Chapter 31

LYDIA REACHES HER GOAL AND HAS HER TALK WITH HER HUSBAND

Paul was still asleep when Lydia opened her eyes one morning and said to herself with a little laugh, but quite resolutely: "I come to tell ye of a world ye mortals wot not of."

As she dressed noiselessly, she fortified herself with the thought that she had, in her nervousness, greatly overestimated the seriousness of her undertaking. There was nothing so formidable in what she meant to do, after all. She only wished to talk reasonably with her husband about how to avoid having their life degenerate into a mere campaign for material advancement. She did not use this phrase in her thoughts about the matter. She thought more deeply, and perhaps more clearly, than during her confused girlhood, but she had no learned or dignified expressions for the new ideas dawning in her. As she coiled her dark hair above her face, rather pale these days, like a white flower instead of the glowing rose it had been, she said to herself, like a child: "Now, I mustn't get excited. I must remember that all I want is a chance for all of us, Paul and the children and me, to grow up as good as we can, and loving one another the most for the nicest things in us and not because we're handy stepping-stones to help one another get on. And we can't do that if we don't really put our minds to it and make that the thing we're trying hardest to do. The other things--the parties and making money and dressing better than we can really afford to--they're only all right if they don't get to seeming the things to look out for first. We must find out how to keep them second."

A golden shaft of winter sunshine fell on Paul's face. He opened his eyes and yawned, smiling good-naturedly at his wife. Lydia summoned her courage and fairly ran to the bed, sitting down by him and taking his strong hand in hers.

"Oh, you india-rubber ball!" he cried in humorous despair at her. "Don't you know a woman with your expectations oughtn't to go hurling herself around that way?"

"I know--I'm too eager always," she apologized. "But, Paul, I've been waiting for a nice quiet time to have a long talk with you about something that's troubling me, and I just decided I wouldn't wait another minute."

Paul patted her cheek. He was feeling very much refreshed by his night's sleep. He smiled at his young wife again. "Why, fire away, Lydia dear. I'm no ogre. You don't have to wait till I'm in a good temper, do you? What is it? More money?"

"Oh, no, _no_!" She repudiated the idea so hotly that he laughed, "Well, you can't scare me with anything else. What's up?"

Lydia hesitated, distracted, now that her chance had come, with the desire to speak clearly. "Paul dear, it's very serious, and I want you to take it seriously. It may take a great effort to change things, too. I'm very unhappy about the way we are--"

A wail from Ariadne's room gave warning that the child had wakened, as she not infrequently did, terrified by a bad dream. Lydia fled in to comfort her, and later, when she came back, leading the droll little figure in its pink sleeping-drawers, Paul was dressing with his usual careful haste. He stopped an instant to laugh at Ariadne's face of determined woe and tossed her up until an unwilling smile broke through her pouting gloom. Then he turned to Lydia, as to another child, and rubbed his cheek on hers with a boyish gesture. "Now, you other little forlornity, what's the matter with you?"

Lydia warmed, as always, at the tenderness of his tone, though she noticed with an inward laugh that he continued buttoning his vest as he caressed her and that his eyes wandered to the clock with a wary alertness. "Perhaps you'd better wait and tell me at the table," he went on briskly. "I'm all ready to go down." He pulled his coat on with his astonishing quickness, and ran downstairs.

Lydia put Ariadne into her own bed, telling the docile little thing to stay there till Mother came back for her, and followed Paul, huddling together the remnants of her resolution which looked very wan in the morning light. Breakfast was not ready; the table was not even set, and when she went out into the kitchen she was met by a heavy-eyed cook, moving futilely about among dirty pots and pans and murmuring something about a headache. Lydia could not stop then to investigate further, but, hurrying about, managed to get a breakfast ready for Paul before his first interest in the morning paper had evaporated enough to make him impatient of the delay.

