“You’ve missed your trolley-car,” said her mother succinctly.
“Oh, I’m sorry!” cried Lydia, in a remorse evidently directed more toward displeasing her mother than the other consequences of her delay, for she asked in a moment, very meekly, “Will it make so very much difference if I don’t go till the next one?”
“You’ll miss the Governor. He was coming down to meet those on this car. You’ll have to go all alone. All the rest of the party were on this one.”
“Oh, I don’t care about that,” cried Lydia. “If that’s all—I’d ever so much rather go alone. I’m never alone a single minute, and it’ll rest me. The crowd would have been so noisy and carried on so—they always do.”
Her mother’s aggrieved disappointment did not disappear. She said nothing, bringing Lydia’s traveling wraps to her silently, and emanating disapproval until Lydia drooped and looked piteously at her godfather.
Dr. Melton cried out at this, “Look here, Susan Emery, you’re like the carpenter that was so proud of his good planing that he planed his boards all away to shavings.”
Mrs. Emery looked at him with a lack of comprehension of his meaning equaled only by her evident indifference to it.
“I mean—I thought what you were going in for was giving Lydia a good time this winter. You’re running her as though she were a transcontinental railway system.”
“You can’t accomplish anything without system in this world,” said Mrs. Emery. She added, “Perhaps Lydia will find, when she comes to ordering her own life, that she will miss her old mother’s forethought and care.”
Lydia flung herself remorsefully on her mother’s neck. “I’m so sorry, Mother dear,” she almost sobbed. Dr. Melton’s professional eye took in the fact that everyone in the room was high-strung and tense. “The middle-of-the-social-season symptom,” he called it to himself. “I’m so sorry, Mother,” Lydia went on. “I will be more careful next time. You are so good to—to—”