Lydia had grown quite pale. She pushed back her plate and looked at her father with horrified eyes. “Father! What a thing to say!” she finally cried out. “You make me ashamed to look him—to look anybody in the face. Why, I never dreamed of such a thing! I never—”
Judge Emery was very fond of his pretty daughter, and at this appeal from what he felt to be a very mild expression of justified discontent, he melted at once. “Now, never mind, Lydia, it won’t kill me. Only as soon as your mother gets about again, for the Lord’s sake have her take you to a butcher shop and learn to select meats.”
Lydia looked at him blankly. She had the feeling that her father was so remote from her that she could hardly see him. She opened her lips to speak, but at that moment the maid—the latest acquisition from the employment agency, a slatternly Irish girl—went through the dining-room on her way to answer the door-bell, and her father’s amused comment cut her short. “Lydia, you’ll have your guests thinking they’re at a lunch counter if you let that girl go on wearing that agglomeration of hair.”
The maid reappeared, sidling into the room, half carrying, half dragging a narrow, tall green pasteboard box, higher than herself but still not long enough for its contents, which protruded in leafy confusion from one end. “It’s for you,” she said bluntly, depositing it beside Lydia and retreating into the kitchen.
Lydia looked at it in wonder, turning to crimson confusion when her father said: “From Paul, I suppose. Very nice, I’m sure. Ring the bell for dessert before you open it. Of course you’re in a hurry to read the card.” He smiled with a tender amusement at the girl, who met his eyes with a look of fright. She opened the box, from which arose a column of strong, spicy odor, almost like something visible, and naïvely read the card aloud: “To the little girl grown up at last—to the young lady I’ve waited so long to see.”
She laid the card down beside her plate and kept her eyes upon it, hanging her head in silence. Her father began to consume his dessert rapidly. The cream in it was delicious, and he ate with appreciation. To him, as to many middle-aged Americans, the two vital parts of a meal were the meat and the dessert. The added pleasures or comforting consolations of soup, salads, vegetables, entrées, made dishes, were not for him. He ate them, but with a robust indifference. “Meat’s business,” he was wont to say, “and dessert’s fun. The rest of one’s victuals is society and art and literature and such—things to leave to the women.”
He now stopped his consumption of his dessert and recalled himself with an effort to his daughter’s impalpable difficulties. She was murmuring, “But, Father—you must be mistaken— Why, nobody so much as hinted at such a—”
“That’s your mother’s doings. She’d be furious now if she knew I’d spoken right out. But you don’t want to be treated like a little girl all your life, do you?” He laughed at her speechless embarrassment with a kind obtuseness to the horror of youth at seeing its shy fastnesses of reserve laid open to indifferent feet. Divining, however, through his affection for her, that she was really more than pleasantly startled by his bluntness, he began to make everything smooth by saying: “There aren’t many girls in Endbury who don’t envy my little Lydia, I guess. Paul is considered—”
At this point Lydia rose hurriedly and actually ran away from the sound of his voice. She fled upstairs so rapidly that he heard the click of her heel on the top step before he could draw his breath. He laughed uneasily, finished his dessert in one or two huge mouthfuls, and followed her. He was recalled by the ringing of the telephone bell, and when he went upstairs again he was smiling broadly. With his lawyer’s caution, he waited a moment outside his wife’s room, where he heard Lydia’s voice, to see if her mother had hit upon some happy inspiration to quiet the girl’s exaggerated maidenly shyness. He had the tenderest indulgence to his daughter’s confusion, but he was not without a humorous, middle-aged realization of the extremely transitory nature of this phase of youth. He had lived long enough to see so many blushing girls transformed into matter-of-fact matrons that the inevitable end of the business was already present to his mind. He was vastly relieved that Lydia had a mother to understand her fancies, and upon his wife, whom he would not have trusted to undertake the smallest business transaction without his advice, he transferred, with a sigh of content, the entire responsibility of wisely counseling their daughter. “Thank the Lord, that’s not my job!” he had often said about some knotty point in the up-bringing of the children. Mrs. Emery had always answered that she could not be too thankful for a “husband who was not a meddler.”
The Judge now listened at the door to the conversation between the two women with a grin of satisfaction.