He turned, the light for the first time on his black, loveless face. “What is it?” he enunciated distinctly, looking at her hard.
Before his eyes Lydia shrank back. She put up her hands instinctively to hide her face from him. Finally, “Nothing—nothing—” she murmured.
Without comment, Paul went back to his conscientious round of the house.
Lydia had felt for the first time the quickening to life of her child. And during all that day, until then, she had forgotten that she was to know motherhood.
CHAPTER XXI
AN ELEMENT OF SOLIDITY
Lydia dated the estrangement from Marietta, which grew so rapidly during the next year, from the conversation on the day after the dinner party. She was cruelly wounded by her sister’s attack on her, but she could never remember the scene without one of her involuntary laughs so disconcerting to Paul, who only laughed when he felt gay, certainly at nothing which affected him seriously. But Lydia’s sense of humor was so tickled at the grotesque contrast between Marietta’s injured conception of the brilliant social event from which she had been excluded and the leaden fiasco which it had really been, that even at the time, in the midst of denying hotly her sister’s charges of snobbishness and social ambition, she was unable to keep back a shaky laugh or two as she cried out: “Oh, Etta! If you could know how things went, you’d be too thankful to have escaped it. It was awful beyond words!”
Marietta answered her by handing her with a grim silence a copy of that morning’s paper, open at Society Notes. Loyal Flora Burgess had lavished on “Miss Lydia’s” first dinner party her entire vocabulary of deferential, not to say reverential, encomiums. The “function had inaugurated a new era of cosmopolitan amplitude of social life in Endbury,” was the ending of the lengthy paragraph that described the table decorations, the menu, the costume of the hostess, the names of the music-makers afterward.