Paul did not attempt to deny this, but he laughed at her dramatic accent. “Sure, he does! And about how to tie a four-in-hand, and what’s the best stud to wear at the back of a collar, and where to buy socks. What’s that to you?”
Lydia looked at him with quivering, silent lips.
He answered, with a little heat: “Why, look-y here, Lydia, suppose I were a doctor. You wouldn’t expect to know how many grains of morphine or what d’you call ’em I was going to use in—”
“But Dr. Melton is a doctor, and I know lots about what he thinks of as he lives day after day—there are other things besides technical details and grains of morphine—other problems—human things—Why, for instance, there’s one question that torments him all the time—how much it’s right to humor people who aren’t sick but think they are. He talks to me a great deal about such—”
Paul laughed, rising and gathering up his blue-prints. “Well, I can’t think of any problem that torments me but the everlasting one of how to sell more generators and motors than my competitors. Come on indoors, Honey; I’ve got to have some light if I finish going over these to-night.”
His accent was evidently intended to end the discussion, and Lydia allowed it to do so, although the incident was one she could not put out of her mind. She watched Walter going back and forth to Endbury with a jealousy the absurdity of which she herself realized, and she listened with a painful intentness to the boy’s talk during his occasional idle sojourns on their veranda steps. Yet she had been used to hearing Paul talk unintelligibly to the business associates whom, from time to time, he brought out to the house to dine and to talk business afterward. Somehow, she said to herself, it’s being just Walter seemed to bring it home to her. To have that boy—and yet she liked him, too, she thought. She looked sometimes into his fresh, innocently keen face with a yearning apprehension. Paul was amused at his precocious airs, and yet was not without respect for his rapidly developing business capacity. He said once, “Walter’s a real nice boy. I shouldn’t mind having a son like that myself!”
The remark startled Lydia. If she were to have a son he would be like that, she realized. And he would grow up and marry some—she sprang up and caught Ariadne to her in a sudden fierce embrace.
“You’ll break your back lifting that heavy baby ’round so,” Paul remonstrated with justice.
For all her aversion to the set forms of “society” as understood by Endbury, Lydia was fond of having people about her, “to try to get really acquainted with them” she said, and during that summer the Hollister veranda in the evening became a rendezvous for their Bellevue neighbors. Paul rather deplored the time wasted in this unprofitable variety of informal social life which, in his phrase, “counted for nothing” but he was always glad to see Walter. “At the rate he’s going and the way he’s taking hold, he’ll be a valuable business friend in a few years,” he said prophetically to Lydia, and he assumed more and more the airs of a comrade with the lad.
One evening when Walter came lounging over to the veranda, Lydia was busy indoors, but later she stepped to the door in time to hear Paul say, laughing: “Well, for all that, he’s not so good as Wellman Phelps’ stenographer.”