The Squirrel-Cage Part 17

"They'd lie down and let her walk over them! You know they would--"

"If they thought she was going in the right direction."

Mrs. Sandworth gave him up, and drifted off into speculation. "I wonder what she could have found in that man to think of! A girl brought up as she's been!"

"Perhaps she was only s.n.a.t.c.hing a little sensible talk where she could get it."

"But they _didn't_ talk sensibly. Marietta said Lydia tried, one of the times when they were going over it with her, Lydia tried to tell her mother some of the things they said that night when he took her home from here. Marietta said they were 'too sickis.h.!.+' 'Flat Sunday-school cant about wanting to be good,' and all that sort of thing."

"That certainly wouldn't have tempted _Marietta_ from the path of virtue and sharp attention to a good match," murmured the doctor. "n.o.body can claim that there's anything very seductive to the average young lady in Rankin's fanaticism."

"Oh, you admit he's a fanatic!" Mrs. Sandworth seized on a valuable piece of driftwood which the doctor's tempest had thrown at her feet.

"Everybody who's worth his salt is a fanatic."

"Not Paul. Everybody says he's so sane and levelheaded."

"There isn't a hotter one in creation!"

"Than _Paul_?"

"Than Paul."

"Oh, Marius!" she reproached him for levity.

"He's a fanatic for success."

"Oh, I don't call _that_--"

"Nor n.o.body else in Endbury--but it is, all the same. And the only wonder is that Lydia should have been attracted by Rankin's heretical brand and not by Paul's orthodox variety. It shows she's rare."

"Good gracious, Marius! You talk as though it were a question of ideas or convictions."

"That's a horrible conception," he admitted gravely.

"It's which one she's in love with!" Mrs. Sandworth emitted this with solemnity.

The doctor stood up to go. "She's not in love with either," he p.r.o.nounced. "She's never been allowed the faintest sniff at reality or life or experience--how can she be in love?"

"Well, they're in love with her," she triumphed for her s.e.x.

"I don't know anything about Paul's inner workings, and as for Rankin, I don't know whether he's in love with her or not. He's sorry for her--he's touched by her--"

Mrs. Sandworth felt the ground slip from beneath her feet. "Good gracious me! If he's not in love with her, nor she with him, what are you making all this fuss about?"

The doctor thrust out his lips. "I'm only protesting in my usual feeble, inadequate manner, after the harm's all done, at idiots and egotists laying their dirty hands on a sacred thing--the right of youth to its own life--"

"Well, if you call that a feeble protest--!" she called after him.

He reappeared, hat in hand. "It's nothing to what I'd like to say. I will add that Daniel Rankin's a man in a million."

Mrs. Sandworth responded, rather neatly for her, that she should hope so indeed, and added, "But, Marius, she couldn't have married him--really!

Mercy! What had he to offer her--compared with Paul? Everybody has always said what a _suitable_ marriage--"

Dr. Melton crammed his hat on his head fiercely and said nothing.

"But it's so," she insisted.

"He hasn't anything to offer to Marietta, perhaps."

"Marietta's _married_!" Mrs. Sandworth kept herself anch.o.r.ed fast to the facts of any case under discussion.

"_Is_ she?" queried the doctor with a sincerity of interrogation which his sister found distracting.

"Oh, Marius!" she reproached him again; and then helplessly, "How did we get on to Marietta, anyhow? I thought we were talking of Lydia's engagement."

"I was," he a.s.sured her.

"And I was going to ask you really seriously, just straight out, what you are so down on the Emerys for? What have they done that's so bad?"

"They've brought her up so that now in her time of need she hasn't a weapon to resist them."

"Oh, Ma--" began Mrs. Sandworth despairingly.

"Well, then, I will tell you--I'll explain in words of one syllable.

Mind you, I don't undertake to settle the question--Heaven forbid! It may be all right for Marietta Mortimer to kill herself body and soul by inches to keep what bores her to death to have--a social position in Endbury's two-for-a-cent society, but, for the Lord's sake, why do they make such a howling and yelling just at the time when Lydia's got the tragically important question to decide as to whether that's what _she_ wants? It's like expecting her to do a problem in calculus in the midst of an earthquake."

Mrs. Sandworth had a mortal antipathy to figures of speech, acquired of much painful experience with her brother's conversation. She sank back in her chair and waved him off. "Calculus!" she cried, outraged; "earthquakes! And I'm sure you're as unfair as can be! You can't say her father's obscured any question. You _know_ he's not a dictatorial father. His principle is not to interfere at all with his children."

"Yes; that's his principle all right. His specialties are in other lines, and they have been for a long time. His wife has seen to that."

Mrs. Sandworth had one of her lucid divinations of the inner meaning of a situation. "Oh, the poor Emerys! Poor Lydia! Oh, Marius, aren't you glad we haven't any children!"

"Every child that's not getting a fair chance at what it ought to have, should be our child," he said.

He went up to her and kissed her gently. "Good-night," he said.

"Where are you going?"

"To the Black Rock woods."

"Tell him--" she was inspired--"tell him to try to see Lydia again."

"I was going to do that. But she won't be allowed to. It's pretty late now. She ought to have seen him a great many years ago--from the time he was born."

"But she's ever so much younger than he," cried Mrs. Sandworth after him, informingly.