Chapter 6

AMERICAN BEAUTIES

On the morning of Lydia's long-expected return, as Mrs. Emery moved restlessly about the large double parlors opening out on a veranda where the vines were already golden in the September sunlight, it seemed to her that the very walls were blank in hushed eagerness and that the chairs and tables turned faces like hers, tired with patience, toward the open door. She had not realized until the long separation was almost over how unendurably she had missed her baby girl, as she still thought of the tall girl of nineteen. She could not wait the few hours that were left. Her fortitude had given way just too soon. She must have the dear child now, now, in her arms.

She moved absently a spray of goldenrod which hid a Fra Angelico angel over the mantel and noted with dramatic self-pity that her hand was trembling. She sat down suddenly, and lost herself in a vain attempt to recall the well-beloved sound of Lydia's fresh young voice. A knot came in her throat, and she covered her face with her large, white, carefully-manicured hands.

Marietta came in briskly a few moments later, bringing a bouquet of asters from her own garden. She was dressed, as always, with a severe reticence in color and line which, though due to her extreme need for economy, nevertheless gave to the rather spare outlines of her tall figure a distinction, admired by Endbury under the name of stylishness. Her rapid step had carried her half-way across the wide room before she saw to her surprise that her mother, usually so self-contained, was giving way to an inexplicable emotion.

"Good gracious, Mother!" she began in the energetic fashion which was apt to make her most neutral remarks sound combative.

Mrs. Emery dried her eyes with a gesture of protest, adjusted her gray pompadour deftly, and cut off her daughter's remonstrance, "Oh, you needn't tell me I'm foolish, Marietta. I know it. I just suddenly got so impatient it didn't seem as though I could wait another minute!"

The younger woman accepted this explanation of the tears with a murmured sound of somewhat enigmatic intonation. Her thin dark face settled into a repose that had a little grimness in it. She began putting the flowers into a vase that stood between the reproduction of a Giotto Madonna and a Japanese devil-hunt, both results of the study of art taken up during the past winter by her mother's favorite woman's club. Mrs. Emery watched the process in the contemplative relief which follows an emotional outbreak, and her eyes wandered to the objects on either side the vase. The sight stirred her to speech. "Oh, Marietta, how _do_ you suppose the house will seem to Lydia after she has seen so much? I hope she won't be disappointed. I've done so much to it this last year, perhaps she won't like it. And Oh, I _was_ so tried because we weren't able to get the new sideboard put up in the dining-room yesterday!"

Mrs. Mortimer glanced without smiling at a miniature of her sister, blooming in a shrine-like arrangement on her mother's writing-desk. She shook her dark head with a gesture like her father's, and said with his blunt decisiveness, "Really, Mother, you must draw the line about Lydia. She's only human. I guess if the house is good enough for you and father it is good enough for her."

She crossed the room toward the door with a brisk rattle of starched skirts, but as she passed her mother her hand was caught and held. "That's just it, Marietta--that's just what came over me! _Is_ what's good enough for us good enough for Lydia? Won't anything, even the best, in Endbury be a come-down for her?"

The slightly irritated impatience with which Mrs. Mortimer had listened to the first words of this speech gave way to a shrewd amusement. "You mean that you've put Lydia up on such a high plane to begin with that whichever way she goes will be a step down," she asked.

"Yes, yes; that's just it," breathed her mother, unconscious of any irony in her daughter's accent. She fixed her eyes, which, in spite of her having long since passed the half-century mark, were still very clear and blue, anxiously upon Marietta's opaque dark ones. She felt not only a need to be reassured in general by anyone, but a reluctant faith in the younger woman's judgment.

Marietta released herself with a laugh that was like a light, mocking tap on her mother's shoulder. "Well, folks that haven't got real worries will certainly manufacture them! To worry about Lydia's future in Endbury! Aren't you afraid the sun won't rise some day? If ever there was any girl that had a smooth road in front of her--"

The door-bell rang. "They've come! They've come!" cried Mrs. Emery wildly.

"Lydia wouldn't ring the bell, and her train isn't due till ten," Mrs. Mortimer reminded her.

"Oh, yes. Well, then, it's the new sideboard. I am so--"

"It's a boy with a big pasteboard box," contradicted Mrs. Mortimer, looking down the hall to the open front door.

Seeing someone there to receive it, the boy set the box inside the screen door and started down the steps.

"Bring it here! Bring it here!" called Mrs. Mortimer, commandingly.

"It's for Lydia," said Mrs. Emery, looking at the address. She spoke with an accent of dramatic intensity, and a flush rose to her fair cheeks.

Her olive-skinned daughter looked at her and laughed. "What did you expect?"

"But he didn't care enough about her coming home to be in town to-day!" Mrs. Emery's maternal vanity flared up hotly.

Mrs. Mortimer laughed again and began taking the layers of crumpled wax-paper out of the box. "Oh, that was the trouble with you, was it? That's nothing. He had to be away to see about a new electrical plant in Dayton. Did you ever know Paul Hollister to let anything interfere with business?" This characterization was delivered with an intonation that made it the most manifest praise.

