Chapter 27

FOR ARIADNE'S SAKE

Little Ariadne was six months old before Lydia could begin to make the slightest effort to resume the social routine of her life. This was not at all on account of ill health, for she had recovered her strength rapidly and completely, and, like a good many normal women, had found maternity a solvent of various slight physical disorders of her girlhood. She felt now a more assured physical poise than ever before, and could not attribute her disappearance from Endbury social life to weakness. The fact was that Dr. Melton had upheld her in her wish to nurse her baby herself, which limited her to very short absences from the house and to a very quiet life within doors. She also discovered that the servant problem was by no means simplified by the new member of the family. "Girls" had always been unwilling to come out to Bellevue because of the distance from their friends and followers, and they now put forth another universally recognized obstacle in the phrase, "I never work out where there is a baby. They make so much dirt." Anastasia O'Hern was there, to be sure--heavy-handed, warm-hearted 'Stashie, who took the new little girl to her loyal spinster heart and wept tears of joy over her safe arrival; but 'Stashie had proved, as Paul predicted from the first time he saw her, incorrigibly rattle-headed and loose-ended. She had learned to prepare a number of simple, homely dishes, quite enough to supply the actual needs of the everyday household, and what she cooked was unusually palatable. She had the Celtic feeling for savoriness. She had also managed, under Lydia's zealous tuition, to overcome the Celtic tolerance for dirt, and thanks to her square, powerful body, as strong as a ditch-digger's, she made light work of keeping the house in a most gratifying state of cleanliness.

But there were gaps in her equipment that were not to be filled by any amount of tuition. In the first place, as Paul said of her, she was as much like the traditional trim maid as a hippopotamus is like a gazelle. Furthermore, as Dr. Melton summed up the matter in answer to one of Paul's outbreaks against her, she was utterly incapable of comprehending that satisfied vanity is the vital element in human life. For anything that pertained to the appearance of things, 'Stashie was deaf, dumb and blind. She would as soon as not put one of her savory stews on the table in an earthen crock, and she never could be trusted to set the table properly. There were always some kitchen spoons among the silver, and the dishes looked, as Paul said, "as though she had stood off and thrown them at a bull's-eye in the middle of the table." Moreover, she herself could not emancipate herself from the ideas of toilet gleaned in the little one-room cabin in County Clare. She was passionately devoted to Lydia, and took with the humblest gratitude any hints about the care of her person, but it was like trying to make a color-blind person into a painter! Anastasia could only love on her knees, and serve, and sympathize and cherish; she could not remember to comb her hair, or to put on a clean apron when she opened the door, even if it were Madame Hollister herself who rang. She had once opened to that important personage attired in a calico wrapper, a sweater, and a pair of rubber boots, having just come in from emptying the ashes--one of the heavy tasks, outside her regular work, which she took upon her strong, willing self. "But I was clane, and I got her into the house in two minutes from the time she rang, the poor old soul!" she protested to Lydia, who, at Paul's instance, had taken her to task.

Lydia explained, "But Mr. Hollister's aunt is a person who would rather wait half an hour in the cold than see you without an apron."

To which 'Stashie exclaimed, in awestruck wonder before the mysteries of creation, "Folks do be the beatin'est, don't they now, Mis' Hollister!"

"And you must not speak of Mr. Hollister's aunt as a 'poor old soul,'" explained Lydia, apprehensive of Paul's wrath if he ever chanced to hear such a characterization.

"But she is that," protested 'Stashie. "Anybody that's her age and hobbles around so crippled up with the rheumatism--my heart bleeds for 'em."

"She is very rich--" began Lydia, but after a moment's hesitation she had not continued her lesson in social value. She often found that 'Stashie's questions brought her to a standstill.

There was something lacking in the Irishwoman's mental outfit, namely, the capacity even to conceive that ideal of impersonal self-effacement, which, as Paul said truthfully, is the everywhere accepted standard for servants. Her loquacity was a never-ending joke to Madeleine Lowder and her husband, who were exulting in a couple of deft, silent, expensive Japanese "boys" and who, since Madeleine frankly expressed her horror at the bother of having children, seemed likely to continue ignorant, except at comfortable second-hand, of harassing domestic difficulties.