He fell to with a hearty appetite as soon as the food was set before him, not noticing for several moments that Lydia's breakfast was not yet ready. When he did so, he spoke with a solicitous sharpness: "Lydia, you need a guardian! You ought to eat as a matter of duty! I bet half your queer notions come from your just pecking around at any old thing when I'm not here to keep track of you."

He poured out another cup of coffee for himself as he spoke.

"Yes, dear; I know, I do. I will," Lydia assured him, with her quick acquiescence to his wishes. "But this morning Mary is sick, or something, and I got yours first."

Paul spoke briefly, with his mouth full of toast: "If you were more regular in the way you run the house, and insisted on never varying the--"

"But I was afraid you would be late," said Lydia. It was the daily terror of her life.

"I _am_ late now," he told her, with his good-humored insistence on facts. "I've missed the 7:40, and I've just time to catch the next one if I hurry. Do you happen to know, dear, where I put that catalogue from Elberstrom and Company? The big red book with the picture of a dynamo on the cover. I was looking over it last night, and Heaven knows where I may have dropped it."

The opinion as to the proper answer to a speech like this was one of the sharply marked lines of divergence between Madeleine Lowder and her brother's wife. "Soak him one when you get a chance, Lydia," she was wont to urge facetiously, and her advice in the present case would unhesitatingly have been to answer as acrimoniously as possible that if he were more regular in the way he handled such things his wife would have to spend less time ransacking the house looking for them. But in spite of such practical and experienced counsel, Lydia was scarcely conscious of refraining from the entirely justifiable and entirely futile customary recriminations, and she was as unaware as Paul of the vast amount of embittering domestic friction which was spared them by her silence. She had some great natural advantages for the task of creating a better domestic life at which she was now so eagerly setting herself, and one of them was this incapacity to resent petty injustices done to herself. She was handicapped in any effort by her utter lack of intellectual training and by a natural tendency to mental confusion, but her lack of small vanities not only spared her untold suffering, but added much to her singleness of aim.

She now went about searching for the catalogue, finally finding it in the library under the couch. When she came back to the dining-room she saw Paul standing up by the table, wiping his mouth. Evidently he was ready to start. How absurd she had been to think of talking seriously to him in the morning!

"Mary brought your breakfast in," he said nodding toward an untidy tray. "I hate to seem to be finding fault all the time, but really her breath was enough to set the house on fire! Can't you keep her down to moderate drinking?"

"I'll try," said Lydia.

Paul took the catalogue from her hand and reached for his hat. They were in the hall now. "Good-by, Honey," he said, kissing her hastily and darting out of the house.

Lydia had but just turned back to the dining-room when he opened the door and came in again, bringing a gust of fresh winter air with him. "Say, dear, you forgot about something you wanted to tell me about. I've got eight minutes before the trolley, so now's your chance. What is it? Something about the plumbing?"

In the dusky hall Lydia faced him for a moment in silence, with so singular an expression on her face that he looked apprehensive of some sort of scene. Then she broke out into breathless, quavering laughter, whose uncertainty did not prevent Paul from great relief at her apparent change of mood. "Never mind," she said, leaning against the newel-post, "I'll tell you--I'll tell you some other time."

He kissed her again, and she felt that it was with a greater tenderness now that he no longer feared a possibly disagreeable communication from her.

After he had gone, she thought loyally, putting things in the order of importance she had been taught all her life, "Well, it _is_ hard for him to have perplexities at home and not to be able to give the freshest and best of himself to business." It was not until later, as she was dressing Ariadne, that she swung slowly back to her new doubt of that view of the problem.

Ariadne was in one of her most talkative moods, and was describing at great length the dream that had frightened her so. There was a hen with six little chickens, she told her mother, and one of them was as big--as big--

"Yes, dear; and what did the big little chicken do?" Lydia laced up the little shoes, on her knees before the small figure, her mind whirling. "That was just the trouble, she couldn't make it seem right any more, that Paul's best and freshest should _all_ go to making money and none to a consideration of why he wished to make it."

"Yes, Ariadne, and it flew over the house, and then?"

