To each of these impassioned statements her sister had returned an automatic nod. “I see what you mean,” she now put in, a statement which was the outward expression of a thought running, “Mercy! Dr. Melton’s right! She’s perfectly wild with nerves! We must get her married as soon as ever we can!”
Lydia went over to the window, and stood looking out as she talked, now with an excited haste, now with a dragging note of fatigue in her voice. Her need of sympathy was so great that she did a violence to the reticence she had always kept, even with herself. She wondered aloud if it were not perhaps Daniel Rankin and his queer ideas that lay at the bottom of her trouble. She added, whirling about from the window, “For mercy’s sake! don’t go and think I am in love with him, or anything! I haven’t so much as thought of him all winter! I see, now that Mother’s pointed it out to me, how domineering he really was to me last autumn. I’m just crazy about Paul, too! When I’m with him he takes my breath away! But maybe—maybe I can’t forget Mr. Rankin’s ideas! You know he talked to me so much when I was first back—and if somebody would just argue me out of them, the way he did into them! I don’t believe I’d ever have thought it queer to live the way we do, just to have more things and get ahead of other people—if he hadn’t put the idea into my head. But nobody else will even talk about it! They laugh when I try to.”
She came over closer to the matron, and said imploringly, her voice trembling, “I don’t want to be queer, Marietta! What makes me? I don’t like to have queer ideas, different from other people’s—but every once in a while it all comes over me with a rush—what’s the good of all we do?”
Poor Lydia propounded this question as though it were the first time in the world’s history that it had passed the lips of humanity. Her curious, puzzled distress rose up in a choking flood to her throat, and she stopped, looking desperately at her sister.
Mrs. Mortimer nodded again, calmly, drew a long breath, and seemed about to speak. Lydia gazed at her, her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright with unshed tears—all one eager expectancy. The older woman’s eyes wandered suddenly for an instant. She darted forward, clapped her hands together once, and then in rapid succession three or four times. Then rolling triumphantly something between her thumb and forefinger, she turned to Lydia. The little operation had not taken the third of a moment, but the change in the girl’s face was so great that Mrs. Mortimer was moved to hasty, half-shamefaced, half-defiant apology. “I was listening to you, Lydia! I was listening! But it’s just the time of year when they lay their eggs, and I have to fight them. Last year my best furs and Ralph’s dress suit were perfectly riddled! You know we can’t afford new.”
Lydia rose in silence and began pinning on her hat. Her sister, for all her vexation over the ending of the interview, could hardly repress a smile of superior wisdom at the other’s face of tragedy. “Don’t go, Lyddie, don’t go!” She tried to put her arms around the flighty young thing. “Oh, dear Lydia, cultivate your sense of humor! That’s all that’s the matter with you. There’s nothing else! Look here, dear, there are moths as well as souls in the world. People have to be on the lookout for them,—for everything, don’t you see?”
“They look out for moths, all right,” said Lydia in a low tone. She submitted, except for this one speech, in a passive silence to her sister’s combination of petting and exhortation, moving quietly toward the door, and stepping evenly forward down the walk.
She had gone down to the street, leaving Mrs. Mortimer still calling remorseful apologies, practical suggestions, and laughing comments on her “tragedy way of taking the world.” At the gate, she paused, and then came back, her face like a mask under the shadow of her hat.
Marietta stood waiting for her with a quizzical expression. Under her appearance of lightly estimating Lydia’s depression as superficial, she had been sensible of a not unfamiliar qualm of doubt as to her own manner of life, an uneasy heaving of a subconscious self not always possible to ignore; but, as was her resolute custom, she forced to the front that perception of the ridiculous which she had urged on her sister. She bit her lips, to conceal a smile at Lydia’s mournful emphasis as she went on: “I forgot to tell you, Marietta, what I was sent over for. You’re to be sure to order the perforated candles. It’s the kind that has holes down the middle, so the wax doesn’t look mussy on the outside, and it’s very, very important to have the right kind of candles.”
Mrs. Mortimer, willfully amused, looked with an obstinate smile into her sister’s troubled eyes as Lydia hesitated, waiting, in spite of herself, for the understanding word.