Mrs. Erwin dropped her hands in front of her, with the open letter stretched between them, and looked at her niece in rapture. “Lydia,” she cried, “one would suppose you had lived all your days in Europe! Showing me your letter, this way,—why, it's quite like a Continental girl.”
“I thought it was no more than right you should see what I was writing home,” said Lydia, unresponsively.
“Well, no matter, even if it was right,” replied Mrs. Erwin. “It comes to the same thing. And now, as you've been quite a European daughter, I'm going to be a real American mother.” She took up the wax, and sealed Lydia's letter without looking into it. “There!” she said, triumphantly.
She was very good to Lydia all through dinner, and made her talk of the simple life at home, and the village characters whom she remembered from her last summer's visit. That amused Mr. Erwin, who several times, when, his wife was turning the talk upon Lydia's voyage over, intervened with some new question about the life of the queer little Yankee hill-town. He said she must tell Lady Fenleigh about it,—she was fond of picking up those curios; it would make any one's social fortune who could explain such a place intelligibly in London; when they got to having typical villages of the different civilizations at the international expositions,—as no doubt they would,—somebody must really send South Bradfield over. He pleased himself vastly with this fancy, till Mrs. Erwin, who had been eying Lydia critically from time to time, as if making note of her features and complexion, said she had a white cloak, and that in Venice, where one need not dress a great deal for the opera, Lydia could wear it that night.
Lydia looked up in astonishment, but she sat passive during her aunt's discussion of her plans. When they rose from table, she said, at her stiffest and coldest, “Aunt Josephine, I want you to excuse me from going with you to-night. I don't feel like going.”
“Not feel like going!” exclaimed her aunt in dismay. “Why, your uncle has taken a box!”
Lydia opposed nothing to this argument. She only said, “I would rather not go.”
“Oh, but you will, dear,” coaxed her aunt. “You would enjoy it so much.”
“I thought you understood from what I said to-day,” replied Lydia, “that I could not go.”
“Why, no, I didn't! I knew you objected; but if I thought it was proper for you to go—”