FOR ARIADNE'S SAKE
Little Ariadne was six months old before Lydia could begin to make the
slightest effort to resume the social routine of her life. This was not
at all on account of ill health, for she had recovered her strength
rapidly and completely, and, like a good many normal women, had found
maternity a solvent of various slight physical disorders of her
girlhood. She felt now a more assured physical poise than ever before,
and could not attribute her disappearance from Endbury social life to
weakness. The fact was that Dr. Melton had upheld her in her wish to
nurse her baby herself, which limited her to very short absences from
the house and to a very quiet life within doors. She also discovered
that the servant problem was by no means simplified by the new member of
the family. "Girls" had always been unwilling to come out to Bellevue
because of the distance from their friends and followers, and they now
put forth another universally recognized obstacle in the phrase, "I
never work out where there is a baby. They make so much dirt." Anastasia
O'Hern was there, to be sure--heavy-handed, warm-hearted 'Stashie, who
took the new little girl to her loyal spinster heart and wept tears of
joy over her safe arrival; but 'Stashie had proved, as Paul predicted
from the first time he saw her, incorrigibly rattle-headed and
loose-ended. She had learned to prepare a number of simple, homely
dishes, quite enough to supply the actual needs of the everyday
household, and what she cooked was unusually palatable. She had the
Celtic feeling for savoriness. She had also managed, under Lydia's
zealous tuition, to overcome the Celtic tolerance for dirt, and thanks
to her square, powerful body, as strong as a ditch-digger's, she made
light work of keeping the house in a most gratifying state of
cleanliness.
But there were gaps in her equipment that were not to be filled by any
amount of tuition. In the first place, as Paul said of her, she was as
much like the traditional trim maid as a hippopotamus is like a gazelle.
Furthermore, as Dr. Melton summed up the matter in answer to one of
Paul's outbreaks against her, she was utterly incapable of comprehending
that satisfied vanity is the vital element in human life. For anything
that pertained to the appearance of things, 'Stashie was deaf, dumb and
blind. She would as soon as not put one of her savory stews on the table
in an earthen crock, and she never could be trusted to set the table
properly. There were always some kitchen spoons among the silver, and
the dishes looked, as Paul said, "as though she had stood off and thrown
them at a bull's-eye in the middle of the table." Moreover, she herself
could not emancipate herself from the ideas of toilet gleaned in the
little one-room cabin in County Clare. She was passionately devoted to
Lydia, and took with the humblest gratitude any hints about the care of
her person, but it was like trying to make a color-blind person into a
painter! Anastasia could only love on her knees, and serve, and
sympathize and cherish; she could not remember to comb her hair, or to
put on a clean apron when she opened the door, even if it were Madame
Hollister herself who rang. She had once opened to that important
personage attired in a calico wrapper, a sweater, and a pair of rubber
boots, having just come in from emptying the ashes--one of the heavy
tasks, outside her regular work, which she took upon her strong, willing
self. "But I was clane, and I got her into the house in two minutes from
the time she rang, the poor old soul!" she protested to Lydia, who, at
Paul's instance, had taken her to task.
Lydia explained, "But Mr. Hollister's aunt is a person who would rather
wait half an hour in the cold than see you without an apron."
To which 'Stashie exclaimed, in awestruck wonder before the mysteries of
creation, "Folks do be the beatin'est, don't they now, Mis' Hollister!"
"And you must not speak of Mr. Hollister's aunt as a 'poor old soul,'"
explained Lydia, apprehensive of Paul's wrath if he ever chanced to hear
such a characterization.
"But she is that," protested 'Stashie. "Anybody that's her age and
hobbles around so crippled up with the rheumatism--my heart bleeds for
'em."
"She is very rich--" began Lydia, but after a moment's hesitation she
had not continued her lesson in social value. She often found that
'Stashie's questions brought her to a standstill.
