Lydia cut her off with a sharp “Oh, don’t!” She was now sitting, still absently grasping the dust-cloth.
Madeleine stood for a moment looking at her in a meditative silence rather unusual for her. “Lydia, you don’t look a bit well,” she said kindly. “Are you still bothered with that nausea?” She sat down by her sister-in-law and put her arms around her with an impulse of affectionate pity that almost undid Lydia, always so helplessly responsive to tenderness. “What’s the matter, Lyd?” Madeleine went on. “Something’s not going just right. Are you scared about this second confinement? Is Paul being horrid about something? You just take my advice, and if you want anything out of him, you fight for it. Nobody gets anything in this world if they don’t put up a fight for it.”
Lydia began to say that there were some things which lost their value if obtained by fighting, but suddenly she stopped her faltering words, drew a long breath, and laid her head on the other’s shoulder. More than wifely loyalty kept her silent. All her lifelong experience of Madeleine crystallized into a certainty of her limitations, and with this certainty came the realization that Madeleine stood for all the circle of people about her. Lydia had learned one lesson of life. She knew, she now knew intensely, that there was no cry by which she could reach the spiritual ear of the warm human beings so close to her in the body. She knew there was no language in which she could make intelligible her travail of soul. In the moment the two women sat thus, she renounced, once for all, any hope of outside aid in her perplexities. They lay between herself and Paul. She could hope to find expression and relief for them only through that unique privilege of marriage, utter intimacy.
She kissed her husband’s sister gently, comforted somewhat by the mere fact of her presence. “You’re good to bother about me, Maddely,” she said, using a pet name of their common childhood. “I guess I’m not feeling very well these days. But that’s to be expected.”
“Well, I tell you what, I wouldn’t be so patient about it as you are!” cried the other wife. “It’s simply horrid to have all this a second time, and Ariadne so little yet. It’s mean of Paul.”
She continued voicing an indignant sympathy with her usual energy. Lydia looked at her with a vague smile. At the first words of the childless woman, she had been filled with the mother-hunger which gave savor to her life during those days. As Madeleine went on, she sat unheeding, lost in a fond impatience to feel the tiny body on her knees, the downy head against her cheek. Her arms ached with emptiness. For an instant, so vivid was her sense of it, the child seemed to be there, in her arms. She felt the eager tug of the soft lips at her breast. She looked down—“Well, anyhow, you poor, dear thing! I hope you will bottle-feed this one! It would be just a little too much if they made you nurse it!”
Lydia did not even attempt a protest. Her submissive, entire acceptance of spiritual isolation seemed an answer to many of the conflicting impulses which had hitherto distracted her. She wished that she could reassure Madeleine by telling her that she would never again make another “odd” speech to her. She renounced all common life except the childlike, harmless, animal-like one of mutual material wants, and this renunciation brought her already a peace which, though barren, was infinitely calming after her former struggling uncertainties. “How did those waists come out that you sent to the cleaner’s, Madeleine?” she asked, in a bright, natural tone of interest. “I hope the blue one didn’t fade.”
Madeleine reported to her husband that Lydia had seemed in one of her queer notional moods at first, but cheered up afterward and talked more “like folks,” and seemed more like herself than she had since her father died. They had a real good visit together she said, and she began to think she could get some good satisfaction out of having Lydia for a neighbor, after all.
But after Lydia was alone, there sprang upon her the terror of living on such terms with Paul. No, no! Never that! It would be dying by inches! Beaten back to this last inner stronghold of the dismantled castle of her ideals of life, she prepared to defend it with the energy of desperation.
She did not believe Madeleine’s story, or, at least, not her interpretation of Paul’s attitude, but she felt a dreary chill at his silence toward her. It seemed to her that their marriage ought to have brought her husband an irresistible impulse to have in all their relations with each other a perfect openness. She resolved that she would begin to help him to that impulse that very day; now, at once.