Chapter 25

AN ELEMENT OF SOLIDITY

Lydia dated the estrangement from Marietta, which grew so rapidly during the next year, from the conversation on the day after the dinner party. She was cruelly wounded by her sister's attack on her, but she could never remember the scene without one of her involuntary laughs so disconcerting to Paul, who only laughed when he felt gay, certainly at nothing which affected him seriously. But Lydia's sense of humor was so tickled at the grotesque contrast between Marietta's injured conception of the brilliant social event from which she had been excluded and the leaden fiasco which it had really been, that even at the time, in the midst of denying hotly her sister's charges of snobbishness and social ambition, she was unable to keep back a shaky laugh or two as she cried out: "Oh, Etta! If you could know how things went, you'd be too thankful to have escaped it. It was awful beyond words!"

Marietta answered her by handing her with a grim silence a copy of that morning's paper, open at _Society Notes_. Loyal Flora Burgess had lavished on "Miss Lydia's" first dinner party her entire vocabulary of deferential, not to say reverential, encomiums. The "function had inaugurated a new era of cosmopolitan amplitude of social life in Endbury," was the ending of the lengthy paragraph that described the table decorations, the menu, the costume of the hostess, the names of the music-makers afterward.

Lydia burst into a hysterical laugh. "Flora Burgess is too killing!" she cried. "She was here in the afternoon to get details, and I just let her wander around and see what she could make out. I was too busy to pay any attention to her--Oh, Etta! I was dead and buried with fatigue before the people even began to come. I can't even remember much about it except that every single thing was wrong. That about 'cosmopolitan amplitude--' Oh, isn't Flora too funny!--means having music after dinner, I suppose. I don't know what else."

"Of course," said Marietta, rising to go, "it doesn't make any difference what it was really like! Only the people that were there know that. The report in the paper--"

"Oh, Marietta, what a thing to say--that it's all pretense, every bit--and not--"

Marietta went on steadily and mordantly: "I don't know how you feel about it, but _I_ shouldn't be very easy in my mind to have my only sister's name not on the list of guests at my most exclusive social function."

Dr. Melton, who made Lydia a professional call that morning, found her with reddened eyes, slowly washing and putting away innumerable dirty dishes. She told him that the second girl, apparently overcome by the events of the day before, had disappeared during the night. Dr. Melton thrust out his lips and said nothing, but he took off his coat, put on an apron, and, pushing his patient away from the dishpan, attacked a huge pile of sticky plates. He worked rapidly and silently, with a surgeon's deftness. Lydia sat quiet for some time, looking at him. Finally, "I hadn't been crying because of dirty dishes," she told him; "I'm not such a child as that. Marietta has been here. She said some things pretty hard to bear about her not having been invited to that awful dinner party. I didn't know what she was talking about a good deal of the time--it was all about what a snob and traitor to my family I was growing to be."

"You mustn't blame Marietta too much," said the doctor, rinsing and beginning to dry the plates with what seemed to Lydia's fatigued languor really miraculous speed. "It's true that she watches your social advance with the calm disinterestedness of a cat watching somebody pour cream out of a jug. She wants her saucerful. But look here. Did I ever tell you about the man Montaigne speaks of who spent all his life to acquire the skill necessary to throw a grain of millet through the eye of a needle? Well, that man was proud of it, but poor Marietta's haunted by doubts as to whether in her case it's been worth while. It makes her naturally inclined to be snappy."

He was so used to delighting in Lydia's understanding of his perversely obscure figures of speech that he turned about, surprised to hear no appreciative comment. She was looking away with troubled eyes.

"Paul will think I ought not to have let Marietta talk to me like that--that I ought to have resented it. I never can remember to resent things."

The doctor began setting out polished water glasses on a tray. "It is the glory of a man to pass by an offense," he quoted. "Ah, don't you suppose if we knew all about things we'd feel as relieved at not having resented an injury as if we had held our hands from striking a blind man who had inadvertently run against us?"

There was no response. It was the second time that one of his metaphors, far-fetched as he loved them, but usually intelligible to Lydia, had missed fire. He turned on her sharply. "What are you thinking about?" he asked.

She raised her tragic eyes to his. "About the mashed potatoes last night--they didn't have a bit of salt in them--they were too nasty for--"

"Oh, pshaw! It makes no difference whether your dinner party was a success or not! You know that as well as I do. A dinner party is a relic of the Dark Ages, anyhow--if not of the Stone Age! As a physician, I shudder to see people sitting down to gorge themselves on the richest possible food, all carefully rendered extra palatable in order that they may put upon their bodies the burden of throwing off an enormous amount of superfluous food. A hundred years from now people will be as ashamed of us for our piggishness as we are of our eighteenth-century forbears for their wine-swilling to the detriment of their descendants. A dinner party of to-day bears no more relation to a rational gathering of rational people for the purpose of rational social intercourse than--"

He had run on with his usual astonishing loquacity without drawing breath, overwhelming Lydia with a fresh flood of words when she tried to break in; but she now sprang up and motioned him peremptorily to silence.