She began buttoning the child's dress, and lost herself in ecstasy over the wisps of soft curls at the back of the rosy neck. She dropped a sudden kiss on the spot, in the midst of Ariadne's narrative, and the child squealed in delighted surprise. Lydia was carried away by one of her own childlike impulses of gayety, and burrowed bear-like, growling savagely, in the soft flesh. Ariadne doubled up, shrieking with laughter, the irresistible laughter of childhood. Lydia laughed in response, and the two were off for one of their rollicking frolics. They were like a couple of kittens together. Finally, "Come, dear; we must get our breakfasts," said Lydia, leading along the little girl, still flushed and smiling from her play.

Her passion for the child grew with Ariadne's growth, and there were times when she was tempted to agree in the unspoken axiom of those about her, that all she needed was enough children to fill her heart and hands too full for thought; but sometimes at night, when Paul was away and she had the little crib moved close to her bed, very different ideas came to her in the silent hours when she lay listening to the child's quick, regular breathing. At such times, when her mind grew very clear in the long pause between the hurry of one day and the next, she had rather a sort of horror in bringing any more lives into a world which she could do so little to make ready for them. Ariadne was here, and, oh! She must do something to make it better for her! Her desire that Ariadne should find it easier than she to know how to live well, rose to a fervor that was a prayer emanating from all her being. Perhaps she was not clever or strong enough to know how to make her own life and Paul's anything but a dreary struggle to get ahead of other people, but somehow--somehow, Ariadne must have a better chance.

Something of all this came to her mind in the reaction from her frolic, as she established the child in her high-chair and sat down to her own cold breakfast; but she soon fell, instead, to pondering the question of Mary in the kitchen. She had not now that terror of a violent scene which had embittered the first year of her housekeeping, but she felt a qualm of revulsion from the dirty negress who, as she entered the kitchen, turned to face her with insolent eyes. It seemed a plague-spot in her life that in the center of her home, otherwise so carefully guarded, there should be this presence, come from she shuddered to think what evil haunts of that part of Endbury known as the "Black Hole." She thought, as so many women have thought, that there must be something wrong in a system that made her husband spend all his strength laboring to make money so much of which was paid, in one form or another, to this black incubus. She thought, as so many other women have thought, that there must be something wrong with a system of life that meant that, with rare exceptions, such help was all that could be coaxed into doing housework; but Lydia, unlike the other women she knew, did not--could not--stop at the realization that something was wrong. Some irresistible impulse moved her to try at least to set it right.

On this occasion, however, as she faced the concrete result of the system, she was too languid, and felt too acutely the need for sparing her strength, to do more than tell her cook briefly that if she did not stop drinking she would be dismissed. Mary made no reply, looking down at her torn apron, her face heavy and sullen. She prepared some sort of luncheon, however, and by night had recovered enough so that with Lydia's help the dinner was eatable.

Paul was late to dinner, and when he sat down heavily at the table Lydia's heart failed her at the sight of his face, fairly haggard with fatigue. She kept Ariadne quiet, the child having already learned that when Daddy came home from the city there must be no more noisy play; and she served Paul with a quickness that outstripped words. She longed unspeakably to put on one side forever all her vexing questions and simply to cherish and care for her husband physically. He had so much to burden him already--all he could carry. But she had been so long bringing herself to the point of resolution in the matter, she had so firmly convinced herself that her duty lay along that dark and obscure path, that she clung to her purpose.

After dinner, when she came downstairs from putting Ariadne to bed, she found him already bent over the writing-table, covering a sheet of paper with figures. "You remember, Paul, I have something to talk over with you," she began, her mouth twitching in a nervous smile.

He pushed the papers aside, and looked up at her with a weary tenderness. "Oh, yes; I do remember. We might as well have it over now, I suppose. Wait a minute, though." He went to the couch, piled the pillows at one end, and lay down, his hands clasped under his head. "I might as well rest myself while we talk, mightn't I?"

"Oh, yes, yes, poor dear!" cried Lydia remorsefully. "I wish I didn't _have_ to bother you!"

