you mean," she now put in, a statement which was the outward expression of a thought running, "Mercy! Dr. Melton's right! She's perfectly wild with nerves! We must get her married as soon as ever we can!"

Lydia went over to the window, and stood looking out as she talked, now with an excited haste, now with a dragging note of fatigue in her voice. Her need of sympathy was so great that she did a violence to the reticence she had always kept, even with herself. She wondered aloud if it were not perhaps Daniel Rankin and his queer ideas that lay at the bottom of her trouble. She added, whirling about from the window, "For mercy's sake! don't go and think I am in love with him, or anything! I haven't so much as thought of him all winter! I see, now that Mother's pointed it out to me, how domineering he really was to me last autumn. I'm just crazy about Paul, too! When I'm with him he takes my breath away! But maybe--maybe I can't forget Mr. Rankin's _ideas_! You know he talked to me so much when I was first back--and if somebody would just argue me out of them, the way he did into them! I don't believe I'd ever have thought it queer to live the way we do, just to have more things and get ahead of other people--if he hadn't put the idea into my head. But nobody else will even _talk_ about it! They laugh when I try to."

She came over closer to the matron, and said imploringly, her voice trembling, "I don't _want_ to be queer, Marietta! What makes me? I don't like to have queer ideas, different from other people's--but every once in a while it all comes over me with a rush--what's the _good_ of all we do?"

Poor Lydia propounded this question as though it were the first time in the world's history that it had passed the lips of humanity. Her curious, puzzled distress rose up in a choking flood to her throat, and she stopped, looking desperately at her sister.

Mrs. Mortimer nodded again, calmly, drew a long breath, and seemed about to speak. Lydia gazed at her, her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright with unshed tears--all one eager expectancy. The older woman's eyes wandered suddenly for an instant. She darted forward, clapped her hands together once, and then in rapid succession three or four times. Then rolling triumphantly something between her thumb and forefinger, she turned to Lydia. The little operation had not taken the third of a moment, but the change in the girl's face was so great that Mrs. Mortimer was moved to hasty, half-shamefaced, half-defiant apology. "I _was_ listening to you, Lydia! I _was_ listening! But it's just the time of year when they lay their eggs, and I have to fight them. Last year my best furs and Ralph's dress suit were perfectly _riddled_! You know we can't afford new."

Lydia rose in silence and began pinning on her hat. Her sister, for all her vexation over the ending of the interview, could hardly repress a smile of superior wisdom at the other's face of tragedy. "Don't go, Lyddie, don't go!" She tried to put her arms around the flighty young thing. "Oh, dear Lydia, cultivate your sense of humor! That's all that's the matter with you. There's nothing else! Look here, dear, there _are_ moths as well as souls in the world. People have to be on the lookout for them,--for everything, don't you see?"

"They look out for _moths_, all right," said Lydia in a low tone. She submitted, except for this one speech, in a passive silence to her sister's combination of petting and exhortation, moving quietly toward the door, and stepping evenly forward down the walk.

She had gone down to the street, leaving Mrs. Mortimer still calling remorseful apologies, practical suggestions, and laughing comments on her "tragedy way of taking the world." At the gate, she paused, and then came back, her face like a mask under the shadow of her hat.

Marietta stood waiting for her with a quizzical expression. Under her appearance of lightly estimating Lydia's depression as superficial, she had been sensible of a not unfamiliar qualm of doubt as to her own manner of life, an uneasy heaving of a subconscious self not always possible to ignore; but, as was her resolute custom, she forced to the front that perception of the ridiculous which she had urged on her sister. She bit her lips, to conceal a smile at Lydia's mournful emphasis as she went on: "I forgot to tell you, Marietta, what I was sent over for. You're to be sure to order the perforated candles. It's the kind that has holes down the middle, so the wax doesn't look mussy on the outside, and it's very, very important to have the right kind of candles."

Mrs. Mortimer, willfully amused, looked with an obstinate smile into her sister's troubled eyes as Lydia hesitated, waiting, in spite of herself, for the understanding word.

"You're a darling, Lyddie," said the elder woman, kissing her again; "but you are certainly _too_ absurd!"

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