There was something lacking in the Irishwoman's mental outfit, namely,
the capacity even to conceive that ideal of impersonal self-effacement,
which, as Paul said truthfully, is the everywhere accepted standard for
servants. Her loquacity was a never-ending joke to Madeleine Lowder and
her husband, who were exulting in a couple of deft, silent, expensive
Japanese "boys" and who, since Madeleine frankly expressed her horror at
the bother of having children, seemed likely to continue ignorant,
except at comfortable second-hand, of harassing domestic difficulties.
If Lydia had not been in such dire need of another pair of hands than
her own slender ones, or if the supply from Endbury intelligence offices
had been a whit less unreliable and uncertain, she would not have felt
justified in retaining the burly, uncouth Celt, in spite of her own
affection, so intensely did Paul dislike her. As it was, she felt guilty
for her presence and miserably responsible for her homeliness of
conduct. 'Stashie was a constant point of friction between husband and
wife, and Lydia was trying with desperate ingenuity to avoid points of
friction by some other method than the usual Endbury one of divided
interests. Many times she lay awake at night, convinced that her duty
was to dismiss Anastasia; only to rise in the morning equally convinced
that things without her would be in the long run even harder and more
disagreeable for Paul than they were now. The upshot of the matter was
that she herself was a very incompetent person, she was remorsefully
sure of that; although her mother and Marietta and Paul's aunt all told
her that she need expect nothing during the first year of a baby's life
but one wretched round of domestic confusion.
Lydia did not find it so. She was immensely occupied, it is true, for
though Ariadne was a strong, healthy child, who spent most of her time,
her grandmother complained, in sleeping, to Lydia's more intimate
contact with the situation there seemed to be more things to be done for
the baby, in addition to the usual cares of housekeeping, than could
possibly be crowded into twenty-four hours. And yet she was happier
during those six months than ever before in her life; happier than she
had ever dreamed anyone could be. She stepped about incessantly from one
task to another and was very tired at night, but there was no nervous
strain on her, and she had no moments of blasting skepticism as to the
value of her labors.
Everything she did, even the most menial tasks connected with the baby,
was dignified, to her mind, by its usefulness; and she so systematized
and organized her busy days that she was always ahead of her work. Paul
was obliged to alter his judgment of her as impractical and
incapable--although of course the dearest and sweetest of little
wives--for nothing could have been more competent than the way she
managed her baby and her simple housekeeping. Indeed, there came to the
young husband's mind not infrequently, and always with a slight aroma of
bitterness, the conviction that Lydia was perfectly able to do whatever
she really wished to do and considered important; and that previous
conditions must have been due to her unwillingness to set herself
seriously at the problems before her. It was a new theory about his
wife's character, which the intelligent young man laid by on a mental
shelf for future use after this period of intense domesticity should be
past.
At present, he accepted thankfully his clean house and his savory food,
was not too much put out by 'Stashie's eccentricities, since there was
no one but the immediate families to see them, and rejoiced with a
whimsical tenderness in Lydia's passion of satisfaction with her baby.
He saw so little of the droll, sleeping, eating little mite that he
could not as yet take it very seriously as his baby. But it was, on the
whole, a happy half-year for him too. He was much moved and pleased by
Lydia's joy. He had meant to make his wife happy.
Lydia herself was transported by the mere physical intoxication of new
motherhood, a potion more exciting, so her much experienced physician
said, than any wine ever fermented. She hung over her sleeping baby,
poring upon the exquisite fineness of the skin, upon the rosy little
mouth, still sucking comically at an imaginary meal, upon the dimpled,
fragile hands, upon the peaceful relaxation of the body, till the very
trusting, appealing essence of babyhood flooded her senses like a strong
drug; and when the child was awake, and she could bathe the much creased
little body, and handle the soft arms, and drop passionate kisses on the
satin-smooth skin, and rub her cheek on the downy head, she found
herself sometimes trembling and dizzy with emotion. She felt constantly
buoyed up by a deep trust and belief in life which she had not known
before. The huge and steadying continuity of existence was revealed to
her in those days. It was a revelation that was never to leave her. She
outgrew definitely the sense of the fragmentary futility of living which
had always been, inarticulate, unvoiced, but intensely felt, the torment
of her earlier life.
