CHAPTER XX
AN EVENING’S ENTERTAINMENT
The dinner parties, so Paul told Lydia one evening a few days later, would certainly be as successful and with but little more trouble. “Just think of the dinners Ellen’s been giving us for the last two months! I don’t believe there’s another such cook in Ohio—within our purse, of course.”
Lydia did not visibly respond to this enthusiasm. Indeed, she walked away from the last half of it, and leaned out of a window to look up at the stars. When she came back to take up the tiny dress on which she was sewing, she said: “I don’t think I can stand more than this one dinner party, Paul. I’m sorry, but I don’t feel at all well, and this dreadful nausea troubles me a good deal.”
“Well, you look lovelier than ever before in your life,” Paul reassured her tenderly, and felt a moment’s pique that her face did not entirely clear at this all-important announcement. “Come, let’s go over to the Derby’s for a game of bridge, will you, Lydia?”
This conversation took place on a Tuesday late in May. The dinner party was set for Thursday. On Wednesday morning, after Paul’s usual early departure, Lydia went to her writing desk to send a note to Madeleine Hollister. Paul had intimated that she and Madeleine were seeing less of each other than he had expected from their girlhood acquaintance, and Lydia, in her anxiety to induce Paul to talk over with her and plan with her the growth of their home life, was eager to adopt every casual suggestion he threw out. She began, therefore, a cordial invitation to Madeleine to spend several days with them. She would try again to be more intimate with her husband’s sister.
She had not inherited her mother’s housekeeping eye, and was never extremely observant of details. Being more than usually preoccupied this morning, she had no suspicion that someone else had been using the conveniences for writing on her desk until she turned over the sheet of paper on which she had begun her note, and saw with surprise that the other side was already covered with a coarse handwriting, unfamiliar to her.
As she looked at this in the blankest astonishment, a phrase leaped out at her comprehension, like a serpent striking. And then another. And another.