Lydia ran over to him, conscience-stricken. He took her embrace and remorseful kiss quietly. “Don’t be sorry, Lydia dear. You have just shown me, as in a flash of lightning, how much more powerful a grasp on reality you have than I.”
Lydia recoiled from him with an outcry of exasperation. “I! Why, I’m almost an idiot! I haven’t a grasp on anything! I can’t see an inch before my nose. I’m in a perfect nightmare of perplexity all the time because I can’t make out what I’m driving at—or ought to—”
She went on more quietly, with a reasoning air: “Only look here, Godfather, it came over me the other night, when I couldn’t sleep, that perhaps what’s the trouble with me is that I’m lazy! I believe that’s it! I don’t want to work the way Marietta does, and Mother does, and even Madeleine does over her dresses and parties and things. It must be I’m a shirk, and expect to have an easier time than most people. That must be it. What else can it be?”
The doctor made no protest against this theory, taking himself off in a silence most unusual with him. Lydia did not notice this; nor did she in the next two or three months remark that her godfather took quite literally and obeyed scrupulously her exhortation to leave her in peace.
She was in the grasp of this new idea. It seemed to her that in phrasing it she had hit upon the explanation of her situation which she had been so long seeking, and it was with a resolve to scourge this weakness out of her life that she now faced the future.
She found a satisfaction in the sweeping manner in which this new maxim could be applied to all the hesitations that had confused her. All her meditations heretofore had brought her nothing but uncertainty, but this new catchword of incessant activity drove her forward too resistlessly to allow any reflections as to whether she were going in the right direction. She yielded herself absolutely to that ideal of conduct which had been urged upon her all her life, and she found, as so many others find, oblivion to the problems of the spirit in this resolute refusal to recognize the spirit. It was perhaps during these next months of her life that she most nearly approximated the Endbury notion of what she should be.
She had yielded to Paul on the subject of the cook not only because of her timid distrust of her own inexperienced judgment but because of her intense reaction from the usual Endbury motto of “Husbands, hands off!” She had wanted Paul to be interested in the details of the house as she hoped to know and be interested in what concerned him, and when he showed his interest in a request she could not refuse it. She hoped that she had made a good beginning for the habit of taking counsel with each other on all matters. But she thought and hoped and reflected very little during these days. She was enormously, incredibly busy, and on the whole, she hoped, successfully so. The receptions, at least, went off very well, everybody said.
Dr. Melton did not see his goddaughter again until he came with Mrs. Sandworth to the last of these events. She was looking singularly handsome at that time, her color high, her eyes very large and dark, almost black, so dilated were the pupils. With the nicety of observation of a man who has lived much among women, the doctor noticed that her costume, while effective, was not adjusted with the exquisite feeling for finish that always pervaded the toilets of her mother and sister. Lydia was trying with all her might to make herself over, but with the best will in the world she could not attain the prayerful concentration on the process of attiring herself, characteristic of the other women of her family.
“She forgot to put the barrette in her back hair,” murmured Mrs. Sandworth mournfully, as she and her brother emerged from the hand-shake of the last of the ladies assisting in receiving, “and there are two hooks of her cuff unfastened, and her collar’s crooked. But I don’t dare breathe a word to her about it. Since that time before her marriage when she—”
“Yes, yes, yes,” her brother cut her short; “don’t bring up that tragic episode again. I’d succeeded in forgetting it.”