It grieved her generous heart and her aspiration to share all with her
husband that the exigences of his busy life deprived him of any
knowledge of this newly-opened well of sweet waters, that he had
nothing from his parenthood but an amused, half shame-faced pride in
points about the baby which, he was informed, were creditable.
At a faint hint of this feeling on Lydia's part, her sister-in-law broke
into her good-natured laughter at Lydia's notions. "What can a man know
about a baby?" she cried conclusively.
"Why, I didn't know about one till Ariadne came. I learned on her.
What's to hinder a man's doing the same thing?"
Madeleine was so much amused by this fantastic idea that she repeated it
to Dr. Melton, who came in just then.
"Don't it take _Lydia_!" she appealed to him.
The doctor considered the lovely, fair-haired creature in silence for a
moment before answering. Then, "Yes; of course you're right," he
assented. "It's a strictly feminine monopoly. It's as true that all men
are incapable of understanding the significance of a baby in the
universe and in their own lives, as it is true that all women love
babies and desire them." His tone was full of a heavy significance. He
could never keep his temper with Paul's sister.
Madeleine received this without a quiver. She neither blushed nor looked
in the least abashed, but there was an unnecessary firmness in her voice
as she answered, looking him steadily in the eye: "Exactly! That's just
what I've been telling Lydia." She often said that she was the only
woman in Endbury who wasn't afraid of that impertinent little doctor.
After Madeleine had gone away, Lydia looked at her godfather with
shining eyes. "I am living! I am living!" she told him, holding up the
baby to him with a gesture infinitely significant; "and I like it as
well as I thought I should!"
"Most people do," he informed her, "when they get a peck at it. It
generally takes something cataclysmic, too, to tear them loose from
their squirrel-cages--like babies, or getting converted."
If he thought that early married life could also be classed among these
beneficently uprooting agencies, he kept his thoughts to himself.
Lydia's marriage had been eminently free from disagreeable shocks or
surprises, and amply deserved to be called successful in the usual
reasonable and moderate application of that adjective to matrimony; but
there had been nothing in it, certainly, to destroy even temporarily
anyone's grasp on what are known as the realities of life.
The doctor considered, and added to his last speech: "Getting converted
is surer. Babies grow up!"
Lydia felt that her godfather was right, and that babies gave one only a
short respite, when, toward spring, she observed in all the inhabitants
of her world repeated signs of uneasy dissatisfaction with her
"submergence in domesticity," as Mrs. Emery put it in a family council.
Her father inquired mildly, one day in March, with the touchingly vague
interest he took in his children's affairs, if it weren't about time she
returned a few calls and accepted some invitations, and began "to live
_like_ folks again." "Ariadne isn't the first baby in the world," he
concluded.
"She's the first one _I_ ever had," Lydia reminded him, with the
humorous smile that was so like his own.
"Well, you mustn't forget, as so many young mothers do, that you're a
member of society and a wife, as well as a wet-nurse," he said.
Marietta had never resumed an easy or genial intercourse with the
Hollisters since the affair of the dinner party, but she came to call at
not infrequent intervals, and Paul's sister dropped in often, to "keep
an eye on Lydia," as she told her husband. She had an affection for her
sister-in-law, in spite of an exasperated amusement over her liability
to break out with new ideas at unexpected moments. Both these ladies
were loud in their exhortations to Lydia not to let maternity be in her
life the encumbering, unbeautifying, too lengthy episode it was to women
with less force of character than their own. "You do get so _out_ of
things," Madeleine told her with her usual breathless italicizing, "if
you stay away too long. You just never can catch up! There's a
behind-the-timesy _smell_ about your clothes--honest, there is--if you
let them go too long."
