Mrs. Emery sank into a seat with a gesture of utter impatience. “Mean? Mean nothing! Didn’t you ever know an engaged girl before?”
“Well, I’m sure when I was engaged I never—”
“Oh, yes, you did; you must have. They all do. It’s nerves.”
But a moment later she contradicted her own assurance with a sigh of unresignation. “Oh, dear! why can’t Lydia be just bright and wholesome and fun-loving and natural like Madeleine Hollister!” She added darkly, “I just feel in my bones that this has something to do with that Rankin and his morbid ideas.”
Mrs. Sandworth was startled. “Good gracious! You don’t suppose she—”
“No; of course I don’t! I never thought of such a thing. You ought to see her when she is with Paul. She’s just fascinated by him! But you know as well as I do that ideas go right on underneath all that!” Her tone implied a disapproval of their tenacity of life. “And yet, Lydia’s really nothing unusual! Before they get married and into social life, and settled down and too busy to think, most girls have a queer spell. Only most of them take it out on religion. Oh, why couldn’t she have met that nice young rector—if she had to meet somebody to put ideas into her head—instead of an anarchist.”
“Well, it’s certainly all past now,” Mrs. Sandworth reassured her.
“Yes; hasn’t it been a lovely winter! Everybody’s been so good to Lydia. Everything’s succeeded so! But I suppose Dr. Melton’s right. We ought to call her season over, except for the announcement party—and the wedding, of course—and oh, dear! There are so many things I’d planned to do I can’t possibly get in now. It seems strange a child of mine should be so queer and have such notions.”
However, after the two had talked over the plans for a great evening garden-party in the Emery “grounds” and Mrs. Emery’s creative eye had seen the affair in a vista of brilliant pictures, she felt more composed. She went up quietly to Lydia’s door and looked in.
The girl was lying on her back, her wide, dark eyes fixed on the ceiling. Something in the expression of her face gave her mother a throb of pain. She yearned over the foolish, unbalanced young thing, and her heart failed her, in that universal mother’s fear for her child of the roughnesses of life, through which she herself has passed safely and which have given savor to her existence. In her incapacity to conceive other roughnesses than those she could feel herself, she was, it is probable, much like the rest of humankind. She advanced to the bed, her tenderest mother-look on her face, and cut Lydia off from speech with gentle wisdom. “No, no, dear; don’t try to talk. You’re all tired out and nervous and don’t know—”