Part 40 (2/2)

Paul patted her cheek. He was feeling very much refreshed by his night's sleep. He smiled at his young wife again. ”Why, fire away, Lydia dear.

I'm no ogre. You don't have to wait till I'm in a good temper, do you?

What is it? More money?”

”Oh, no, _no_!” She repudiated the idea so hotly that he laughed, ”Well, you can't scare me with anything else. What's up?”

Lydia hesitated, distracted, now that her chance had come, with the desire to speak clearly. ”Paul dear, it's very serious, and I want you to take it seriously. It may take a great effort to change things, too.

I'm very unhappy about the way we are--”

A wail from Ariadne's room gave warning that the child had wakened, as she not infrequently did, terrified by a bad dream. Lydia fled in to comfort her, and later, when she came back, leading the droll little figure in its pink sleeping-drawers, Paul was dressing with his usual careful haste. He stopped an instant to laugh at Ariadne's face of determined woe and tossed her up until an unwilling smile broke through her pouting gloom. Then he turned to Lydia, as to another child, and rubbed his cheek on hers with a boyish gesture. ”Now, you other little forlornity, what's the matter with you?”

Lydia warmed, as always, at the tenderness of his tone, though she noticed with an inward laugh that he continued b.u.t.toning his vest as he caressed her and that his eyes wandered to the clock with a wary alertness. ”Perhaps you'd better wait and tell me at the table,” he went on briskly. ”I'm all ready to go down.” He pulled his coat on with his astonis.h.i.+ng quickness, and ran downstairs.

Lydia put Ariadne into her own bed, telling the docile little thing to stay there till Mother came back for her, and followed Paul, huddling together the remnants of her resolution which looked very wan in the morning light. Breakfast was not ready; the table was not even set, and when she went out into the kitchen she was met by a heavy-eyed cook, moving futilely about among dirty pots and pans and murmuring something about a headache. Lydia could not stop then to investigate further, but, hurrying about, managed to get a breakfast ready for Paul before his first interest in the morning paper had evaporated enough to make him impatient of the delay.

He fell to with a hearty appet.i.te as soon as the food was set before him, not noticing for several moments that Lydia's breakfast was not yet ready. When he did so, he spoke with a solicitous sharpness: ”Lydia, you need a guardian! You ought to eat as a matter of duty! I bet half your queer notions come from your just pecking around at any old thing when I'm not here to keep track of you.”

He poured out another cup of coffee for himself as he spoke.

”Yes, dear; I know, I do. I will,” Lydia a.s.sured him, with her quick acquiescence to his wishes. ”But this morning Mary is sick, or something, and I got yours first.”

Paul spoke briefly, with his mouth full of toast: ”If you were more regular in the way you run the house, and insisted on never varying the--”

”But I was afraid you would be late,” said Lydia. It was the daily terror of her life.

”I _am_ late now,” he told her, with his good-humored insistence on facts. ”I've missed the 7:40, and I've just time to catch the next one if I hurry. Do you happen to know, dear, where I put that catalogue from Elberstrom and Company? The big red book with the picture of a dynamo on the cover. I was looking over it last night, and Heaven knows where I may have dropped it.”

The opinion as to the proper answer to a speech like this was one of the sharply marked lines of divergence between Madeleine Lowder and her brother's wife. ”Soak him one when you get a chance, Lydia,” she was wont to urge facetiously, and her advice in the present case would unhesitatingly have been to answer as acrimoniously as possible that if he were more regular in the way he handled such things his wife would have to spend less time ransacking the house looking for them. But in spite of such practical and experienced counsel, Lydia was scarcely conscious of refraining from the entirely justifiable and entirely futile customary recriminations, and she was as unaware as Paul of the vast amount of embittering domestic friction which was spared them by her silence. She had some great natural advantages for the task of creating a better domestic life at which she was now so eagerly setting herself, and one of them was this incapacity to resent petty injustices done to herself. She was handicapped in any effort by her utter lack of intellectual training and by a natural tendency to mental confusion, but her lack of small vanities not only spared her untold suffering, but added much to her singleness of aim.

She now went about searching for the catalogue, finally finding it in the library under the couch. When she came back to the dining-room she saw Paul standing up by the table, wiping his mouth. Evidently he was ready to start. How absurd she had been to think of talking seriously to him in the morning!

”Mary brought your breakfast in,” he said nodding toward an untidy tray.

”I hate to seem to be finding fault all the time, but really her breath was enough to set the house on fire! Can't you keep her down to moderate drinking?”

”I'll try,” said Lydia.

Paul took the catalogue from her hand and reached for his hat. They were in the hall now. ”Good-by, Honey,” he said, kissing her hastily and darting out of the house.

Lydia had but just turned back to the dining-room when he opened the door and came in again, bringing a gust of fresh winter air with him.

”Say, dear, you forgot about something you wanted to tell me about. I've got eight minutes before the trolley, so now's your chance. What is it?

Something about the plumbing?”

In the dusky hall Lydia faced him for a moment in silence, with so singular an expression on her face that he looked apprehensive of some sort of scene. Then she broke out into breathless, quavering laughter, whose uncertainty did not prevent Paul from great relief at her apparent change of mood. ”Never mind,” she said, leaning against the newel-post, ”I'll tell you--I'll tell you some other time.”

He kissed her again, and she felt that it was with a greater tenderness now that he no longer feared a possibly disagreeable communication from her.

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