“Don’t Lydia! Oh, don’t, dear! You’ll make yourself look like a fright for the luncheon.” Mrs. Emery ran to her daughter with a solicitude in which there was considerable irritation. “You’re perfectly exhausting, taking everything that deadly serious way. Don’t be so morbid! You know your Aunt Julia didn’t mean anything. She never does!”
Lydia pulled away and threw herself on the bed, still sobbing, and protesting that she could not go to the luncheon; and in the end Mrs. Emery was obliged to make the profoundest apologies over the telephone to a justly indignant hostess.
In the meantime Lydia was undressed and put to bed by Mrs. Sandworth, who dared not open her mouth. The girl still drew long, sobbing breaths, but before her aunt left the room she lay quiet, her eyes closed. The other was struck by the way her pallor brought out the thinness of her lovely face. She hovered helplessly for a moment over the bed. “Is there anything I can do for you, dearie?” she asked humbly.
Lydia shook her head. “Just let me be quiet,” she murmured.
At this, Mrs. Sandworth retreated to the door, from which she ventured a last “Lydia darling, you know I’m sorry if I said anything to hurt—”
Lydia raised herself on her elbow and looked at her solemnly. “It wasn’t what you said; it was what it meant!” she said tragically.
With this cryptic utterance in her ears, Mrs. Sandworth fled downstairs, to find her sister-in-law turning away from the telephone with a frown. “Mrs. Hollister was very much provoked about it, and I don’t blame her. It’s hard to make her understand we couldn’t have given her a little warning. And—that’s the most provoking part—I didn’t dare say Lydia is really sick, when, as like as not, she’ll be receiving company this evening.”
“You wouldn’t want her sick, just so it would be easier to explain, would you?” asked Mrs. Sandworth with her eternal disconcerting innocence.
Mrs. Emery relieved her mind by snapping at her sister-in-law with the violence allowed to an intimate of many years’ standing, “Good gracious, Julia! you’re as bad as Lydia! Turning everything people say into something quite different—”
Mrs. Sandworth interrupted hastily, “Susan, tell me, for mercy’s sake, what did I say? The last thing I remember passing my lips was about her collar’s being a little crooked,—and just now she told me, as though it was the crack of Doom, that it wasn’t what I said, but what it meant, that was so awful. What in the world does she mean?”