“Is she?” queried the doctor with a sincerity of interrogation which his sister found distracting.
“Oh, Marius!” she reproached him again; and then helplessly, “How did we get on to Marietta, anyhow? I thought we were talking of Lydia’s engagement.”
“I was,” he assured her.
“And I was going to ask you really seriously, just straight out, what you are so down on the Emerys for? What have they done that’s so bad?”
“They’ve brought her up so that now in her time of need she hasn’t a weapon to resist them.”
“Oh, Ma—” began Mrs. Sandworth despairingly.
“Well, then, I will tell you—I’ll explain in words of one syllable. Mind you, I don’t undertake to settle the question—Heaven forbid! It may be all right for Marietta Mortimer to kill herself body and soul by inches to keep what bores her to death to have—a social position in Endbury’s two-for-a-cent society, but, for the Lord’s sake, why do they make such a howling and yelling just at the time when Lydia’s got the tragically important question to decide as to whether that’s what she wants? It’s like expecting her to do a problem in calculus in the midst of an earthquake.”
Mrs. Sandworth had a mortal antipathy to figures of speech, acquired of much painful experience with her brother’s conversation. She sank back in her chair and waved him off. “Calculus!” she cried, outraged; “earthquakes! And I’m sure you’re as unfair as can be! You can’t say her father’s obscured any question. You know he’s not a dictatorial father. His principle is not to interfere at all with his children.”
“Yes; that’s his principle all right. His specialties are in other lines, and they have been for a long time. His wife has seen to that.”
Mrs. Sandworth had one of her lucid divinations of the inner meaning of a situation. “Oh, the poor Emerys! Poor Lydia! Oh, Marius, aren’t you glad we haven’t any children!”