If Lydia had not been in such dire need of another pair of hands than her own slender ones, or if the supply from Endbury intelligence offices had been a whit less unreliable and uncertain, she would not have felt justified in retaining the burly, uncouth Celt, in spite of her own affection, so intensely did Paul dislike her. As it was, she felt guilty for her presence and miserably responsible for her homeliness of conduct. 'Stashie was a constant point of friction between husband and wife, and Lydia was trying with desperate ingenuity to avoid points of friction by some other method than the usual Endbury one of divided interests. Many times she lay awake at night, convinced that her duty was to dismiss Anastasia; only to rise in the morning equally convinced that things without her would be in the long run even harder and more disagreeable for Paul than they were now. The upshot of the matter was that she herself was a very incompetent person, she was remorsefully sure of that; although her mother and Marietta and Paul's aunt all told her that she need expect nothing during the first year of a baby's life but one wretched round of domestic confusion.

Lydia did not find it so. She was immensely occupied, it is true, for though Ariadne was a strong, healthy child, who spent most of her time, her grandmother complained, in sleeping, to Lydia's more intimate contact with the situation there seemed to be more things to be done for the baby, in addition to the usual cares of housekeeping, than could possibly be crowded into twenty-four hours. And yet she was happier during those six months than ever before in her life; happier than she had ever dreamed anyone could be. She stepped about incessantly from one task to another and was very tired at night, but there was no nervous strain on her, and she had no moments of blasting skepticism as to the value of her labors.

Everything she did, even the most menial tasks connected with the baby, was dignified, to her mind, by its usefulness; and she so systematized and organized her busy days that she was always ahead of her work. Paul was obliged to alter his judgment of her as impractical and incapable--although of course the dearest and sweetest of little wives--for nothing could have been more competent than the way she managed her baby and her simple housekeeping. Indeed, there came to the young husband's mind not infrequently, and always with a slight aroma of bitterness, the conviction that Lydia was perfectly able to do whatever she really wished to do and considered important; and that previous conditions must have been due to her unwillingness to set herself seriously at the problems before her. It was a new theory about his wife's character, which the intelligent young man laid by on a mental shelf for future use after this period of intense domesticity should be past.

At present, he accepted thankfully his clean house and his savory food, was not too much put out by 'Stashie's eccentricities, since there was no one but the immediate families to see them, and rejoiced with a whimsical tenderness in Lydia's passion of satisfaction with her baby. He saw so little of the droll, sleeping, eating little mite that he could not as yet take it very seriously as his baby. But it was, on the whole, a happy half-year for him too. He was much moved and pleased by Lydia's joy. He had meant to make his wife happy.

Lydia herself was transported by the mere physical intoxication of new motherhood, a potion more exciting, so her much experienced physician said, than any wine ever fermented. She hung over her sleeping baby, poring upon the exquisite fineness of the skin, upon the rosy little mouth, still sucking comically at an imaginary meal, upon the dimpled, fragile hands, upon the peaceful relaxation of the body, till the very trusting, appealing essence of babyhood flooded her senses like a strong drug; and when the child was awake, and she could bathe the much creased little body, and handle the soft arms, and drop passionate kisses on the satin-smooth skin, and rub her cheek on the downy head, she found herself sometimes trembling and dizzy with emotion. She felt constantly buoyed up by a deep trust and belief in life which she had not known before. The huge and steadying continuity of existence was revealed to her in those days. It was a revelation that was never to leave her. She outgrew definitely the sense of the fragmentary futility of living which had always been, inarticulate, unvoiced, but intensely felt, the torment of her earlier life.

It grieved her generous heart and her aspiration to share all with her husband that the exigences of his busy life deprived him of any knowledge of this newly-opened well of sweet waters, that he had nothing from his parenthood but an amused, half shame-faced pride in points about the baby which, he was informed, were creditable.

At a faint hint of this feeling on Lydia's part, her sister-in-law broke into her good-natured laughter at Lydia's notions. "What can a man know about a baby?" she cried conclusively.

"Why, I didn't know about one till Ariadne came. I learned on her. What's to hinder a man's doing the same thing?"

Madeleine was so much amused by this fantastic idea that she repeated it to Dr. Melton, who came in just then.

"Don't it take _Lydia_!" she appealed to him.

The doctor considered the lovely, fair-haired creature in silence for a moment before answering. Then, "Yes; of course you're right," he assented. "It's a strictly feminine monopoly. It's as true that all men are incapable of understanding the significance of a baby in the universe and in their own lives, as it is true that all women love babies and desire them." His tone was full of a heavy significance. He could never keep his temper with Paul's sister.

