every girl in the party was going home to come out in society, and of course we just concentrated on clothes. You don’t mind, do you?”
As she hesitated, with raised eyebrows of doubt, her mother, heedless of what she was saying, was suddenly overcome by her appealing look and drew her close with a rush of little incoherent tender cries choked with tears. It was as though she were seeing her for the first time. Judge Emery twice tried to speak before his husky voice was under control. He patted his wife on the shoulder. “There, there, Mother,” he said vaguely. To Lydia he went on, “You’ve been gone quite a while, you know, and—well, till you have a baby-girl of your own I guess you won’t have much notion of how we feel.”
Lydia’s dark eyes filled, responsive to the emotion about her. “I’m just about distracted,” she cried. “I love everybody and everything so, I can’t stand it! I want to kiss you both and I can’t make up my mind which to kiss first—and it’s that way about everything! It’s all so good I don’t know what to begin on.” She brought their faces together and achieved a simultaneous kiss with a shaky laugh. “Now, look here! If we stand here another minute we’ll all cry. Come and show me the house. I want to see every single thing. All the old things, and all the new ones Mother’s been writing about.” She seized their hands and pulled them into the parlor. “I’ve been in this room already, but I didn’t see it. I don’t believe I even touched the floor when I walked, I was so excited. Oh, it’s lovely—it’s lovely!”
She darted about the room like a humming-bird, recognizing what was familiar with fond little exclamations. “Oh, that darling little wicker chair!—the picture of the dog!—oh! oh! here’s my china lamb!” and crying out in admiration over new acquisitions.
“Oh, Mother, what a perfectly lovely couch—sofa—what do you call it? Why, it is so beautifully different! Wherever did you get that?”
Mrs. Emery turned to her husband. “There, Nathaniel, what did I tell you?” she triumphed.
“That’s one of your mother’s latest extravagances,” explained Judge Emery. “There’s a crazy fad in Endbury for special handmade furniture. Maybe it’s all right, but I can’t see it’s so much better than what you buy in the department stores. Grand Rapids is good enough for me.”
“He doesn’t like the man who made it,” said Mrs. Emery accusingly.
“What’s the matter with him?” asked Lydia, rubbing her hand luxuriously over the satin-smooth, lusterless wood of the sofa’s high back.
Judge Emery replied, with his laugh of easy, indifferent tolerance for everything outside the profession of the law, “Oh, I never said I didn’t like him; I only said he struck me as a crack-brained, self-willed, conceited—”
Lydia laughed. She thought her father’s dry, ironic turns very witty.
“I never saw anything conceited about him,” protested Mrs. Emery, admitting the rest of the indictment.
Judge Emery sat down on the sofa in question and pulled his tie into shape. “Well, folks are always conceited who find the ordinary ways of doing things not good enough for them. Lydia, what do you think of this tie? Nobody pays a proper attention to my ties but you.”
“I’ve brought you some beauties from London,” said Lydia. Then reverting with a momentary curiosity to the subject they had left, “Whatever does this man do that’s so queer?”
“Oh, he’s just one of the back-to-all-fours faddists,” said her father.
“Back-to-all-fours?” Lydia was dim as to his meaning, but willing to be amused.
“That’s just your father’s way,” exclaimed Mrs. Emery, who had not her daughter’s fondness for the Judge’s tricks of speech.
“He lives as no Dago ditch-digger with a particle of get-up-and-get in him would be willing to,” said Judge Emery finally.
Lydia turned to her mother.
“Why, it’s nothing that would interest you in the least, dear,” said the matron, taking in admiringly Lydia’s French dress. “Only for a little while everybody was talking about how strangely he acted. He was an insurance man, like Marietta’s husband, and getting on finely, when all of a sudden, for no reason on earth, he threw it all up and went to live in the woods. Do you mean to say you only paid twenty dollars for that dress?”
“In the woods!” repeated Lydia.
“Yes; the real woods. His father was a farmer, and left him—why you know, you’ve been there ever so many times—the Black Rock woods, the picnic woods. He has built him a little hut there and makes his furniture out of the trees.”
Lydia’s passing curiosity had faded. “Not quite twenty, even—only ninety-two francs,” she at last answered her mother’s question. “You never saw anything like the bargains there in summertime. Well, I should think your carpenter man was crazy.” She glanced down with satisfaction at the hang of her skirt.
“Oh, not dangerous,” her mother reassured her; “just socialistic, I suppose, and all that sort of thing.”
“Well, who’s crazier than a socialist?” cried her father genially. He added, “Where are you going, Daughter?”
Lydia stopped in the doorway, with a look of apology for her lack of interest in their talk. “I thought I’d just slip into the hall and see if there’s anything new there. There’s so much I want to see—all at once.”
Her fond impatience brought her parents forward with a start of pleasure, and the tour of inspection began. She led them from one room to another, swooping with swallow-like motions upon them for sudden caresses, dazzling them with her changing grace. She liked it all—all—she told them, a thousand times better than she remembered. She liked the new arrangement of the butler’s pantry; she loved the library for being all done over new; she adored the hall for being left exactly the way it was. The dining-room was the best of all, she declared, with so much that was familiar and so much that was new. “Only no sideboard,” she commented. “Have they gone out of fashion while I was away?”
Mrs. Emery, whose delight at Lydia’s approval had been mounting with every breath, looked vexed. “I knew you’d notice that!” she said. “We tried so hard to get the new one put in before you got back, but Mr. Rankin won’t deliver a thing till it’s just so!”
“Rankin!” cried Lydia, stopping so short in one of her headlong rushes across the room that she gave the impression of having encountered an invisible obstacle, “Who’s that?”
“Oh, that’s the crazy cabinet-maker we were talking about. The one who—”
“Why, I’ve met a Mr. Rankin,” said Lydia, with more emphasis than the statement seemed to warrant.
“It’s a common enough name,” said her mother, struck oddly by her accent.
“But here, in Endbury. Only it can’t be the same person. He wasn’t queer; he was awfully nice. I met him once when a crowd of us were out skating that last Christmas I was home from school; the time when you and Father were in Washington and left me at Dr. Melton’s with Aunt Julia. I used to see him there a lot. He used to talk to the doctor by the hour, and Aunt Julia and I were doing that set of doilies in Hardanger work and we used to sit and sew and count threads and listen.”
“That’s the one,” said her father. “Melton has one of his flighty notions that the man is something wonderful.”
“But he wasn’t queer or anything then!” protested Lydia. “He never talked to me any, of course, I was such a kid, but it was awfully interesting to hear him and Godfather go on about morals, and the universe, and the future of man, and such—I never heard such talk before or after—but it can’t be that one!” Lydia broke off to marvel incredulously at the possibility. “He was—why, he was awfully nice!” she fell back on reiteration to help out her affirmation.
“They