Paul laughed. “You just see if there’s anything so contradictory. Trust me. You just see if you don’t beat Madeleine on her own ground yet.”
“I don’t want—” began Lydia; but Paul had gone back to his first theme and was expanding it for her benefit. “Yes; we’re getting the English idea. In twenty years from now you’ll find the social center of every moderate-sized American city shifted to some such place as this.”
Lydia craned her neck down the tracks impatiently. “I hope we don’t miss a trolley car every day of those twenty years,” she said, laughing.
“We’ll have an automobile,” he said. Then, reflecting that this was a somewhat exaggerated prophecy, he went on, with the honesty he meant always to show Lydia (so far as should be wise), “No; I’m afraid we sha’n’t, either—not for some time. It’ll take several years to finish paying altogether for the house, and we’ll have to pull hard to keep up our end for a time. But we’re young, so much won’t be expected of us—and if we just dig in for a few years now while we’re fresh, we can lie back and—”
“Well, gracious!” said Lydia, “who wants an automobile, anyhow! Only I wish the trolley didn’t take so long. It’s going to take the best part of an hour, you know; the ten or twelve minutes to get here from the house, the two or three minutes to wait, the thirty minutes on the car, the ten minutes to your office—and then all that turned inside out when you come back in the evening.”
“Oh, I’ll be able to do a lot of business figuring in that time. It won’t be wasted.”
They fell into happy picture-making of their future. Lydia wanted to have chickens and a garden, she said. She’d always wanted to be a farmer’s wife—an idea that caused Paul much laughter. They revised the plans for the furnishing of the hall—the china closet could stand against the west wall of the dining-room; why had they not thought of that before? The little room upstairs was to be a sewing-room “Although I hate sewing,” cried Lydia, “and nowadays, when ready-mades are so cheap and good—”
“Nobody expected you to make yourself tailored street dresses,” said Paul; “but don’t I all the time hear Madeleine and my aunt saying how the ‘last chic of a costume, the little indefinable touches that give a toilet distinction,’ they have to fuss up themselves out of bits of lace and ribbon and fur and truck?” He was quoting, evidently, with an amused emphasis.
Lydia leaned to him, her eyes wide in a mock solemnity. “Paul, I have a horrible confession to make to you. I loathe the ‘last chic, the little indefinable touches that give a toilet,’ and so forth! It makes me sick to spend my time on them. What difference does it make to real folks if their toilets aren’t ‘and so forth!’”
She looked so deliciously whimsical with her down-drawn face of rebellious contrition that Paul was enchanted. “And this I learn when it’s too late for me to draw back!” he cried in horror. “Woman! woman! this tardy confession”