Madeleine received this without a quiver. She neither blushed nor looked in the least abashed, but there was an unnecessary firmness in her voice as she answered, looking him steadily in the eye: "Exactly! That's just what I've been telling Lydia." She often said that she was the only woman in Endbury who wasn't afraid of that impertinent little doctor.

After Madeleine had gone away, Lydia looked at her godfather with shining eyes. "I am living! I am living!" she told him, holding up the baby to him with a gesture infinitely significant; "and I like it as well as I thought I should!"

"Most people do," he informed her, "when they get a peck at it. It generally takes something cataclysmic, too, to tear them loose from their squirrel-cages--like babies, or getting converted."

If he thought that early married life could also be classed among these beneficently uprooting agencies, he kept his thoughts to himself. Lydia's marriage had been eminently free from disagreeable shocks or surprises, and amply deserved to be called successful in the usual reasonable and moderate application of that adjective to matrimony; but there had been nothing in it, certainly, to destroy even temporarily anyone's grasp on what are known as the realities of life.

The doctor considered, and added to his last speech: "Getting converted is surer. Babies grow up!"

Lydia felt that her godfather was right, and that babies gave one only a short respite, when, toward spring, she observed in all the inhabitants of her world repeated signs of uneasy dissatisfaction with her "submergence in domesticity," as Mrs. Emery put it in a family council. Her father inquired mildly, one day in March, with the touchingly vague interest he took in his children's affairs, if it weren't about time she returned a few calls and accepted some invitations, and began "to live _like_ folks again." "Ariadne isn't the first baby in the world," he concluded.

"She's the first one _I_ ever had," Lydia reminded him, with the humorous smile that was so like his own.

"Well, you mustn't forget, as so many young mothers do, that you're a member of society and a wife, as well as a wet-nurse," he said.

Marietta had never resumed an easy or genial intercourse with the Hollisters since the affair of the dinner party, but she came to call at not infrequent intervals, and Paul's sister dropped in often, to "keep an eye on Lydia," as she told her husband. She had an affection for her sister-in-law, in spite of an exasperated amusement over her liability to break out with new ideas at unexpected moments. Both these ladies were loud in their exhortations to Lydia not to let maternity be in her life the encumbering, unbeautifying, too lengthy episode it was to women with less force of character than their own. "You do get so _out_ of things," Madeleine told her with her usual breathless italicizing, "if you stay away too long. You just never can catch up! There's a behind-the-timesy _smell_ about your clothes--honest, there is--if you let them go too long."

Marietta added her quota of experienced wisdom to the discussion. "If you just hang over a baby all the time, you get morbid, and queer, and different."

Madeleine had laughed, and summed up the matter with a terse, "Worse than that! You get left!"

Lydia's elder brother, George, the rich one, who lived in Cleveland and manufactured rakes and hoes, wrote her one of his rare letters to the same effect. Lydia thought it likely that he had been moved to this unusual show of interest in her affairs by proddings from her mother and Marietta. If this surmise was correct, and if a similar request had been sent to Henry, the other member of the Emery family, the one who had married the grocer's daughter, the appeal had a strikingly different effect. From Oregon came an impetuous, slangily-worded exhortation to Lydia not to make a fool of herself and miss the best of life to live up to the tommyrot standard of old dry-as-dust Endbury. The Emerys heard but seldom from this erring son, and Lydia, who had been but a child when he left home, had never before received a letter from him. He wrote from a fruit farm in Oregon, the description of which, on the grandiloquent letter-head, gave an impression of ampleness and prosperity which was not contradicted by the full-blooded satisfaction in life which breathed from every line of the breezy, good-natured letter.

The incident stirred Lydia's imagination. It spoke of a wider horizon--of a fresher air than that about her. She tried to remember the loud-talking, much-laughing, easy-going young man as she had seen him last. They were too far apart in years to have had much companionship, but there had been between them an unspoken affection which had never died. People always said that George and Marietta were alike and Lydia and Harry. To this Mrs. Emery always protested that Lydia wasn't in the _least_ like Henry, and she didn't know what people were talking about; but the remark gave a secret pleasure to Lydia. She, too, was very fond of laughing, and her brother's vein of light-hearted nonsense had been a great delight to her. It was not present in any of the rest of the family, and certainly did not show itself in her at this period of her life.

