“I’ll try,” said Lydia.
Paul took the catalogue from her hand and reached for his hat. They were in the hall now. “Good-by, Honey,” he said, kissing her hastily and darting out of the house.
Lydia had but just turned back to the dining-room when he opened the door and came in again, bringing a gust of fresh winter air with him. “Say, dear, you forgot about something you wanted to tell me about. I’ve got eight minutes before the trolley, so now’s your chance. What is it? Something about the plumbing?”
In the dusky hall Lydia faced him for a moment in silence, with so singular an expression on her face that he looked apprehensive of some sort of scene. Then she broke out into breathless, quavering laughter, whose uncertainty did not prevent Paul from great relief at her apparent change of mood. “Never mind,” she said, leaning against the newel-post, “I’ll tell you—I’ll tell you some other time.”
He kissed her again, and she felt that it was with a greater tenderness now that he no longer feared a possibly disagreeable communication from her.
After he had gone, she thought loyally, putting things in the order of importance she had been taught all her life, “Well, it is hard for him to have perplexities at home and not to be able to give the freshest and best of himself to business.” It was not until later, as she was dressing Ariadne, that she swung slowly back to her new doubt of that view of the problem.
Ariadne was in one of her most talkative moods, and was describing at great length the dream that had frightened her so. There was a hen with six little chickens, she told her mother, and one of them was as big—as big—
“Yes, dear; and what did the big little chicken do?” Lydia laced up the little shoes, on her knees before the small figure, her mind whirling. “That was just the trouble, she couldn’t make it seem right any more, that Paul’s best and freshest should all go to making money and none to a consideration of why he wished to make it.”
“Yes, Ariadne, and it flew over the house, and then?”
She began buttoning the child’s dress, and lost herself in ecstasy over the wisps of soft curls at the back of the rosy neck. She dropped a sudden kiss on the spot, in the midst of Ariadne’s narrative, and the child squealed in delighted surprise. Lydia was carried away by one of her own childlike impulses of gayety, and burrowed bear-like, growling savagely, in the soft flesh. Ariadne doubled up, shrieking with laughter, the irresistible laughter of childhood. Lydia laughed in response, and the two were off for one of their rollicking frolics. They were like a couple of kittens together. Finally, “Come, dear; we must get our breakfasts,” said Lydia, leading along the little girl, still flushed and smiling from her play.