She raised her tragic eyes to his. “About the mashed potatoes last night—they didn’t have a bit of salt in them—they were too nasty for—”
“Oh, pshaw! It makes no difference whether your dinner party was a success or not! You know that as well as I do. A dinner party is a relic of the Dark Ages, anyhow—if not of the Stone Age! As a physician, I shudder to see people sitting down to gorge themselves on the richest possible food, all carefully rendered extra palatable in order that they may put upon their bodies the burden of throwing off an enormous amount of superfluous food. A hundred years from now people will be as ashamed of us for our piggishness as we are of our eighteenth-century forbears for their wine-swilling to the detriment of their descendants. A dinner party of to-day bears no more relation to a rational gathering of rational people for the purpose of rational social intercourse than—”
He had run on with his usual astonishing loquacity without drawing breath, overwhelming Lydia with a fresh flood of words when she tried to break in; but she now sprang up and motioned him peremptorily to silence.
“Please, please, Godfather, don’t! I asked you not to unsettle me—you’re not kind to do it! You’re not kind! I must think it’s important and, and—the necessary thing to do. I must!” She put her hands over her eyes as she spoke. She was trying to shut out a vision of Paul’s embittered face of wrathful chagrin. “That’s the trouble with me,” she went on. “Something in me makes it hard for me to think it important enough to give up everything else for it—and I—”
“Why ‘must’ you?” asked the doctor bluntly, crumpling his damp dishcloth into a ball.
Lydia looked at him and saw Paul so evidently that the doctor saw with her. “I must! I must!” she only repeated.
Dr. Melton opened his mouth wide, closed it again with a snap, and threw the tightly wadded ball in his hand passionately upon the floor with the gesture of an angry child. Lydia was standing now, looking down at the red-faced little man as he peered up at her after his silent outbreak. His attitude of fury so contrasted with the pacific white apron which enveloped him, that she broke out into a laugh. Even as she laughed and turned away to answer a knock at the door, she was acutely thankful that it was not with Paul that she had been set upon by that swiftly mobile change of humor, that it was not at Paul that she had launched that disrespectful mirth.
The person who knocked proved to be a very large, rosy-cheeked female, who might be a big, overgrown child or a preposterously immature woman for all Lydia, looking at her in perplexity, could make out. She felt no thrill of premonition as this individual advanced into the kitchen, a pair of immense red hands folded before her.
“I’m Anastasia O’Hern, ma’am,” she announced with a thick accent of County Clare and a self-confident, good-humored smile, “though mostly I’m called ’Stashie—and I’m just over from th’ old country to my Aunt Bridgie that washed for you till the rheumatism got her, and when she told me about what you’d done for her and Patsy—how you’d sent off that ould divil where she couldn’t torment Patsy no more, and him as glad of it as Aunt Bridgie herself, just like she knew he would be, and what an awful time you do be havin’ with gurrls, and a baby comin’, I says to myself and to Aunt Bridgie, ‘There’s the lady I’m goin’ to worrk for if she’ll lave me do ut,’ and Aunt Bridgie was readin’ to me in the paper about your gran’ dinner party last night and I says to her and to myself, ‘There’ll be a main lot of dishes to be washed th’ day and I’d better step over and begin.’”
She pulled off the shawl that had covered her head of flaming hair, and smiled broadly at her two interlocutors, who remained motionless, staring at her in an ecstasy of astonishment.