During this time Paul's attention was concentrated on bringing about a reallotment of American Electric territory in the Middle West, an arrangement that would add several busy cities to his district and make a decided difference in his salary and commissions. He worked early and late in the Endbury office, and made many trips into all parts of the field, to gather data conclusive of the value of his scheme. Lydia had tried hard to get from him information enough to understand what it was all about, but he put her off with vague, fatigued assurances that it was too complicated for her to grasp, or for him to go over without his papers; that it would take him too long to explain, and that, anyhow, she could be sure of one thing--it was all straight, clean business, designed entirely to give the public better service and more work from everybody all 'round. Lydia did not doubt this. It was always a great source of satisfaction to her to feel secure and unshaken trust in her father's and her husband's business integrity, and she was sorry for Marietta, who could not, she feared, count among her spiritual possessions any such faith in Ralph. It was, on the other hand, one of her most unresigned regrets, that she was not allowed to share in these ideals for public service of her husband and father--these ideals so distantly glimpsed by her, and perhaps not very consciously felt by them. It was not that they refused to answer any one of her questions, but they were so little in the habit of articulating this phase of their activities that their tongues balked stubbornly before her ignorant and fumbling attempts to enter this inner chamber.

"Oh, it's all right, Lydia! Just you trust me!" Paul would cry, with a hint of vexation in his voice, as if he felt that questions could mean only suspicion.

Lydia's tentative efforts to construct a bridge between her world and his met constantly with this ill success. She had had so little training in bridge-building, she thought sadly.

One evening that spring, such a futile attempt of hers was interrupted by the son of one of their neighbors, a lad of eighteen, who had just been given a subordinate position in his father's business. As he strolled up to their veranda steps, Lydia looked up from the dress she was enlarging for the rapidly growing baby and reflected that astonishingly rapid growth is the law of all healthy youth. The tall boy looked almost ludicrous to her in his ultra-correct man's outfit, so vividly did she recall him, three or four years before, in short trousers and round-collared shirt-waist. His smooth, rosy face had still the downy bloom of adolescence.

"Howd' do, Walter!" said Paul, glancing up from a pile of blue-prints over which he had been straining his eyes in the fading evening light.

"Evening," answered the boy, nodding and sitting down on the top step with one knee up. "D'you mind if I smoke, Mrs. Hollister?"

"Not at all," she answered gravely, tickled by the elaborate carelessness with which he handled his new pipe.

"What you working on, Hollister?" he went on with the manner of one old business man to another.

Lydia hid a smile. She found him delicious. She began to think how she could make Dr. Melton laugh with her account of Walter the Man.

"The lay-out of the new power-house--Elliott-Gridley works in Urbana," answered Paul, in a straightforward, reasonable tone, a little absent.

Lydia stopped smiling. It was a tone he had never used to answer any business question she had ever put to him. "I'm figuring on their generators," he went on in explanation.

"Big contract?" asked Walter.

"Two thousand kilowatt turbo generator," answered Paul.

The other whistled. "Whew! I didn't know they had the cash!"

"They haven't," said Paul briefly.

"Oh, chattel-mortgage?" surmised the other.

"Lease-contract," Paul corrected. "That doesn't have to be recorded."

"What's the matter with recording it?"

"Afraid of their credit. They don't want Dunn's sending all over creation that they've put chattel-mortgages on their equipment, do they?"

"No; sure! I see." The boy grasped instantly, with a quick nod, the other's meaning. "Well, that's _one_ way of gettin' 'round it!" he added admiringly after an instant's pause.

Lydia had laid down her work and was looking intently at her two companions. At this she gave a stifled exclamation which made the boy turn his head. "Say, Mrs. Hollister, aren't you looking kind of pale this evening?" he asked. "These first hot nights do take it out of a person, don't they? Mr. Hollister ought to take you to Put-in-Bay for a holiday. Momma'd take care of the baby for you and welcome. She's crazy about babies." He was again the overgrown school-boy that Lydia knew. The conversation drifted to indifferent topics. Lydia did not take her usual share in it, and when their caller had gone Paul inquired if she really were exhausted by the heat.

"Oh, no," she said; "you know I don't mind the heat."

"You didn't say much when Walter was here, and I--"

"I was thinking," Lydia broke in. "I was thinking that I couldn't understand a word you and Walter were saying any more than if you were talking Hebrew. I was thinking that that little boy knows more about your business than I do."