"I wish so, too," he said whimsically. "Sure it's nothing you can't settle yourself?" He closed his eyes and yawned.

"I don't _want_ to settle it myself!" cried Lydia with a rush, seeing an opening ready-made. "That's the point. I want you to be in it! I want you to help me! Paul, I'm sure there's something the matter with the way we live--I don't like it! I don't see that it helps us a bit--or anyone else--you're just killing yourself to make money that goes to get us things we don't need nearly as much as we need more of each other! We're not getting a bit nearer to each other--actually further away, for we're both getting different from what we were without the other's knowing how! And we're not getting nicer--and what's the use of living if we don't do that? We're just getting more and more set on scrambling along ahead of other people. And we're not even having a good time out of it! And here is Ariadne--and another one coming--and we've nothing to give them but just this--this--this--"

She had poured out her accumulated, pent-up convictions with passion, feeling an immense relief that she had at last expressed herself--that at last she had made a breach in the wall that separated her from Paul. At the end, as she hesitated for a phrase to sum up her indictment of their life, her eyes fell on Paul's face. Its expression turned her cold. She stopped short. He did not open his eyes, and the ensuing silence was filled with his regular, heavy breathing. He had fallen asleep.

Lydia folded her hands in her lap and sat looking at him intently. In the tumult of her emotions there was neither bitterness nor resentment. But a cloud had passed between her and the sun. She sat there a long time, her face very pale and grave. After a time she laid her hand on her husband's shoulder. She felt an intolerable need to feel him at least physically near.

The telephone bell rang distinctly in the hall. Paul bounded to his feet, wide awake.

"I bet that's the Washburn superintendent!" he cried. "He said they might call me up here if they came to a decision." He had apparently forgotten Lydia's presence, or else the fact that she knew nothing of his affairs. He disappeared into the hall, his long, springy, active step resounding quickly as he hurried to the instrument. Lydia heard his voice, decisive, masterful, quiet, evidently dictating terms of some bargain that had been hanging in the balance. When he came back, his head was up, like a conqueror's. "I've got their contract!" he told her, and then, snatching her up, he whirled her about, shouting out a "yip! yip! yip!" of triumph.

In spite of herself Lydia's chin began to tremble. She felt a stinging in her eyes. Paul saw these signs of emotion and was conscience-stricken. "Oh, I'm a black-hearted monster!" he cried, in burlesque contrition. "I must have dropped off just as you began your spiel. But, Lydia, if _you'd_ taken that West Virginia trip, you'd go to sleep if the Angel Gabriel were blowing his horn! I was gone three days, you know, and, honest, I didn't have three hours' consecutive sleep! Don't be too mad at me. Start over again. I'll listen to every word, honest to gracious I will. I feel as waked up as a fighting cock, anyhow, by this Washburn business! To think I've pulled that off at last!"

"I'm not mad at _you_, Paul," said Lydia, trying to speak steadily, and holding with desperate resolution to her purpose of communicating with her husband. "I'm mad at the conditions that made you so sleepy you couldn't keep awake! All I had to say is that I don't like our way of life--I don't see that it's making us any better, and I want Ariadne--I want our children to have a better one. I want you to help me make it so."

Paul stared at her, stupefied by this attack on axioms. "Good gracious, my dear! What are you talking about? 'Our way of life!' What do you mean? There's nothing peculiar about the way we live. Our life is just like everybody else's."

Lydia burned with impatience at the appearance of this argument, beyond which she had never been able to induce her mother or Marietta to advance a step. She cried out passionately: "What if it is! If it's not the right kind of life, what difference does it make if everybody's life _is_ like it!"

