Mrs. Mortimer paused with uplifted needle to inquire wildly, “New what?”
“New curtains, instead of spending a whole week in hot weather mending those.”
“Good gracious, child! Will you ever learn anything about the cost of living! I think it’s awful, the way Father and Mother have let you grow up! Why, it would take half a month’s salary to reproduce these curtains. I got them at a great bargain—but even then I couldn’t afford them. Ralph was furious.”
“You could buy muslin curtains that would be just as pretty,” suggested Lydia.
“Why, those curtains are the only things with the least distinction in my whole parlor! They save the room.”
“From what?”
“From showing that there’s almost nothing in it that cost anything, to be sure! With them at the window, it would never enter people’s heads to think that I upholstered the furniture myself, or that the pictures are—”
“Why shouldn’t they think so, if you did?” Lydia proffered this suggestion with an air of fatigued listlessness, which, her sister thought, showed that she made it “simply to be contrary.” Acting on this theory, she answered it with a dignified silence.
There was a pause. Lydia tilted her head back against the chair, and looked out of the window at the new green leaves of the piazza vine. Mrs. Mortimer’s thin, white, rather large hands drew the shining little needle back and forth with a steady, hurrying industry. It came into her mind that their respective attitudes were symbolical of their lives, and she thought, glancing at Lydia’s drooping depression, that it would be better for her if she were obliged to work more. “Work,” of course, meant to Marietta those forms of activity which filled her own life. “I never have any time for notions,” she thought, the desperate, hurrying, straining routine of her days rising before her and moving her, as always, to rebellion and yet to a martyr’s pride.
Lydia stirred from her listless pose and came over to her sister, sitting down on a stool at her feet. “Marietta, dear, please let me talk to you. I’m so miserable these days—and Mother won’t let me say a word to her. She says it’s spring fever, and being engaged, and the end of the season, and everything. Please, please be serious, and let me tell you about it, and see if you can’t help me.”