"If the divinity which shapes our ends really intended Lydia to be happy, why was Harry Spencer allowed to return when he did?" Warming to the vividness of her imagination, she continued briskly, "The ideal course of events would have been this: First, the baby should never have been born; secondly, Herbert Maxwell should have felt an uncontrollable patriotic call to go to the war; he should have fought with distinguished valor and brilliancy—sufficient to inscribe his name on the pages of history—and he should have been shot dead. That would have satisfied him. Then would have been the time for Harry Spencer to come home. With him and Herbert's fortune Lydia might have been radiantly happy. As it is—" Mrs. Cole paused, palsied by the perplexities of reality, and unwilling to venture on prophecy.
But Mrs. Baxter saw fit to finish the sentence for her by a not altogether logical utterance: "As it is, it was Mr. Spencer who went to the war and has come back alive and a hero. If Lydia liked him before, it is of course all the harder for her not to like him now."
Mrs. Cunningham uttered a sort of groan. Then she said emphatically, "There can be but one end to it, in my opinion. Sooner or later she will leave her husband and run away with him."
There was a general nodding of heads—all but Mrs. Cole's.
"And what will they do with that poor baby?" interjected Miss Marbury.
Fannie Cole sat up by way of protest. "My dears," she said with gasping alertness, "that would be comparatively normal, and it cannot be the correct solution. Don't you see it's impossible? Neither of them has any money. If she would, he wouldn't, and neither of them would." She looked around the circle with a smile of triumph, knowing that her stricture was unanswerable.
"I never thought of that," said Mrs. Baxter, voicing the general perplexity.