Marietta added her quota of experienced wisdom to the discussion. "If
you just hang over a baby all the time, you get morbid, and queer, and
different."
Madeleine had laughed, and summed up the matter with a terse, "Worse
than that! You get left!"
Lydia's elder brother, George, the rich one, who lived in Cleveland and
manufactured rakes and hoes, wrote her one of his rare letters to the
same effect. Lydia thought it likely that he had been moved to this
unusual show of interest in her affairs by proddings from her mother and
Marietta. If this surmise was correct, and if a similar request had been
sent to Henry, the other member of the Emery family, the one who had
married the grocer's daughter, the appeal had a strikingly different
effect. From Oregon came an impetuous, slangily-worded exhortation to
Lydia not to make a fool of herself and miss the best of life to live up
to the tommyrot standard of old dry-as-dust Endbury. The Emerys heard
but seldom from this erring son, and Lydia, who had been but a child
when he left home, had never before received a letter from him. He wrote
from a fruit farm in Oregon, the description of which, on the
grandiloquent letter-head, gave an impression of ampleness and
prosperity which was not contradicted by the full-blooded satisfaction
in life which breathed from every line of the breezy, good-natured
letter.
The incident stirred Lydia's imagination. It spoke of a wider
horizon--of a fresher air than that about her. She tried to remember the
loud-talking, much-laughing, easy-going young man as she had seen him
last. They were too far apart in years to have had much companionship,
but there had been between them an unspoken affection which had never
died. People always said that George and Marietta were alike and Lydia
and Harry. To this Mrs. Emery always protested that Lydia wasn't in the
_least_ like Henry, and she didn't know what people were talking about;
but the remark gave a secret pleasure to Lydia. She, too, was very fond
of laughing, and her brother's vein of light-hearted nonsense had been a
great delight to her. It was not present in any of the rest of the
family, and certainly did not show itself in her at this period of her
life.
During this time Paul's attention was concentrated on bringing about a
reallotment of American Electric territory in the Middle West, an
arrangement that would add several busy cities to his district and make
a decided difference in his salary and commissions. He worked early and
late in the Endbury office, and made many trips into all parts of the
field, to gather data conclusive of the value of his scheme. Lydia had
tried hard to get from him information enough to understand what it was
all about, but he put her off with vague, fatigued assurances that it
was too complicated for her to grasp, or for him to go over without his
papers; that it would take him too long to explain, and that, anyhow,
she could be sure of one thing--it was all straight, clean business,
designed entirely to give the public better service and more work from
everybody all 'round. Lydia did not doubt this. It was always a great
source of satisfaction to her to feel secure and unshaken trust in her
father's and her husband's business integrity, and she was sorry for
Marietta, who could not, she feared, count among her spiritual
possessions any such faith in Ralph. It was, on the other hand, one of
her most unresigned regrets, that she was not allowed to share in these
ideals for public service of her husband and father--these ideals so
distantly glimpsed by her, and perhaps not very consciously felt by
them. It was not that they refused to answer any one of her questions,
but they were so little in the habit of articulating this phase of their
activities that their tongues balked stubbornly before her ignorant and
fumbling attempts to enter this inner chamber.
"Oh, it's all right, Lydia! Just you trust me!" Paul would cry, with a
hint of vexation in his voice, as if he felt that questions could mean
only suspicion.
Lydia's tentative efforts to construct a bridge between her world and
his met constantly with this ill success. She had had so little training
in bridge-building, she thought sadly.
One evening that spring, such a futile attempt of hers was interrupted
by the son of one of their neighbors, a lad of eighteen, who had just
been given a subordinate position in his father's business. As he
strolled up to their veranda steps, Lydia looked up from the dress she
was enlarging for the rapidly growing baby and reflected that
astonishingly rapid growth is the law of all healthy youth. The tall boy
looked almost ludicrous to her in his ultra-correct man's outfit, so
vividly did she recall him, three or four years before, in short
trousers and round-collared shirt-waist. His smooth, rosy face had still
the downy bloom of adolescence.
