Lydia heard a frightened roaring in her ears at this unexpected turn to the conversation. Paul had never spoken so to her before. This was a very different tone from his irritation over defective housekeeping. She was as horrified as he over the picture that he held up with such apparently justified indignation, the picture of her as a querulous and ungrateful wife. Why, Paul was looking at her as though he hated her! For the first time in her married life, she conceived the possibility that she and Paul might quarrel, really seriously quarrel, about fundamental things. The idea terrified her beyond words. Her mind, undisciplined and never very clear, became quite confused, and only her long preparation and expectation of this talk enabled her to keep on at all, although now she could but falter ahead blindly. “Why, Paul dear—don’t look at me so! I never dreamed of blaming you for it! It’s just because I want things better for you that I’m so anxious to—”
“You haven’t noticed me complaining any, have you?” put in Paul grimly, still looking at her coldly.
“—It’s because I can’t bear to see you work so hard to get me things I’d ever so much rather go without than have you grow so you can’t see anything but business—it seems all twisted! I’d rather you’d pay an assistant to go off on these out-of-town trips, and we’d get along on less money—live in a smaller house, and not entertain.”
“Oh, Lydia, you talk like a child! How can I talk business with you when you have such crazy, impractical ideas? It’s not just the money an assistant would cost! Either he’d not be so good as I, and then I’d lose my reputation for efficiency and my chance for promotion, or else he would be as good and he’d get the job permanently and divide the field with me. A man has to look a long way ahead in business!”
“But, Paul, what if he did divide the field with you? What if you don’t get ahead of everybody else, if you’d have time and strength to think of other things more—you said the other day that you weren’t sleeping well any more, and you’re losing your taste for books and music and outdoors—why, I’d rather live in four rooms right over your office, so that you wouldn’t have that hour lost going and coming—”
Paul broke in with a curt scorn: “Oh, Lydia! What nonsense! Why don’t you propose living in a tent, to save rent?”
“Why I would—I would in a minute if I thought it would make things any better!” Lydia cried with a desperate simplicity.
At this crowning absurdity, Paul began to laugh, his ill-humor actually swept away by his amusement at Lydia’s preposterous fancies. It was too foolish to try to reason seriously with her. He put his hand on her shining dark hair, ruffling it up like a teasing boy. “I guess you’d better leave the economic status of society alone, Lydia. You might break something if you go charging around it so fierce.”
A call came from the darkness of the hall: “Mis’ Hollister!”
“It’s Mary,” said Paul; “probably you forgot to give her any instructions about breakfast, in your anxiety about the future of the world. If you can calm down enough for such prosaic details, do tell her for the Lord’s sake not to put so much salt in the oatmeal as there was this morning.”