“There, there! That’s enough!” said Lydia.
“I didn’t need to be so violent about it, that’s a fact,” apologized Rankin.
“But you’re talking of people the way they ought to be,” objected Lydia, apparently drawing again from a stock of inculcated arguments. “Do you really, honestly, suppose that that girl would rather have an opportunity to do something for her parents and—and—and all that, than have a fine dress that would cost a lot and make the other girls envious?”
“Oh, Lydia!” cried her companion, not noticing the betrayal of a mental habit in the slipping out of her name. “You’re just in a state of saturated solution of Dr. Melton. Don’t you believe a word he says about folks. They’re lots better than he thinks. The only reason anybody has for raging at them for being a bad lot is because they are such a good lot! They are so chuck-full of good possibilities! There’s so much more good in them than bad. You think that, don’t you? You must! There’s nothing to go on, if you don’t.”
As Lydia began to answer she felt herself, as once or twice before when with Rankin, suddenly an immeasurable distance from her usual ways of mental life. She looked about her upon a horizon very ample and quite strange, without being able to trace the rapid steps that had carried her away from the close-walled room full of knickknacks and trifles, where she usually lived. She drew a deep breath of surprise and changed her answer to an honest “I don’t believe I know whether I believe you or not. I don’t think I ever thought of it before.”
“What do you think about?” The question was evidently too sincere an interrogation to resent.
The girl made several beginnings at an answer, stopped, looked out of the window, looked down at her shoe-tip, and finally burst into her little clear trill of amusement. “I don’t,” she said, looking full at Rankin, her eyes shining. “You’ve caught me! I can’t remember a single time in my day when I think about anything but hurrying to get dressed in time to be at the next party promptly. Maybe some folks can think when they’re hurrying to get dressed, but I can’t.”
Rankin was very little moved to hilarity by this statement, but he was too young to resist the contagion of Lydia’s mirth, and laughed back at her, wondering at the mobility of her ever-changing face.
“If you don’t think, what do you do?” he interrogated with mock relentlessness.
“Nothing,” said Lydia recklessly, still laughing.