The idea which her excitement instantly suggested to Paul was reassuring. Before Ariadne came, he remembered, Lydia had had queer spells of nervous tension. He patted her on the shoulder and spoke in the tone used to soothe a nervous horse. "There, Lydia! There, dear! Don't get so wrought up! Remember you're not yourself. You do too much thinking. Come, now, just curl up here and put your head on my--"

Lydia feared greatly the relaxing influence of his caressing touch. If once he put forth his personal magnetism, it would be so hard to go on. She drew away gently. "_Can_ anybody do too much thinking, Paul? The trouble must be that I'm not thinking right. And, oh, I want to, so! _Please_ help me! Everybody says you have such a wonderful head for organization and for science--if I were a dynamo that wasn't working, you could set me right!"

Paul laughed, and made another attempt to divert her. "I couldn't if the dynamo looked as pretty and kissable as you do!" He was paying very little attention to what she said. He was only uncomfortable and uneasy to see her so white and trembling. He wished he had proposed taking her out for the evening. She had been having too dull a time. He ought to see that she got more amusement. They said that comic opera now running in town was very funny.

"Paul, listen to me!" she was crying desperately as these thoughts went through his head. "Listen to me, and look honestly at the way we've been living since we were married, and you _must_ see that something's all wrong. I never see you--never, never, do you realize that? except when you're in a raging hurry in the morning or tired to death at night, and when I'm just as tired as you are, so all we can do is to go to bed so we can get up in the morning and begin it all over again. Or else we tire ourselves out one degree more by entertaining people we don't really like--or rather people about whose real selves we don't know enough to know whether we like them or not--we have them because they're influential, or because everybody else entertains them, or because they can help us to get on--or can be smoothed over so they won't hinder our getting on. And there's no prospect of doing anything different from this all the days of our life--"

"But, look-y here, Lydia, that's the way things _are_ in this world! The men have to go away the first thing in the morning--and all the rest of what you say! _I_ can't help it! What do you come to me about it for? You might as well break out crying because I can't give you eyes in the back of your head. That's the way things are!"

Lydia made a violent gesture of unbelief. "That's what everybody's been telling me all my life--but now I'm a grown woman, with eyes to see, and something inside me that won't let me say I see what I don't--_and I don't see that_! I don't _believe_ it has to be so. I can't believe it!"

Paul laughed a little impatiently, irritated and uneasy, as he always was, at any attempt to examine too closely the foundations of existing ideas. "Why, Lydia, what's the matter with you? You sound as though you'd been reading some fool socialist literature or something."

"You know I don't read anything, Paul. I never hear about anything but novels. I never have time for anything else, and very likely I couldn't understand it if I read it, not having any education. That's one thing I want you to help me with. All I want is a chance for us to live together a little more, to have a few more thoughts in common, and, oh! to be trying to be making something better out of ourselves for our children's sake. I can't see that we're learning to be anything but--you, to be an efficient machine for making money, I to think of how to entertain as though we had more money than we really have. I don't seem really to know you or live with you any more than if we were two guests stopping at the same hotel. If socialists are trying to fix things better, why shouldn't we have time--both of us--to read their books; and you could help me know what they mean?"

Paul laughed again, a scornful, hateful laugh, which brought the color up to Lydia's pale face like a blow. "I gather, then, Lydia, that what you're asking me to do is to neglect my business in order to read socialist literature with you?"

His wife's rare resentment rose. She spoke with dignity: "I begged you to be serious, Paul, and to try to understand what I mean, although I'm so fumbling, and say it so badly. As for its being impossible to change things, I've heard you say a great many times that there are no conditions that can't be changed if people would really try--"

"Good heavens! I said that of _business_ conditions!" shouted Paul, outraged at being so misquoted.

"Well, if it's true of them--No; I feel that things are the way they are because we don't really care enough to have them some other way. If you really cared as much about sharing a part of your life with me--really sharing--as you do about getting the Washburn contract--"

Her indignant and angry tone, so entirely unusual, moved Paul, more than her words, to shocked protest. He looked deeply wounded, and his accent was that of a man righteously aggrieved. "Lydia, I lay most of this absurd outbreak to your nervous condition, and so I can't blame you for it. But I can't help pointing out to you that it is entirely uncalled for. There are few women who have a husband as absolutely devoted as yours. You grumble about my not sharing my life with you--why, I _give_ it to you entire!" His astonished bitterness grew as he voiced it. "What am I working so hard for if not to provide for you and our child--our children! Good Heavens! What more _can_ I do for you than to keep my nose on the grindstone every minute. There are limits to even a husband's time and endurance and capacity for work."

