The Squirrel-Cage Part 20

There was a pause, during which Lydia looked at the fire dreamily, and he looked at Lydia. The girl's face grew more and more absent and brooding.

The door-bell rang. "There he is, I suppose," said her father.

"But isn't it a pity we couldn't make connections?" she asked musingly.

"Maybe I'd have liked you better with your nose on, better even than pretty trash."

"Eh?" said Judge Emery. His blankness was so acute that he slipped for an instant back into a rusticity he had long ago left behind him. "What say, Lydia?" he asked.

"Yes, yes, Paul; I didn't hear you come in," called the girl, jumping up and beginning to put on her wraps.

The young man darted into the room to help her, saying over his shoulder: "Much obliged to you, Judge, for your good word to Egdon, March and Company. I got the contract for the equipment of their new factory to-day."

The Judge screwed himself round in his chair till he could see Paul bending at Lydia's feet, putting on her high overshoes. "That's quite a contract, isn't it?" he asked, highly pleased.

"The biggest I ever got my teeth into," said Paul, straightening up.

"I'm ashamed to have Lydia know anything about it, though. I didn't bring a hack to take her to the dance."

"Oh, I never thought you would," cried Lydia, standing up and stamping her feet down in her overshoes--an action that added emphasis to her protest. "I'd rather walk, it's such a little way. I like it better when I'm not costing people money."

"You're not like most of your s.e.x," said Paul. "Down in Mexico, when I was there on the Brighton job, I heard a Spanish proverb: 'If a pretty woman smiles, some purse is shedding tears.'"

The two men exchanged laughing glances of understanding. Lydia frowned.

"That is hateful--and horrid--and a _lie_!" she cried energetically, finding that they paid no attention to her protest.

"_I_ didn't invent it," Paul exonerated himself lightly.

"But you laughed at it--you think it's so--you--" She was trembling in a sudden resentment at once inexplicable and amusing to the other two.

"Highty-tighty! you little spitfire!" cried her father, laughing. "I see _your_ finish, my boy!"

"Good gracious, Lydia, how you do fly at a man! I take it back. I take it back." Paul looked admiringly at his pretty sweetheart's flas.h.i.+ng eyes and crimson cheeks as he spoke.

She turned away and picked up her cloak without speaking.

"To tell the truth," said Paul, going on with the conversation as though it had not been interrupted, and addressing his father-in-law-to-be, "every penny I can rake and sc.r.a.pe is going into the house. Lydia's such a sensible little thing I knew she'd think it better to have something permanent than an ocean of orchids and candy now. Besides, such a belle as she is gets them from everybody else."

Mrs. Emery often pointed out to Lydia's inexperience that it was rare to see a man so magnanimously free from jealousy as her fiance.

"The architect and I were going over it to-day," the young electrician went on, "and I decided, seeing this new contract means such a lot, that I would have the panels in the hall carved, after all--of course if you agree," he turned to Lydia, but went on without waiting for an answer.

"The effect will be much handsomer--will go with the rest of the house better."

"They'd be lots harder to dust," said Lydia dubiously, putting a spangled web of gold over her hair. The contrast between her aspect and the dingy suggestions of her speech made both men laugh tenderly. "When t.i.tania takes to being practical--" laughed Paul.

Lydia went on seriously. "Honestly, Paul, I'm afraid the house is getting too handsome, anyhow--everything in it. It's too expensive, I'm--"

"Nothing's too good for you." Paul said this with conviction. "And besides, it's an a.s.set. The mortgage won't be so very large. And if we're in it, we'll just have to live up to it. It'll be a stimulus."

"I hope it doesn't stimulate us into our graves," said Lydia, as she kissed her father good-night.

"Well, your families aren't paupers on either side," said Paul.

A casual remark like this was the nearest approach he ever made to admitting that he expected Lydia to inherit money. He would have been shocked at the idea of allowing any question of money to influence his marriage, and would not have lifted a hand to learn the state of his future father-in-law's finances. Still, it was evident to the most disinterested eye that there were plenty of funds behind the Emery's ample, comfortable mode of life, and on this point his eyes were keen, for all their delicacy.

As the young people paused at the door, Judge Emery took a note-book out of his pocket and elaborately made a note. "Fifty-five minutes in eight days, Lydia," he called.