"Howd' do, Walter!" said Paul, glancing up from a pile of blue-prints
over which he had been straining his eyes in the fading evening light.
"Evening," answered the boy, nodding and sitting down on the top step
with one knee up. "D'you mind if I smoke, Mrs. Hollister?"
"Not at all," she answered gravely, tickled by the elaborate
carelessness with which he handled his new pipe.
"What you working on, Hollister?" he went on with the manner of one old
business man to another.
Lydia hid a smile. She found him delicious. She began to think how she
could make Dr. Melton laugh with her account of Walter the Man.
"The lay-out of the new power-house--Elliott-Gridley works in Urbana,"
answered Paul, in a straightforward, reasonable tone, a little absent.
Lydia stopped smiling. It was a tone he had never used to answer any
business question she had ever put to him. "I'm figuring on their
generators," he went on in explanation.
"Big contract?" asked Walter.
"Two thousand kilowatt turbo generator," answered Paul.
The other whistled. "Whew! I didn't know they had the cash!"
"They haven't," said Paul briefly.
"Oh, chattel-mortgage?" surmised the other.
"Lease-contract," Paul corrected. "That doesn't have to be recorded."
"What's the matter with recording it?"
"Afraid of their credit. They don't want Dunn's sending all over
creation that they've put chattel-mortgages on their equipment, do
they?"
"No; sure! I see." The boy grasped instantly, with a quick nod, the
other's meaning. "Well, that's _one_ way of gettin' 'round it!" he added
admiringly after an instant's pause.
Lydia had laid down her work and was looking intently at her two
companions. At this she gave a stifled exclamation which made the boy
turn his head. "Say, Mrs. Hollister, aren't you looking kind of pale
this evening?" he asked. "These first hot nights do take it out of a
person, don't they? Mr. Hollister ought to take you to Put-in-Bay for a
holiday. Momma'd take care of the baby for you and welcome. She's crazy
about babies." He was again the overgrown school-boy that Lydia knew.
The conversation drifted to indifferent topics. Lydia did not take her
usual share in it, and when their caller had gone Paul inquired if she
really were exhausted by the heat.
"Oh, no," she said; "you know I don't mind the heat."
"You didn't say much when Walter was here, and I--"
"I was thinking," Lydia broke in. "I was thinking that I couldn't
understand a word you and Walter were saying any more than if you were
talking Hebrew. I was thinking that that little boy knows more about
your business than I do."
Paul did not attempt to deny this, but he laughed at her dramatic
accent. "Sure, he does! And about how to tie a four-in-hand, and what's
the best stud to wear at the back of a collar, and where to buy socks.
What's that to you?"
Lydia looked at him with quivering, silent lips.
He answered, with a little heat: "Why, look-y here, Lydia, suppose I
were a doctor. You wouldn't expect to know how many grains of morphine
or what d'you call 'em I was going to use in--"
"But Dr. Melton _is_ a doctor, and I know lots about what he thinks of
as he lives day after day--there are other things besides technical
details and grains of morphine--other problems--human things--Why, for
instance, there's one question that torments him all the time--how much
it's right to humor people who aren't sick but think they are. He talks
to me a great deal about such--"
Paul laughed, rising and gathering up his blue-prints. "Well, I can't
think of any problem that torments me but the everlasting one of how to
sell more generators and motors than my competitors. Come on indoors,
Honey; I've got to have some light if I finish going over these
to-night."
His accent was evidently intended to end the discussion, and Lydia
allowed it to do so, although the incident was one she could not put out
of her mind. She watched Walter going back and forth to Endbury with a
jealousy the absurdity of which she herself realized, and she listened
with a painful intentness to the boy's talk during his occasional idle
sojourns on their veranda steps. Yet she had been used to hearing Paul
talk unintelligibly to the business associates whom, from time to time,
he brought out to the house to dine and to talk business afterward.