Lydia heard a frightened roaring in her ears at this unexpected turn to the conversation. Paul had never spoken so to her before. This was a very different tone from his irritation over defective housekeeping. She was as horrified as he over the picture that he held up with such apparently justified indignation, the picture of her as a querulous and ungrateful wife. Why, Paul was looking at her as though he hated her! For the first time in her married life, she conceived the possibility that she and Paul might quarrel, really seriously quarrel, about fundamental things. The idea terrified her beyond words. Her mind, undisciplined and never very clear, became quite confused, and only her long preparation and expectation of this talk enabled her to keep on at all, although now she could but falter ahead blindly. "Why, Paul dear--don't look at me so! I never dreamed of _blaming_ you for it! It's just because I want things better for you that I'm so anxious to--"

"You haven't noticed me complaining any, have you?" put in Paul grimly, still looking at her coldly.

"--It's because I can't bear to see you work so hard to get me things I'd ever so much rather go without than have you grow so you can't see anything but business--it seems all twisted! I'd rather you'd pay an assistant to go off on these out-of-town trips, and we'd get along on less money--live in a smaller house, and not entertain."

"Oh, Lydia, you talk like a child! How can I talk business with you when you have such crazy, impractical ideas? It's not just the money an assistant would cost! Either he'd not be so good as I, and then I'd lose my reputation for efficiency and my chance for promotion, or else he _would_ be as good and he'd get the job permanently and divide the field with me. A man has to look a long way ahead in business!"

"But, Paul, what if he _did_ divide the field with you? What if you don't get ahead of everybody else, if you'd have time and strength to think of other things more--you said the other day that you weren't sleeping well any more, and you're losing your taste for books and music and outdoors--why, I'd rather live in four rooms right over your office, so that you wouldn't have that hour lost going and coming--"

Paul broke in with a curt scorn: "Oh, Lydia! What nonsense! Why don't you propose living in a tent, to save rent?"

"Why I would--I would in a minute if I thought it would make things any better!" Lydia cried with a desperate simplicity.

At this crowning absurdity, Paul began to laugh, his ill-humor actually swept away by his amusement at Lydia's preposterous fancies. It was too foolish to try to reason seriously with her. He put his hand on her shining dark hair, ruffling it up like a teasing boy. "I guess you'd better leave the economic status of society alone, Lydia. You might break something if you go charging around it so fierce."

A call came from the darkness of the hall: "Mis' Hollister!"

"It's Mary," said Paul; "probably you forgot to give her any instructions about breakfast, in your anxiety about the future of the world. If you can calm down enough for such prosaic details, do tell her for the Lord's sake not to put so much salt in the oatmeal as there was this morning."

Lydia found the negress with her wraps on, glooming darkly, "Mis' Hollister, I'm gwine to leave," she announced briefly.

Lydia felt for a chair. Mary had promised faithfully to stay through the winter, until after her confinement. "What's the matter, Mary?"

"I cyant stay in no house wheah de lady says I drinks."

"You will stay until--until I am able to be about, won't you?"

"My things is gone aready," said Mary, moving heavily toward the door, "and I'm gwine now." As she disappeared, she remarked casually, "I didn't have no time to wash the supper dishes. Good-by."

"What's the matter with Mary?" called Paul.

Lydia went back to him, trying to smile. "She's gone--left," she announced.

Paul opened his eyes with a look of keen annoyance. "You can't break in a new cook _now_!" he said. "She can't go now!"

"She's gone," repeated Lydia wearily. "I don't know how anybody could make her stay."