"Please, please, Godfather, don't! I asked you not to unsettle me--you're not kind to do it! You're not kind! I must think it's important and, and--the necessary thing to do. I _must_!" She put her hands over her eyes as she spoke. She was trying to shut out a vision of Paul's embittered face of wrathful chagrin. "That's the trouble with me," she went on. "Something in me makes it hard for me to think it important enough to give up everything else for it--and I--"

"Why '_must_' you?" asked the doctor bluntly, crumpling his damp dishcloth into a ball.

Lydia looked at him and saw Paul so evidently that the doctor saw with her. "I must! I _must_!" she only repeated.

Dr. Melton opened his mouth wide, closed it again with a snap, and threw the tightly wadded ball in his hand passionately upon the floor with the gesture of an angry child. Lydia was standing now, looking down at the red-faced little man as he peered up at her after his silent outbreak. His attitude of fury so contrasted with the pacific white apron which enveloped him, that she broke out into a laugh. Even as she laughed and turned away to answer a knock at the door, she was acutely thankful that it was not with Paul that she had been set upon by that swiftly mobile change of humor, that it was not at Paul that she had launched that disrespectful mirth.

The person who knocked proved to be a very large, rosy-cheeked female, who might be a big, overgrown child or a preposterously immature woman for all Lydia, looking at her in perplexity, could make out. She felt no thrill of premonition as this individual advanced into the kitchen, a pair of immense red hands folded before her.

"I'm Anastasia O'Hern, ma'am," she announced with a thick accent of County Clare and a self-confident, good-humored smile, "though mostly I'm called 'Stashie--and I'm just over from th' old country to my Aunt Bridgie that washed for you till the rheumatism got her, and when she told me about what you'd done for her and Patsy--how you'd sent off that ould divil where she couldn't torment Patsy no more, and him as glad of it as Aunt Bridgie herself, just like she knew he would be, and what an awful time you do be havin' with gurrls, and a baby comin', I says to myself and to Aunt Bridgie, 'There's the lady I'm goin' to worrk for if she'll lave me do ut,' and Aunt Bridgie was readin' to me in the paper about your gran' dinner party last night and I says to her and to myself, 'There'll be a main lot of dishes to be washed th' day and I'd better step over and begin.'"

She pulled off the shawl that had covered her head of flaming hair, and smiled broadly at her two interlocutors, who remained motionless, staring at her in an ecstasy of astonishment.

As she looked into Lydia's pale face and reddened eyes, the smile died away. She clasped her big hands with a pitying gesture, and cried out a Gaelic exclamation of compassion with a much-moved accent; then, "It's time I was here," she told herself. She wiped her eyes, passed the back of her hand over her nose with a sniff, picked up the dishcloth from the floor, and advanced upon a pile of dirty silver. Her massive bulk shook the floor.

"I don't know no more about housework than Casey's pig," she told them cheerfully, "but Aunt Bridgie says in America they don't none of the gurrls know nothing. They just hold their jobs because their ladies know they couldn't do no better to change, and maybe I can learn. I want to help."

She emptied the silver into the dishwater with a splash, and set to work, turning her broad face to them to say familiarly over her shoulder to Lydia, "Now, just you go and lie down and send the little ould gentleman about his business. You need to be quiet--for the sake of the one that's coming; and don't you forget I'm here. I'm--_here_!"

Dr. Melton drew Lydia away silently, and not until they had put two rooms between them and the kitchen did they dare face each other. With that first interchange of looks came peals of laughter--Lydia's light, ringing laughter--to hear which the doctor offered up heartfelt thanksgivings.

"That is your fate, Lydia," he said finally, wiping his eyes.

"Don't you just love her?" Lydia cried. "Isn't she the most _human_ thing!"

"Do you remember Maeterlinck's theory that every soul summons--"

Lydia interrupted to say with a wry, humorous mouth, "You know I don't know anything. Don't ask me if I remember things."

"Well, Maeterlinck has one of his fanciful theories that everybody calls to him from the unknown those elements that he most needs, which are most in harmony with--"

"I caught a good solid element that time," cried Lydia, laughing again.

"She's embodied Loyalty," said the doctor. "It breathes from every pore."

"She's going to smash my cut glass and china something awful," Lydia foretold.

Dr. Melton took his godchild by the shoulders and shook her. "Now, Lydia Emery, you listen to me! I don't often issue an absolute command, if I am your physician, but I do now. You _let_ her smash your china and cut glass, and all the rest of your devastating trash she can lay her hands on, rather than lose her--until after September, anyhow! It's a direct reward of virtue for your having shipped the 'ould divil'!"

Lydia's face clouded. "I'm afraid Paul won't think her much of a substitute for Ellen," she murmured, "and we'll have to find a cook somehow even if this one learns enough to be second girl."

"Second girl!" ejaculated the doctor. "She's a human being with a capacity for loyalty."

"She's evidently awfully incompetent--"

The doctor snorted. "Competence--I loathe the word! It's used now to cover all imaginable sins, as folks used to excuse all manner of rascality in a good swordsman. We're beyond the frontier period now when competence was a matter of life and death. We ought to begin to have some glimmering realization that there are other--"

"_Oh_, what a hand for talk!" said Lydia.

The doctor rejoiced at her laughing impatience. He thought to himself, as he looked at her standing in the doorway and waving good-by to him, that she seemed a very different creature from the drooping and tearful--he interrupted his chain of thought as he boarded his car, to exclaim, "May she live long, that heavy-handed, vivifying Celt!"