Madeleine was so much amused by this fantastic idea that she repeated it to Dr. Melton, who came in just then.
“Don’t it take Lydia!” she appealed to him.
The doctor considered the lovely, fair-haired creature in silence for a moment before answering. Then, “Yes; of course you’re right,” he assented. “It’s a strictly feminine monopoly. It’s as true that all men are incapable of understanding the significance of a baby in the universe and in their own lives, as it is true that all women love babies and desire them.” His tone was full of a heavy significance. He could never keep his temper with Paul’s sister.
Madeleine received this without a quiver. She neither blushed nor looked in the least abashed, but there was an unnecessary firmness in her voice as she answered, looking him steadily in the eye: “Exactly! That’s just what I’ve been telling Lydia.” She often said that she was the only woman in Endbury who wasn’t afraid of that impertinent little doctor.
After Madeleine had gone away, Lydia looked at her godfather with shining eyes. “I am living! I am living!” she told him, holding up the baby to him with a gesture infinitely significant; “and I like it as well as I thought I should!”
“Most people do,” he informed her, “when they get a peck at it. It generally takes something cataclysmic, too, to tear them loose from their squirrel-cages—like babies, or getting converted.”
If he thought that early married life could also be classed among these beneficently uprooting agencies, he kept his thoughts to himself. Lydia’s marriage had been eminently free from disagreeable shocks or surprises, and amply deserved to be called successful in the usual reasonable and moderate application of that adjective to matrimony; but there had been nothing in it, certainly, to destroy even temporarily anyone’s grasp on what are known as the realities of life.
The doctor considered, and added to his last speech: “Getting converted is surer. Babies grow up!”
Lydia felt that her godfather was right, and that babies gave one only a short respite, when, toward spring, she observed in all the inhabitants of her world repeated signs of uneasy dissatisfaction with her “submergence in domesticity,” as Mrs. Emery put it in a family council. Her father inquired mildly, one day in March, with the touchingly vague interest he took in his children’s affairs, if it weren’t about time she returned a few calls and accepted some invitations, and began “to live like folks again.” “Ariadne isn’t the first baby in the world,” he concluded.
“She’s the first one I ever had,” Lydia reminded him, with the humorous smile that was so like his own.