Paul got up from the couch with his lips closed tightly together, and, sitting down in a straight chair, took Lydia on his knee as though she were a child. "Now, see here, my wife, you mustn't get your feelings hurt if I do some plain talking for a minute. You've been telling me what you think about things, and now it's my turn. And what _I_ think is that if my dear young wife would spend more time looking after her own business she'd have fewer complaints to make about my doing the same. The thing for you to do is to accept conditions as they are and do your best in them--and, really, Lydia, make your best a little better."

Lydia was on the point of nervous tears from sheer fatigue, but she clung to her point with a tenacity which in so yielding a nature was profoundly eloquent. "But, Paul, if everybody had always settled down and accepted conditions, and never tried to make them better--"

"There's a difference between conditions that have to be accepted and those that can be changed," said Paul sententiously.

Lydia tore herself away from him and stood up, trembling with excitement. She felt that they had stumbled upon the very root of the matter. "But who's to decide which our conditions are?"

Paul caught at her, laughing. "I am, of course, you firebrand! Didn't you promise to honor and obey?" He went on with more seriousness, a tender, impatient, condescending seriousness: "Now, Lydia, just stop and think! Do you, can you, consider this a good time for you to try to settle the affairs of the universe--still all upset about your father's death, and goodness knows what crazy ideas it started in your head--and with an addition to the family expected! _And_ the cook just left!"

"But that's the way things always are!" she protested. "That's life. There's never a time when something important hasn't just happened or isn't just going to happen, you have to go right ahead, or you never--why, Paul, I've waited for two years for a really good chance for this talk with you--"

"Thank the Lord!" he ejaculated. "I hope it'll be another two before you treat me to another evening like this. Oh, pshaw, Lydia! You're morbid, moping around the house too much--and your condition and all. Wait till you've got another baby to play with--I don't remember you had any doubts of anything the first six months of Ariadne's life. You ought to have a baby a year to keep you out of mischief! Just you wait till you can entertain and live like folks again. In the meantime you hustle around and keep busy and you won't be so bothered with thinking and worrying."

Unknowingly, they had drawn again near to the heart of their discussion. Unknowingly Lydia stood before the answer from her husband, the final statement that she wished to hear.

"But to hustle and keep busy--that's good only so long as you keep at it. The minute you stop--"

Paul's answer was an epoch in her thought.

"_Don't stop!_" he cried, surprised at her overlooking so obvious a solution.

At this bullet-like retort, Lydia shivered as though she had been struck. She turned away with a blind impulse for flight. Her gesture brought her husband flying to her. He took her forcibly in his arms. "What the devil--what is the matter _now_?" he asked, praying for patience. She hung unresponsive in his grasp. "What's the matter?" he repeated.

"You've just told me a horrible thing," she whispered; "that life is so dreadful that the only way we can get through it at all is by never looking at--"

Paul actually shook her in his exasperation. "Gee whiz, Lydia! you're enough to drive a man to drink! I never told you any such melodramatic nonsense. I told you straight horse sense, which is that if you took more interest in your work, in the work that every woman of your class and position has to do, you'd have less time to think foolishness--and your husband would have an easier life."

Her trembling lips opened to speak again, but he closed them with a firm hand. "And now, as your natural guardian, I'm not going to let you say another word about it. You dear little silly! However did you get us so wound up! Blessed if I have any idea what it's all been about!"

He was determined to end the discussion. He was relieved beyond expression that he had been able to get through it without saying anything unkind to his wife. He never meant to do that. He now went on, shaking a finger at her:

"You listen to me, Lydia-Emery-that-was! Do you know what we are going to do? We're going out into that howling desolation that Mary has probably left in the kitchen, and we're going to see if we can find a couple of clean glasses, and we're going to have a glass of beer apiece and a ham sandwich and a piece of the pie that's left over from dinner. You don't know what's the matter with you, but I do! You're starved! You're as hungry as you can be, aren't you now?"

Lydia had sunk into a chair during this speech and was now regarding him fixedly, her hands clasped between her knees. At his final appeal to her, she closed her eyes. "Yes," she said with a long breath; "yes, I am."