At the end of a fortnight he proclaimed aloud that the record was too discouraging to keep any longer; he was losing ground instead of gaining. He had followed Mrs. Emery to her room one afternoon to make this complaint, and now moved about uneasily, trying to bestow his large, square figure where he would not be in the way of his wife, who was hurrying nervously about to pack Lydia's traveling bag. She looked very tired and pale, and spoke as though near a nervous outbreak of some sort. Didn't he know that Lydia had to start for the Mallory Valentine house-party this afternoon, she asked with an asperity not directed at the Judge's complaint, for she considered that negligible, but at Lydia for being late. She often became so absorbed and fascinated by her own managerial capacity that she was vastly put out by lapses on the part of the object of it. She did not spare herself when it was a question of Lydia's career. Without a thought of fatigue or her own personal tastes, she devoted herself with a fanatic zeal to furthering her daughter's interests. It sometimes seemed very hard to bear that Lydia herself was so much less zealous in the matter.

When the girl came in now, flushed and guiltily breathless, Dr. Melton trotted at her heels, calling out excuses for her tardiness. "It's my fault. I met her scurrying away from a card-party, and she was exactly on time. But I walked along with her and detained her."

"It was the sunset," said Lydia, hurrying to change her hat and wraps.

"It was so fine that when G.o.dfather called my attention to it, I just _stood_! I forgot everything! There may have been sunsets before this winter, but it seems as though I hadn't had time to see one before--over the ironworks, you know, where that hideous black smoke is all day, and the sun turned it into such loveliness--"

"You've missed your trolley-car," said her mother succinctly.

"Oh, I'm _sorry_!" cried Lydia, in a remorse evidently directed more toward displeasing her mother than the other consequences of her delay, for she asked in a moment, very meekly, "Will it make so very much difference if I don't go till the next one?"

"You'll miss the Governor. He was coming down to meet those on this car.

You'll have to go all alone. All the rest of the party were on this one."

"Oh, I don't care about that," cried Lydia. "If that's all--I'd ever so much rather go alone. I'm never alone a single minute, and it'll rest me. The crowd would have been so noisy and carried on so--they always do."

Her mother's aggrieved disappointment did not disappear. She said nothing, bringing Lydia's traveling wraps to her silently, and emanating disapproval until Lydia drooped and looked piteously at her G.o.dfather.

Dr. Melton cried out at this, "Look here, Susan Emery, you're like the carpenter that was so proud of his good planing that he planed his boards all away to shavings."

Mrs. Emery looked at him with a lack of comprehension of his meaning equaled only by her evident indifference to it.

"I mean--I thought what you were going in for was giving Lydia a good time this winter. You're running her as though she were a transcontinental railway system."

"You can't accomplish anything without system in this world," said Mrs.

Emery. She added, "Perhaps Lydia will find, when she comes to ordering her own life, that she will miss her old mother's forethought and care."

Lydia flung herself remorsefully on her mother's neck. "I'm so _sorry_, Mother dear," she almost sobbed. Dr. Melton's professional eye took in the fact that everyone in the room was high-strung and tense. "The middle-of-the-social-season symptom," he called it to himself. "I'm so sorry, Mother," Lydia went on. "I will be more careful next time. You are _so_ good to--to--"

"Good Heavens!" said Dr. Melton. "All the child did was to give herself a moment's time to look at a fine spectacle, after spending all a precious afternoon on such a tragically idiotic pursuit as cards."

"Oh, _sunsets_!" Mrs. Emery disposed of them with a word. "Come, Lydia."

"I'll go with her, and carry her bag," said the doctor.

"You made such a good job of getting her here on time," said Mrs. Emery, unappeased.

The Judge offered to go, as a means of one of his rare visits with Lydia, but his wife declared with emphasis that she didn't care who went or didn't go so long as she herself saw that Lydia did not take to star-gazing again. It ended by all four proceeding down the street together.

"You're sure you remember everything, Lydia?" asked her mother.

"Let me see," said the girl, laughing nervously. "Do I? The Governor's wife is his second, so I'm to waste no time admiring the first set of children. They're Methodists, so I'm to keep quiet about our being Episcopalians--"