Her mother seconded it with unquestioning acquiescence. "No, that's a fact; I never did."

Mrs. Mortimer in her turn had an accent of dramatic intensity as she cried out, "Oh! they are American Beauties! The biggest I ever saw!"

The two women looked at the flowers, almost awestruck at their size.

"Have you a vase?" Mrs. Mortimer asked dubiously.

Mrs. Emery rose to the occasion. "The Japanese umbrella stand."

There was a pause as they reverently arranged the great sheaf of enormous flowers. Then Mrs. Emery began, "Marietta--" She hesitated.

"Well," Mrs. Mortimer prompted her, a little impatiently.

"Do you really think that he--that Lydia--?"

Marietta accepted with a somewhat pinched smile her mother's boundary lines of reticence. "Of course. Did you ever know Paul Hollister to give up anything he wanted?"

Her mother shook her head.

Mrs. Mortimer rose with a "Well, then!" and the air of one who has said all there is to be said on a subject, and again crossed the room toward the door. Her mother drifted aimlessly in that direction also, as though swept along by the other's energy.

"Well, it's a pity he is not here now, anyhow," she said, adding in a spirited answer to her daughter's expression, "Now, you needn't look that way, Marietta. You know yourself that Lydia is very romantic and fanciful. It would be a very different matter if she were like Madeleine Hollister. She wouldn't need any managing."

Mrs. Mortimer smiled at the idea. "Yes, I'd like to see somebody try to manage Paul's sister," she commented.

"They wouldn't _have_ to," her mother pointed out, "she's so levelheaded and sane. But Lydia's different. It's part of her loveliness, of course, only you do have to manage her. And she'll be in a very unsettled state for the first week or two after she gets home after such a long absence. The impressions she gets then--well, I wish he were here!"

Mrs. Mortimer waved her hand toward the roses.

"Of course, of course," assented her mother, subsiding peaceably down the scale from anxiety to confidence with the phrase. She looked at the monstrous flowers with the gaze of acquired admiration so usual in her eyes. "They don't look much like roses, do they?" she remarked irrelevantly.

Mrs. Mortimer turned in the doorway, her face expressing an extreme surprise. "Good gracious, no," she cried. "Why, of course not. They cost a dollar and a half apiece."

She did not stop to hear her mother's vaguely assenting reply. Mrs. Emery heard her firm, rapid tread go down the hall to the front door and then suddenly stop. Something indefinable about the pause that followed made the mother's heart beat thickly. "What is it, Marietta?" she called, but her voice was lost in Mrs. Mortimer's exclamation of surprise, "Why it can't be--why, _Lydia_!"

As from a great distance, the mother heard a confused rush in the hall, and then, piercing through the dreamlike unreality of the moment, came the sweet, high note of a girl's voice, laughing, but with the liquid uncertainty of tears quivering through the mirth. "Oh, Marietta! Where's Mother? Aren't you all slow-pokes--not a soul to meet us at the train--where's Mother? Where's Mother? Where's--" The room swam around Mrs. Emery as she stood up looking toward the door, and the girl who came running in, her dark eyes shining with happy tears, was not more real than the many visions of her that had haunted her mother's imagination during the lonely year of separation. At the clasp of the young arms about her face took light as from an inner source, and breath came back to her in a sudden gasp. She tried to speak, but the only word that came was "Lydia! Lydia! Lydia!"

The girl laughed, a half-sob breaking her voice as she answered whimsically, "Well, who did you expect to see?"

Mrs. Mortimer performed her usual function of relieving emotional tension by putting a strong hand on Lydia's shoulder and spinning her about. "Come! I want to see if it _is_ you--and how you look."

For a moment the ardent young creature stood still in a glowing quiet. She drank in the dazzled gaze of admiration of the two women with an innocent delight. The tears were still in Mrs. Emery's eyes, but she did not raise a hand to dry them, smitten motionless by the extremity of her proud satisfaction. Never again did Lydia look to her as she did at that moment, like something from another sphere, like some bright, unimaginably happy being, freed from the bonds that had always weighed so heavily on all the world about her mother.

Before she could draw breath, Lydia moved and was changed. Her mother saw suddenly, with that emotion which only mothers know, reminiscences of little-girlhood, of babyhood, even of long-dead cousins and aunts, in the lovely face blooming under the wide hat. She felt the sweet momentary confusion of individuality, the satisfied sense of complete ownership which accompanies a strong belief in family ties. Lydia was not only altogether entrancing, but she was of the same stuff with those who loved her so dearly. It gave a deeper note to her mother's passion of affectionate pride.

The girl turned with a pretty, defiant tilt of her head. "Well, and how _do_ I look?" she asked; and before she could be answered she flew at Mrs. Mortimer with a gentle roughness, clasping her arms around her waist until the matron gasped. "_You_ look too good to be true--both of you--if you are such lazybones that you wouldn't go to the station to meet the prodigal daughter!"

