They were silent, standing with clasped hands in the passage-way that was to be the thoroughfare of their common life. It was a moment that was to come back many times to Lydia’s memory during later innumerable, hurried daily farewells. The thought of the significance of the place came to her mind now. She said softly, “This must be a foretaste of what we’re to have under this roof. How good it seems not to be in a hurry to—”
With a start Paul came to himself from his unusual forgetfulness of his surroundings. “We ought to be in a hurry now, dearest. Dr. Melton keeps me stirred up all the time to take care of you, and I’m sure I’m not doing that to let you stand here in this cold evening air. Come, let me show you—the closet under the stairs, you know, and the place for the refrigerator.”
Lydia yielded to his care for her with her sweet passivity, echoed his opinion about the details, and ran beside him down the driveway, to catch the next car to Endbury, with a singular light grace for a tall woman encumbered with long skirts.
In spite of their haste, they missed the car and were obliged to wait for a quarter of an hour beside the tracks. They talked cheerfully on indifferent topics, the sense of intimate comradeship gilding all they said. In their hearts was fresh the memory of the scene in the new house. They looked at each other and smiled happily in the intervals of their talk.
Paul was recapitulating to Lydia the advantages of the location of their house. “We are in the vanguard of a new movement in American life,” he said, “the movement away from the cities. Madeleine tells me that she and Lowder are planning a house at the other end of this street, and you can be sure they know what they are about.”
Lydia did not dissent from this opinion of her future sister-in-law, but she interrupted Paul a moment later, to say fondly, “Oh, but I’m glad that you aren’t fifty-five and bald and with lots of money!”
Paul laughed. “Madeleine’ll get on all right. She knows what she’s about. It’s a pair of them.”
“Well, I am church-thankful that that is not what we are about!” exclaimed Lydia.
Her lover voiced the extreme content with his lot which had been his obsession that day. “We have everything, darling. We shall have all that Madeleine and old Lowder have and we have now all this heavenly happiness that they’ll never know—or miss,” he added, giving them their due.
“I didn’t mean that,” protested Lydia. “It seems to me that being like them and being like us are two contradictory things. You can’t be both and have the things that go with both. And what I’m so thankful for is that we’re us and not them.”