"I found her reading—and eating." Lydia hadn't known she could be so hateful. Still she was telling the exact truth. "We talked a few minutes and I came away."
"Did she—" at last suddenly and painfully thrown out of his nonchalant run of talk, he stopped.
"She's a horrid woman," said Lydia, crimson with her own daring, and got up and ran out of the room.
Anne looked appealingly at Jeff, in a way of begging him to remember how young Lydia was, and perhaps how spoiled. But he wasn't disturbed. He only said to his father in a perfectly practical way:
"Women never did like her, you know."
So Anne got up and went out, thinking it was the moment for him and his father to pace along together on this road of masculine understanding. She found Lydia by the dining-room window, savagely drying her cheeks. Lydia looked as if she had cried hard and scrubbed the tears off and cried again, there was such wilful havoc in the pink smoothness of her face.
"Isn't he hateful?" she asked Anne, with an incredulous spite in her voice. "How could anybody that belonged to Farvie be so rough? I can't endure him, can you?"
Anne looked distressed. When there were disagreements and cross-purposes they made her almost ill. She would go about with a physical nausea upon her, wishing the world could be kind.
"But he's only just—free," she said.
They were still making a great deal of that word, she and Lydia. It seemed the top of earthly fortune to be free, and abysmal misery to have missed it.