"Well, if you will come on an earlier train than you telegraphed--" began Mrs. Mortimer, "Everybody's getting ready to meet you with a brass band. What did you do with Father?"

The girl moved away, putting her hands up to her hat uncertainly as though about to take out the hat-pins. There was between the three a moment of that constraint which accompanies the transition from emotional intensity down to an everyday level. In Lydia's voice there was even a little flatness as she answered, "Oh, he put me in the hack and went off to see about business. I heard him 'phoning something to somebody about a suit. We got through the customs sooner than we thought we could, you see, and caught an earlier train."

Mrs. Emery turned her adoring gaze from Lydia's slim beauty and looked inquiringly at her elder daughter. Mrs. Mortimer understood, and nodded.

"What are you two making faces about?" Lydia turned in time to catch the interchange of glances.

Mrs. Emery hesitated. Marietta spoke with a crisp straightforwardness which served as well in this case as nonchalance for keeping her remark without undue significance. "We were just wondering if now wasn't a good time to show you what Paul Hollister did for your welcome home. He couldn't be here himself, so he sent those." She nodded toward the bouquet.

As Lydia turned toward the flowers her two elders fixed her with the unscrupulously scrutinizing gaze of blood-relations; but their microscopic survey showed them nothing in the girl's face, already flushed and excited by her home-coming, beyond a sudden amused surprise at the grotesque size of the tribute.

"Why, for mercy's sake! Did you ever see such monsters! They are as big as my head! Look!" She whirled her hat from the pretty disorder of her brown hair and poised it on the topmost of the great flowers, stepping back to see the effect and laughing, "They don't look any more like roses, do they?" she added, turning to her mother. Mrs. Emery's answer rose so spontaneously to her lips that she was not aware that she was echoing Marietta. "Good gracious, no; of course not. They cost a dollar and a half apiece."

Lydia neither assented to nor dissented from this apothegm. It started another train of thought in her mind. "As much as all that! Why, Paul oughtn't to be so extravagant! He can't afford it, and I should have liked something else just as--"

Her sister broke in with an ample gesture of negation. "You don't know Paul. If he goes on the way he's started--he's district sales manager for southern Ohio already."

Lydia paid to this information the passing tribute of a moment's uncomprehending surprise. "Think of that! The last time Paul told me about himself he was working day and night in Schenectady, learning the business, and getting--oh, I don't know--fifty cents an hour, or some such starvation wages."

Mrs. Mortimer's bitterly acquired sense of values revolted at this. "What are you talking about, Lydia? Fifty cents an hour starvation wages!"

"Well, perhaps it was five cents an hour. I don't remember. And he worked with his hands and was always in danger of getting shot through with a million volts of electricity or mashed with a breaking fly-wheel or something. He said electricians were the soldiers of modern civilization. I told that to a German woman we met on the boat when she said Americans have no courage because they don't fight duels. The idea!"

She began pulling off her gloves, with a quick energetic gesture. Mrs. Mortimer went on, "Well, he certainly has a brilliant future before him. Everybody says that--" She stopped, struck by her rather heavy emphasis on the theme and by a curious look from Lydia. The girl did not blush, she did not seem embarrassed, but for a moment the childlike clarity of her look was clouded by an expression of consciousness.

Mrs. Emery made a rush upon her, drawing her away toward the door with a displeased look at Marietta. "Never mind about Paul's prospects," she said. "With Lydia just this minute home, to begin gossiping about the neighbors! Come up to your room, darling, and see the little outdoor sitting-room we've had fixed over the porch."

Mrs. Mortimer was not given to bearing chagrin, even a passing one, with undue self-restraint. She threw into the intonation of her next sentence her resentment at the rebuke from her mother. "I still live, you know, even if Lydia has come home!" As Mrs. Emery turned with a look of apology, she added, "Oh, I only wanted to make you turn around so that I could tell you that I am going to bring my two men-folks over here to-night, to the gathering of the clans, and that I must go home until then. Dr. Melton and Aunt Julia are coming, aren't they?"

"Oh, yes!" cried Lydia. "It doesn't seem to me I can wait to see Godfather. I sort of half hoped he might be here now."

"Well, _Lydia_!" her mother reproached her jealously.

"Oh, you might as well give in, Mother, Lydia likes the little old doctor better than any of the rest of us."

"He talks to me," said Lydia defensively.

"_We_ never say a word," commented Mrs. Mortimer.

Lydia broke away from her mother's close clasp and ran back to her sister. She was always running, as though to keep up with the rapidity of her swift impulses. She held her subtly-curved cheek up to the other's strongly-marked face. "You just kiss me, Etta dear," she pleaded softly, "and stop teasing."

Mrs. Mortimer looked long into the clear dark eyes with an unmoved countenance. Then her face melted suddenly till she looked like her mother. She put her arms about the girl with a fervent gesture of tenderness. "Dear little Lydia," she murmured, with a quaver in her voice.