Paul did not attempt to deny this, but he laughed at her dramatic accent. "Sure, he does! And about how to tie a four-in-hand, and what's the best stud to wear at the back of a collar, and where to buy socks. What's that to you?"

Lydia looked at him with quivering, silent lips.

He answered, with a little heat: "Why, look-y here, Lydia, suppose I were a doctor. You wouldn't expect to know how many grains of morphine or what d'you call 'em I was going to use in--"

"But Dr. Melton _is_ a doctor, and I know lots about what he thinks of as he lives day after day--there are other things besides technical details and grains of morphine--other problems--human things--Why, for instance, there's one question that torments him all the time--how much it's right to humor people who aren't sick but think they are. He talks to me a great deal about such--"

Paul laughed, rising and gathering up his blue-prints. "Well, I can't think of any problem that torments me but the everlasting one of how to sell more generators and motors than my competitors. Come on indoors, Honey; I've got to have some light if I finish going over these to-night."

His accent was evidently intended to end the discussion, and Lydia allowed it to do so, although the incident was one she could not put out of her mind. She watched Walter going back and forth to Endbury with a jealousy the absurdity of which she herself realized, and she listened with a painful intentness to the boy's talk during his occasional idle sojourns on their veranda steps. Yet she had been used to hearing Paul talk unintelligibly to the business associates whom, from time to time, he brought out to the house to dine and to talk business afterward. Somehow, she said to herself, it's being just _Walter_ seemed to bring it home to her. To have that boy--and yet she liked him, too, she thought. She looked sometimes into his fresh, innocently keen face with a yearning apprehension. Paul was amused at his precocious airs, and yet was not without respect for his rapidly developing business capacity. He said once, "Walter's a real nice boy. I shouldn't mind having a son like that myself!"

The remark startled Lydia. If she were to have a son he _would_ be like that, she realized. And he would grow up and marry some--she sprang up and caught Ariadne to her in a sudden fierce embrace.

"You'll break your back lifting that heavy baby 'round so," Paul remonstrated with justice.

For all her aversion to the set forms of "society" as understood by Endbury, Lydia was fond of having people about her, "to try to get really acquainted with them" she said, and during that summer the Hollister veranda in the evening became a rendezvous for their Bellevue neighbors. Paul rather deplored the time wasted in this unprofitable variety of informal social life which, in his phrase, "counted for nothing" but he was always glad to see Walter. "At the rate he's going and the way he's taking hold, he'll be a valuable business friend in a few years," he said prophetically to Lydia, and he assumed more and more the airs of a comrade with the lad.

One evening when Walter came lounging over to the veranda, Lydia was busy indoors, but later she stepped to the door in time to hear Paul say, laughing: "Well, for all that, he's not so good as Wellman Phelps' stenographer."

"How so?" asked the boy, alert for a pleasantry from his elder.

"Why, Phelps carries this fellow 'round with him everywhere he goes, has had him for years, and twice a week all he has to do is to say: 'Say, Fred; write my wife, will you?'"

His listener broke out into a peal of boyish laughter. "Pretty good!" he applauded the joke.

"It's a fact," Paul went on. "Fred writes it and signs it and sends it off, and Phelps never has to trouble his head about it."

Lydia stepped back into the darkness of the hall.

When she came out later, a misty figure in white, Paul rose, saying, "Well, Walter, I'll leave you to Mrs. Hollister now. I've got some work to do before I get to bed."

Lydia sat silent, looking at the boy's face, clear and untarnished in the moonlight. He was looking dreamily away at the lawn, dappled with the shadow of the slender young trees. They seemed creatures scarcely more sylvan than he, sprawled, like a loitering faun with his hands clasped behind his head. His mouth had the pure, full outlines of a child's.

"What are you thinking about, Walter?" Lydia asked him suddenly.

He started, and brought his limpid gaze to hers. "About how to cross-index our follow-up letter catalogue better," he answered promptly.

"Really? Really?" She leaned toward him, urging him to frankness.

He was surprised at her tone. "Why, sure!" he told her. "Why not? What else?"

Lydia said no more.

She had never felt more helplessly her remoteness from her husband's world than during that spring. It was a sentiment that Paul, apparently, did not reciprocate. In spite of his frequent absences from home and his detached manner about most domestic questions, he had as definite ideas about his wife's resumption of her social duties as had everyone else. "It made him uneasy," as he put it, "to be losing so many points in the game."

