He was surprised at her tone. “Why, sure!” he told her. “Why not? What else?”
Lydia said no more.
She had never felt more helplessly her remoteness from her husband’s world than during that spring. It was a sentiment that Paul, apparently, did not reciprocate. In spite of his frequent absences from home and his detached manner about most domestic questions, he had as definite ideas about his wife’s resumption of her social duties as had everyone else. “It made him uneasy,” as he put it, “to be losing so many points in the game.”
“Look here, my dear,” he said one evening in spring when the question came up; “summer’s almost here, and this winter’s been as good as dropped right out. Can’t you just pick up a few threads and make a beginning? It’ll make it easier in the fall.” He added, uneasily, “We don’t want old Lowder and Madeleine to get ahead of us entirely, you know. You can leave the kid with ’Stashie, can’t you, once in a while? She ought to be able to do that much, I should think.” He spoke as though he had assigned to her the simplest possible of all domestic undertakings. As Lydia made no response, he said finally, before attacking a pile of papers, “If I’m going to earn a lot more money, what good’ll it do us if you don’t do your share? Besides, we owe it to the kid. You want to do your best by your little girl, don’t you?”
As always, Lydia responded with a helpless alacrity to that appeal. “Oh, yes! Oh, yes! We must do our best for her.” This phrase summed up the religion she had at last found after so much fervent, undirected search. The church, as she knew it, was chiefly the social center of various fashionable activities which differed from ordinary fashionable enterprises only in being used to bring in money, which money, handed over to the rector, disappeared into the maw of some unknown, voracious, charitable institution. And beyond the church there had been no element in the life she knew, that was not frankly materialistic. But now, as the miracle of awakening consciousness took place daily in her very sight, and as the first dawnings of a personality began to look out of her child’s eyes, all Lydia’s vague spiritual cravings, all the groping tendrils of her aspirations, clung about the conviction more and more summing up her inner life, that she must do her best for Ariadne, must make the world, into which that little new soul had come, a better place than she herself had found it. She felt as naïvely and passionately that her child must be saved the mistakes that she had made, as though she were the first mother who ever sent up over her baby’s head that pitiful, universal prayer.
The matter of the social duty of the young Hollisters was finally compromised by Lydia’s accepting a number of invitations for the latter part of the season, and giving a series of big receptions in May. They were not by a hair nor a jot nor a tittle to be distinguished from their predecessors of the year before. As they seemed hardly adequate, Lydia suggested half-heartedly that they give a dinner party, but Paul replied, “With ’Stashie to pour soup down people’s backs and ask them how their baby’s whooping cough is, as she passes the potatoes?”
The hot weather came with the rush that was always so unexpected and so invariable, and another season was over. It was a busy, silent, thoughtful summer for Lydia. Of course (much to Lydia’s distress), Ariadne had been weaned when her mother had been forced to leave her to “go out” again, and this necessitated such anxious attention to her diet and general regimen during the hot weather that Lydia was very grateful to have little to interfere with her.
The General Office had accepted provisionally Paul’s redistributing plan, and in his anxiety to prove its value he was away from home more even than usual. The heat was terrible, but Lydia and he both knew no other climate, and Lydia loved the summer as the time of year when the fierceness of Nature forced on all her world a reluctant adjournment of their usual methods of spending their lives. She was absorbed in Ariadne, and the slow, blazing summer days were none too long for her.
The child began to develop an individuality. She was a sensitive, quickly-responsive little thing; exactly, so Mrs. Emery said, like Lydia at her age, except that she seemed to have none of Lydia’s native mirth, but, rather, a little pensive air that made her singularly appealing to all who saw her, and that pierced her mother’s heart with an anguish of protecting love.
Lydia said to her godfather one day, suddenly, “I wonder if people can be taught how to fight?”