“Oh, Susan! If Paul can’t in three months make more headway than Rankin can tear down in an hour and a half—”
She raged at him, revolted at the calmness with which he was unbuttoning his overcoat and unwinding his muffler, “You don’t understand—anything! I’m not afraid she’ll elope with him—Paul’s got her too solid for that—Rankin probably won’t say anything of that kind! But he’ll put notions in her head again—she’s so impressionable. And she says queer things now, once in a while, if she’s left alone a minute. She needs managing. She’s not like that levelheaded, sensible Madeleine Hollister. Lydia has to be guided, and you don’t see anything—you leave it all to me.”
She was almost crying with nervous exhaustion. That Lydia’s course ran smooth through a thousand complications was not accomplished without an incalculable expenditure of nervous force on her mother’s part. Dr. Melton had several times of late predicted that he would have his old patient back under his care again. Judge Emery, remembering this prophecy, was now moved by his wife’s pale agitation to a heart-sickening mixture of apprehension for her and of recollection of his own extreme discomfort whenever she was sick. He tried to soothe her. “But, Susan, there’s nothing we can do about it,” he said reasoningly, hanging up his overcoat, blandly ignorant that her irritation came largely from his failure to fall in with her conception of the moment as a tragic one.
“You could care something about it,” she said bitterly, standing with all her wraps on. The telephone bell rang. She motioned him back. “No; I might as well go first as last. It’ll be something I’d have to see about, anyway.”
As he hesitated in the middle of the hall, longing to betake himself to a deep easy chair and a moment’s relaxation, and not daring to do so, he was startled by an electric change in his wife’s voice. “You’re at Hardville, you say? Oh, Flora Burgess, I could go down on my knees in thanksgiving. I want you to run right out as fast as you can and get on the next Interurban car from Endbury. Lydia’s on it—” she cast caution from her desperately—“and I’ve just heard that there’s somebody I don’t want her to talk to—you know—carpenters—run—fly—never mind what they say! Make them talk to you, too!”
She turned back to her husband, transfigured with triumph. “I guess that’ll put a spoke in his wheel!” she cried. “Flora Burgess’s at Hardville, and that’s only half an hour from here. I guess they can’t get very far in half an hour.”
The Judge considered the matter with pursed lips. “I wish it hadn’t happened,” he mused, as unresponsive to his wife’s relief as he had been to her anxiety. “At first, I mean—last autumn—at all.”
His wife caught him up with a good humor gay with relief. “Oh, give you time, Nat, and you come round to seeing what’s under your nose. I was wishing it hadn’t happened long before I knew it had. I breathed it in the air before we ever knew she’d so much as seen him.”
“Melton says he thinks the fellow has a future before him—”
“Oh, Marius Melton! How many of his swans have stuffed feather pillows!”