Somehow, she said to herself, it's being just _Walter_ seemed to bring
it home to her. To have that boy--and yet she liked him, too, she
thought. She looked sometimes into his fresh, innocently keen face with
a yearning apprehension. Paul was amused at his precocious airs, and yet
was not without respect for his rapidly developing business capacity. He
said once, "Walter's a real nice boy. I shouldn't mind having a son like
that myself!"
The remark startled Lydia. If she were to have a son he _would_ be like
that, she realized. And he would grow up and marry some--she sprang up
and caught Ariadne to her in a sudden fierce embrace.
"You'll break your back lifting that heavy baby 'round so," Paul
remonstrated with justice.
For all her aversion to the set forms of "society" as understood by
Endbury, Lydia was fond of having people about her, "to try to get
really acquainted with them" she said, and during that summer the
Hollister veranda in the evening became a rendezvous for their Bellevue
neighbors. Paul rather deplored the time wasted in this unprofitable
variety of informal social life which, in his phrase, "counted for
nothing" but he was always glad to see Walter. "At the rate he's going
and the way he's taking hold, he'll be a valuable business friend in a
few years," he said prophetically to Lydia, and he assumed more and more
the airs of a comrade with the lad.
One evening when Walter came lounging over to the veranda, Lydia was
busy indoors, but later she stepped to the door in time to hear Paul
say, laughing: "Well, for all that, he's not so good as Wellman Phelps'
stenographer."
"How so?" asked the boy, alert for a pleasantry from his elder.
"Why, Phelps carries this fellow 'round with him everywhere he goes, has
had him for years, and twice a week all he has to do is to say: 'Say,
Fred; write my wife, will you?'"
His listener broke out into a peal of boyish laughter. "Pretty good!" he
applauded the joke.
"It's a fact," Paul went on. "Fred writes it and signs it and sends it
off, and Phelps never has to trouble his head about it."
Lydia stepped back into the darkness of the hall.
When she came out later, a misty figure in white, Paul rose, saying,
"Well, Walter, I'll leave you to Mrs. Hollister now. I've got some work
to do before I get to bed."
Lydia sat silent, looking at the boy's face, clear and untarnished in
the moonlight. He was looking dreamily away at the lawn, dappled with
the shadow of the slender young trees. They seemed creatures scarcely
more sylvan than he, sprawled, like a loitering faun with his hands
clasped behind his head. His mouth had the pure, full outlines of a
child's.
"What are you thinking about, Walter?" Lydia asked him suddenly.
He started, and brought his limpid gaze to hers. "About how to
cross-index our follow-up letter catalogue better," he answered
promptly.
"Really? Really?" She leaned toward him, urging him to frankness.
He was surprised at her tone. "Why, sure!" he told her. "Why not? What
else?"
Lydia said no more.
She had never felt more helplessly her remoteness from her husband's
world than during that spring. It was a sentiment that Paul, apparently,
did not reciprocate. In spite of his frequent absences from home and his
detached manner about most domestic questions, he had as definite ideas
about his wife's resumption of her social duties as had everyone else.
"It made him uneasy," as he put it, "to be losing so many points in the
game."
"Look here, my dear," he said one evening in spring when the question
came up; "summer's almost here, and this winter's been as good as
dropped right out. Can't you just pick up a few threads and make a
beginning? It'll make it easier in the fall." He added, uneasily, "We
don't want old Lowder and Madeleine to get ahead of us entirely, you
know. You can leave the kid with 'Stashie, can't you, once in a while?
She ought to be able to do _that_ much, I should think." He spoke as
though he had assigned to her the simplest possible of all domestic
undertakings. As Lydia made no response, he said finally, before
attacking a pile of papers, "If I'm going to earn a lot more money, what
good'll it do us if you don't do your share? Besides, we owe it to the
kid. You want to do your best by your little girl, don't you?"