"Look here, my dear," he said one evening in spring when the question came up; "summer's almost here, and this winter's been as good as dropped right out. Can't you just pick up a few threads and make a beginning? It'll make it easier in the fall." He added, uneasily, "We don't want old Lowder and Madeleine to get ahead of us entirely, you know. You can leave the kid with 'Stashie, can't you, once in a while? She ought to be able to do _that_ much, I should think." He spoke as though he had assigned to her the simplest possible of all domestic undertakings. As Lydia made no response, he said finally, before attacking a pile of papers, "If I'm going to earn a lot more money, what good'll it do us if you don't do your share? Besides, we owe it to the kid. You want to do your best by your little girl, don't you?"

As always, Lydia responded with a helpless alacrity to that appeal. "Oh, yes! Oh, yes! We must do our best for her." This phrase summed up the religion she had at last found after so much fervent, undirected search. The church, as she knew it, was chiefly the social center of various fashionable activities which differed from ordinary fashionable enterprises only in being used to bring in money, which money, handed over to the rector, disappeared into the maw of some unknown, voracious, charitable institution. And beyond the church there had been no element in the life she knew, that was not frankly materialistic. But now, as the miracle of awakening consciousness took place daily in her very sight, and as the first dawnings of a personality began to look out of her child's eyes, all Lydia's vague spiritual cravings, all the groping tendrils of her aspirations, clung about the conviction more and more summing up her inner life, that she must do her best for Ariadne, must make the world, into which that little new soul had come, a better place than she herself had found it. She felt as naïvely and passionately that her child must be saved the mistakes that she had made, as though she were the first mother who ever sent up over her baby's head that pitiful, universal prayer.

The matter of the social duty of the young Hollisters was finally compromised by Lydia's accepting a number of invitations for the latter part of the season, and giving a series of big receptions in May. They were not by a hair nor a jot nor a tittle to be distinguished from their predecessors of the year before. As they seemed hardly adequate, Lydia suggested half-heartedly that they give a dinner party, but Paul replied, "With 'Stashie to pour soup down people's backs and ask them how their baby's whooping cough is, as she passes the potatoes?"

The hot weather came with the rush that was always so unexpected and so invariable, and another season was over. It was a busy, silent, thoughtful summer for Lydia. Of course (much to Lydia's distress), Ariadne had been weaned when her mother had been forced to leave her to "go out" again, and this necessitated such anxious attention to her diet and general regimen during the hot weather that Lydia was very grateful to have little to interfere with her.

The General Office had accepted provisionally Paul's redistributing plan, and in his anxiety to prove its value he was away from home more even than usual. The heat was terrible, but Lydia and he both knew no other climate, and Lydia loved the summer as the time of year when the fierceness of Nature forced on all her world a reluctant adjournment of their usual methods of spending their lives. She was absorbed in Ariadne, and the slow, blazing summer days were none too long for her.

The child began to develop an individuality. She was a sensitive, quickly-responsive little thing; exactly, so Mrs. Emery said, like Lydia at her age, except that she seemed to have none of Lydia's native mirth, but, rather, a little pensive air that made her singularly appealing to all who saw her, and that pierced her mother's heart with an anguish of protecting love.

Lydia said to her godfather one day, suddenly, "I wonder if people can be taught how to fight?"

He had one of his flashes of intuition. "The baby, you mean?"

Lydia evaded the directness of this. "Oh, in general, aren't folks better off if they like to fight for themselves? Don't they _have_ to?"

He considered the question in one of his frowning silences, so long that Lydia started when he spoke again. "They don't need to fight with claws for their food, as they used to do. Things are arranged now so that the physically strong, who like such a life, are the ones who choose it. They get food for the others. Why shouldn't the morally strong fight for the weaker ones and make it possible for everyone to have a chance at developing the best of himself without having to battle with others to do it?"

"That's pretty vague," said Lydia.

"Why, look here," said the doctor. "You don't plow the field to plant the wheat that makes your bread. That's a man of a coarser physical fiber than yours, who is strengthened by the effort, and not exhausted as you would be. Why shouldn't the world be so organized that somebody of coarser moral texture than yours should do battle with the forces of materialism and tragic triviality that--"

"But Ariadne's growing up! She will need all that so _soon_-- and the world won't be organized then, you know it won't--and she's no fighter by instinct, any more than--" She was silent. The doctor filled in her incomplete sentence mentally, and found no answer to make.