Lydia considered this with honest surprise. “Why, do you know, it never occurred to me I could do that!”
Rankin nodded. “It’s a common hallucination,” he explained. “I’ve had it. I have to struggle against it still.”
“Hallucination?”
“The notion that you belong to the things that belong to you.”
Lydia looked at him sidewise out of her clear dark eyes. She was beginning to feel more at home in his odd repertory of ideas. “I wonder,” she mused, “if that’s why I always feel so much freer and happier in old clothes—that I don’t forget that they’re for me and I’m not for them. But really, you know, dressmakers and mothers and folks get you to thinking that you are for clothes—you’re made to show them off.” Rankin vouchsafed no opinion as to this problem of young-ladyhood. “Here’s your sister’s rain,” he said instead, pointing across the clearing, where against the dark tree-trunks fine, clear lines slanted down to the dry grass. Lydia rose in some agitation. “Why, I didn’t really think it would rain! I thought it was just Marietta’s—” She glanced down in dismay at her thin low shoes and the amber-colored silk of her ruffled skirt.
Rankin stood up eagerly. “Ah, I’ve a chance to do you a service. Just step in, won’t you, a moment and let me skirmish around and see what a bachelor’s establishment can offer to a beautiful young lady who mustn’t get wet.”
Lydia moved into the wide, low room, saying deprecatingly, “It wouldn’t hurt me to get wet, you know. But this dress just came from Paris, and I haven’t had a chance to show it to anybody yet.”
Rankin laughed, hastening to draw up a chair before the hearth, where a few embers still glowed, their presence explained by the autumnal chill which now struck sharply across the room from the open door as the rain began to patter on the roof. The girl looked about her in silence, apparently with surprise.
“Well, how do you like it?” asked the master of the house, throwing some dry twigs on the fire so that the flame, leaping up, lighted the corners, already dusky with the approach of evening. “It’s not very tidy, is it?” He began rummaging in a recess in the wall, tumbling out coats and shoes and hats in his haste. Finally, “There!” he cried in triumph, shaking out a rain-coat, “That will keep your pretty French finery dry.”
He turned back to the girl, who was sitting very straight in her chair, peering about her with wide eyes and a strange expression on her face. “Why, what’s the matter?” he asked.