As always, Lydia responded with a helpless alacrity to that appeal.
"Oh, yes! Oh, yes! We must do our best for her." This phrase summed up
the religion she had at last found after so much fervent, undirected
search. The church, as she knew it, was chiefly the social center of
various fashionable activities which differed from ordinary fashionable
enterprises only in being used to bring in money, which money, handed
over to the rector, disappeared into the maw of some unknown, voracious,
charitable institution. And beyond the church there had been no element
in the life she knew, that was not frankly materialistic. But now, as
the miracle of awakening consciousness took place daily in her very
sight, and as the first dawnings of a personality began to look out of
her child's eyes, all Lydia's vague spiritual cravings, all the groping
tendrils of her aspirations, clung about the conviction more and more
summing up her inner life, that she must do her best for Ariadne, must
make the world, into which that little new soul had come, a better place
than she herself had found it. She felt as naively and passionately that
her child must be saved the mistakes that she had made, as though she
were the first mother who ever sent up over her baby's head that
pitiful, universal prayer.
The matter of the social duty of the young Hollisters was finally
compromised by Lydia's accepting a number of invitations for the latter
part of the season, and giving a series of big receptions in May. They
were not by a hair nor a jot nor a tittle to be distinguished from their
predecessors of the year before. As they seemed hardly adequate, Lydia
suggested half-heartedly that they give a dinner party, but Paul
replied, "With 'Stashie to pour soup down people's backs and ask them
how their baby's whooping cough is, as she passes the potatoes?"
The hot weather came with the rush that was always so unexpected and so
invariable, and another season was over. It was a busy, silent,
thoughtful summer for Lydia. Of course (much to Lydia's distress),
Ariadne had been weaned when her mother had been forced to leave her to
"go out" again, and this necessitated such anxious attention to her
diet and general regimen during the hot weather that Lydia was very
grateful to have little to interfere with her.
The General Office had accepted provisionally Paul's redistributing
plan, and in his anxiety to prove its value he was away from home more
even than usual. The heat was terrible, but Lydia and he both knew no
other climate, and Lydia loved the summer as the time of year when the
fierceness of Nature forced on all her world a reluctant adjournment of
their usual methods of spending their lives. She was absorbed in
Ariadne, and the slow, blazing summer days were none too long for her.
The child began to develop an individuality. She was a sensitive,
quickly-responsive little thing; exactly, so Mrs. Emery said, like Lydia
at her age, except that she seemed to have none of Lydia's native mirth,
but, rather, a little pensive air that made her singularly appealing to
all who saw her, and that pierced her mother's heart with an anguish of
protecting love.
Lydia said to her godfather one day, suddenly, "I wonder if people can
be taught how to fight?"
He had one of his flashes of intuition. "The baby, you mean?"
Lydia evaded the directness of this. "Oh, in general, aren't folks
better off if they like to fight for themselves? Don't they _have_ to?"
He considered the question in one of his frowning silences, so long that
Lydia started when he spoke again. "They don't need to fight with claws
for their food, as they used to do. Things are arranged now so that the
physically strong, who like such a life, are the ones who choose it.
They get food for the others. Why shouldn't the morally strong fight for
the weaker ones and make it possible for everyone to have a chance at
developing the best of himself without having to battle with others to
do it?"
"That's pretty vague," said Lydia.
"Why, look here," said the doctor. "You don't plow the field to plant
the wheat that makes your bread. That's a man of a coarser physical
fiber than yours, who is strengthened by the effort, and not exhausted
as you would be. Why shouldn't the world be so organized that somebody
of coarser moral texture than yours should do battle with the forces of
materialism and tragic triviality that--"
"But Ariadne's growing up! She will need all that so _soon_-- and the
world won't be organized then, you know it won't--and she's no fighter
by instinct, any more than--" She was silent. The doctor filled in her
incomplete sentence mentally, and found no answer to make.