“She’s embodied Loyalty,” said the doctor. “It breathes from every pore.”
“She’s going to smash my cut glass and china something awful,” Lydia foretold.
Dr. Melton took his godchild by the shoulders and shook her. “Now, Lydia Emery, you listen to me! I don’t often issue an absolute command, if I am your physician, but I do now. You let her smash your china and cut glass, and all the rest of your devastating trash she can lay her hands on, rather than lose her—until after September, anyhow! It’s a direct reward of virtue for your having shipped the ‘ould divil’!”
Lydia’s face clouded. “I’m afraid Paul won’t think her much of a substitute for Ellen,” she murmured, “and we’ll have to find a cook somehow even if this one learns enough to be second girl.”
“Second girl!” ejaculated the doctor. “She’s a human being with a capacity for loyalty.”
“She’s evidently awfully incompetent—”
The doctor snorted. “Competence—I loathe the word! It’s used now to cover all imaginable sins, as folks used to excuse all manner of rascality in a good swordsman. We’re beyond the frontier period now when competence was a matter of life and death. We ought to begin to have some glimmering realization that there are other—”
“Oh, what a hand for talk!” said Lydia.
The doctor rejoiced at her laughing impatience. He thought to himself, as he looked at her standing in the doorway and waving good-by to him, that she seemed a very different creature from the drooping and tearful—he interrupted his chain of thought as he boarded his car, to exclaim, “May she live long, that heavy-handed, vivifying Celt!”