Mrs. Emery looked up in astonishment and a little vexation. She, too, had nerves these days. “Why, Lydia, what’s the matter with you? You know nobody uses those for table decoration.”
“We could,” said Lydia.
“Why, my dear child, I never knew before there was a contrary streak in you, like your father. What in the world possesses you all of a sudden to object to candles?”
“It’s not candles—it’s the idea of—Oh, all the fuss and bother, when everybody’s so tired, and the weather’s so hot, and it’s going to cost too much anyhow.”
“Well, what would you have us fuss and bother about, if not over having everything nice when we entertain?” Mrs. Emery’s air of enforced patience was strained.
Lydia surveyed her from the hall in silence. “That’s just it—that’s just it,” she said finally, and went away.
Mrs. Emery laid down her pen to laugh to herself over the queer ways of children. “They begin to have notions with their first teeth, and I suppose they don’t get over them till their first baby begins to teethe.”
When Lydia arrived at her sister’s house, she found that competent housekeeper engaged in mending the lace curtains of her parlor. She had about her a battery of little ingenious devices to which she called Lydia’s attention with pride. “I’ve taught myself lace-mending just by main strength and awkwardness,” she observed, fitting a hoop over a torn place, “and it’s not because I have any natural knack, either. If there’s anything I hate to do, it’s to sew. But these curtains do go to pieces so. I wash them myself, to be careful, but they are so fine. Still,” she cast a calculating eye on the work before her, “I’ll be through by the end of this week, anyhow—if that new Swede will only stay in the kitchen that long!”
She bent her head over her work again, holding it up to the light from time to time and straining her eyes to catch the exact thread with her almost impalpably fine needle. Lydia sat and fanned herself, looking flushed and tired from the walk in the heat, and listening in silence to Mrs. Mortimer’s account of the various happenings of her household: “And didn’t I find that good-for-nothing negro wench had been having that man—and goodness knows how many others—right here in the house. I told Ralph I never would have another nigger—but I shall. You can’t get anything else half the time. I tell you, Lydia, the servant problem is getting to be something perfectly terrible—it’s—”
Lydia broke in to say, “Why don’t you buy new ones?”