THE ORCHID
I
It was generally recognized that Lydia Arnold's perceptions were quicker than those of most other people. She was alert in grasping the significance of what was said to her; her face clearly revealed this. She had the habit of deliberating just an instant before responding, which marked her thought; and when she spoke, her words had a succinct definiteness of their own. The quality of her voice arrested attention. The intonation was finished yet dry: finished in that it was well modulated; dry in that it was void of enthusiasm.
Yet Lydia was far from a grave person. She laughed readily and freely, but in a minor key, which was only in keeping with her other attributes of fastidiousness. Her mental acuteness and conversational poise were accounted for at Westfield—the town within the limits of which dwelt the colony of which she was a member—by the tradition that she had read everything, or, more accurately, that she had been permitted to read everything while still a school-girl.
Her mother, a beautiful, nervous invalid—one of those mysterious persons whose peculiarities are pigeon-holed in the memories of their immediate families—had died in Lydia's infancy. Her amiable but self-indulgent father had been too easy-going or too obtuse to follow the details of her home-training. He had taken refuge from qualms or perplexities by providing a governess, a well-equipped, matronly foreigner, from whom she acquired a correct French accent and composed deportment, both of which were now marks of distinction. Mlle. Demorest would have been the last woman to permit a jeune fille to browse unreservedly in a collection of miscellaneous French novels. But Lydia saw no reason why she should inform her preceptress that, having entered her father's library in search of "Ivanhoe" and the "Dutch Republic," she had gone there later to peruse the works of Flaubert, Octave Feuillet, and Guy de Maupassant. Why, indeed? For, to begin with, was she not an American girl, and free to do as she chose? And then again the evolution was gradual; she had reached this stage of culture by degrees. She read everything which the library contained—poetry, history, philosophy, fiction—and having exhausted these resources, she turned her attention outside, and became an omnivorous devourer of current literature.
Before her "coming-out" party she was familiar with all the "up-to-date" books, and had opinions on many problems, sexual and otherwise, though be it said she was an eminently proper young person in her language and behavior, and her knowingness, so far as appeared, was merely intellectual. Early in the day her father's scrutiny was forever dazzled by the assuring discovery that she was immersed in Scott. Mr. Arnold had been told by some of his contemporaries that the rising generation did not read Sir Walter, a heresy so damnable that when he found his daughter pale with interest over the sorrows of the "Bride of Lammermoor," he jumped to the conclusion that her literary taste was conservative, and gave no more thought to this feature of her education. Presently he did what he considered the essentially paternal thing—introduced her to the social world through the medium of a magnificent ball, which taxed his income though he had been preparing for it for a year or two. As one of a bevy of pretty, innocent-looking maidens in white tulle, Lydia attracted favorable comment from the outset by her piquant expression and stylish figure. But shortly after the close of her first season she was driven into retirement by her father's death, and when next she appeared on the horizon, sixteen months later, it was as a spirited follower of the hounds belonging to the Westfield Hunt Club.
On the crisp autumn day when this story opens, the members of that energetic body were eagerly discussing the interesting proposition whether or not Miss Lydia Arnold was going to accept Herbert Maxwell as a husband. This was the universal query, and the point had been agitated for the past six weeks with increasing curiosity. The hunting season was now nearing its close, and the lover was still setting a tremendous pace, but none of the closest feminine friends of the young woman in question appeared to have inside information. Even her bosom friend, Mrs. Walter Cole, as she joined the meet that morning, could only say in answer to inquiries that Lydia was mum as an oyster.