Lydia started, and flushed painfully. “Oh, Mother—” she began.
Her mother cut her short. “My dear! Miss Burgess!” she pointed out, as who should deplore keeping a secret from the family priest, “You know she never breathes a word that people don’t want known. And she had to be told so she can know how to put things all this winter.”
“I’m sure it’s the most wonderfully suitable marriage,” pronounced Miss Burgess.
A ring at the door-bell was instantly followed by the bursting open of the door and the impetuous onslaught of a girl, a tall, handsome, brown-eyed blonde about Lydia’s age, who, wasting no time in greetings to the older women, flung herself on Lydia’s neck with a wild outcry of jubilation. “My dear! Isn’t it dandy! Perfectly dandy! Paul met me at the train last night and when he told me I nearly swooned for joy! Of all the tickled sisters-in-law! I wanted to come right over here last night, but Paul said it was a secret, and wouldn’t let me.” A momentary failure of lung-power forced her to a pause in which she perceived Lydia’s attire. She recoiled with a dramatic rush. “Oh, you’ve got one of them on! Lydia, how insanely swell you do look! Why, Mrs. Emery”—she turned to Lydia’s mother with a light-hearted unconsciousness that she had not addressed her before—“she doesn’t look real, does she!”
There was an instant’s pause as the three women gazed ecstatically at Lydia, who had again turned her back and was leaning her forehead against the window. Then the girl sprang at her again. “Well, my goodness, Lydia! I just love you to pieces, of course, but if we were of the same complexion I should certainly put poison in your candy. As it is, me so blonde and you so dark—I tell you what—what we won’t do this winter—” She ran up to her again, putting her arms around her neck from behind and whispering in her ear.
Miss Burgess turned to her hostess with her sweet, motherly smile. “Aren’t girls the dearest things?” she whispered. “I love to see them so young, and full of their own little affairs. I think it’s dreadful nowadays how so many of them are allowed to get serious-minded.”
Madeleine was saying to Lydia, “You sly little thing—to land Paul before the season even began! Where are you going to get your lingerie? Oh, isn’t it fun? If I go abroad I’ll smuggle it back for you. You haven’t got your ring yet, I don’t suppose? Make him make it a ruby. That’s ever so much sweller than that everlasting old diamond. He’s something to land, too, Paul is, if I do say it—not, of course, that we’ve either of us got any money, but,” she looked about the handsomely furnished house, “you’ll have lots, and Paul’ll soon be making it hand over fist—and I’ll be marrying it!” She ended with a triumphant pirouette her vision of the future, and encountered Madame Boyle, entering with a white and gold evening wrap which sent her into another paroxysm of admiration. The dressmaker had just begun to say that she thought another line of gold braid around the neck would—when Mrs. Emery, looking out of the window, declared the caterer to be approaching and that she must have aid from her subordinates before he should enter. “I do not want to have that old red lemonade and sweet crackers everybody has, and slabs of ice-cream floating around on your plate. Think quick, all of you! What kind of crackers can we have?”
“Animal crackers,” suggested Madeleine, with the accent of a remark intended to be humorous, drawing Lydia into a corner. “Now, don’t make Lydia work. She’s It right now, and everything’s to be done for her. Madame, come over here with that cloak and let’s see about the—and Oh, you and Lydia, for the love of Heaven tell me what I’m to do about this fashion for no hips, and me with a figure of eight! Lydia, the fit of that thing is sublime!”
“Maddemwaselle, don’t you see how a little more gold right here—”
“Here, Lydia,” called her mother, “it wasn’t the caterer after all; it’s flowers for you. Take it over there to the young lady in pink,” she directed the boy.