The Squirrel-Cage Part 2

"He talks to me," said Lydia defensively.

"_We_ never say a word," commented Mrs. Mortimer.

Lydia broke away from her mother's close clasp and ran back to her sister. She was always running, as though to keep up with the rapidity of her swift impulses. She held her subtly-curved cheek up to the other's strongly-marked face. "You just kiss me, Etta dear," she pleaded softly, "and stop teasing."

Mrs. Mortimer looked long into the clear dark eyes with an unmoved countenance. Then her face melted suddenly till she looked like her mother. She put her arms about the girl with a fervent gesture of tenderness. "Dear little Lydia," she murmured, with a quaver in her voice.

CHAPTER III

PICKING UP THE THREADS

After she was alone she looked again at the miniature of Lydia. The youthful radiance of the face had singularly the effect of a perfect flower. Mrs. Mortimer glanced at the hat still drooping its wide brim over the rose where Lydia had forgotten it, and stood still in a reverie that had, from her aspect, something of sadness in it. After a moment she sighed out, "Poor little Lydia!"

"What's the matter with Lydia?" asked someone behind her.

She turned and faced a dark, elderly personage, the robust dignity of whose bearing was now tempered with shamefacedness. Mrs. Mortimer's face sharpened in affectionate malice. "What are you doing here at this hour of the morning?" she asked with a humorously exaggerated air of amazement. "No self-respecting man is ever seen in his house during business hours!" She went on, "Oh, I know well enough. You let Mother have her first to make up for her being sick and not able to go to meet her ship; but you can't stay away."

The Judge waved her raillery away with a smile. The physical resemblance between father and daughter was remarkable. "I asked you what was the matter with Lydia," he repeated.

Mrs. Mortimer's face clouded. "Oh, it's a hateful, horrid sort of world we're all so eager to push her into. It's like a can full of angleworms, everlastingly squirming and wriggling to get to the top. I was just thinking that it would be better for her, maybe, if she could always stay a little girl and travel 'round to see things."

"Why, Etta! I tell you _I'm_ glad to have Lydia get through with her traveling 'round. Maybe I can see something of her if I hurry up and do it now before your mother gets things going. I won't after that, of course. I never have."

To this his daughter had one of her abrupt, disconcerting responses.

"You'd better hurry and do it before you get so deep in some important trial that you wouldn't know Lydia from a plaster image. There are more reasons than just Mother and card parties why you don't see much of her, I guess."

Judge Emery forbore to argue the point. "Where are they now?" he asked.

"Oh, upstairs, out of my way. Mother's usual state of mind about Lydia is more so than ever, I warn you. She thought I wasn't refined enough company."

"Now, Etta, you know your mother never thought any such thing."

"Well, I know she was inconsistent, whatever she thought. While we were here alone she was speculating about Paul Hollister like anything. And yet, because I just happened to mention to Lydia that he is getting on in the world, I got put down as if I'd tried to make her marry him for his prospects."

There was an edge in her voice which her father deprecated, rubbing his shaven chin mildly. He deplored the appearance of a flaw in the smooth surface of harmony he loved to see in his family.

"Well, you know, Marietta, we aim to have everything about right for Lydia. She's all we've got left now the rest of you are settled."

The deepening of the careworn lines in the woman's face seemed a justification for the undisguised bitterness of her answer. "I don't see why n.o.body must breathe a word to her about what everybody knows is so.

What's the use of pretending that we'd be satisfied or she'd be comfortable a minute if Paul didn't promise to be a money-maker--or at least to have a good income?"

She turned away and walked rapidly down the hall, followed by her father, half apologetic, half reproachful. "Why, Daughter, you don't grudge your sister! We couldn't do so much for you; but we're better off since you were a young lady and we want Lydia to have the benefit."

Mrs. Mortimer paused on the veranda and stood looking in a troubled silence at the broad, well-kept lawn, stretching down to the asphalt street, shaded by vigorous young maples. Her father waited for her to speak, too good a lawyer to spoil by superfluous words the effect of a well-calculated appeal.

Finally she turned to him contritely. "I'm hateful, Dad, and I'm sorry.

Of course I don't grudge dear little Lydia anything. Only I have a pretty hard time of it scratching along, and when I'm awfully tired of contriving and calculating how to manage somehow and anyhow, it's hard to come up to the standard of saying everything's lovely that you and Mother want for Lydia."

"Anything the trouble specially?" asked her father guardedly.

"Oh, no; same old thing. Keeping up a two-maid and a man establishment on a one-maid income, and mostly not being able to hire the one maid.

There aren't _any_ girls to be had lately. It means I have to be the other maid and the man all of the time, and all three, part of the time." She was starting down the step, but paused as though she could not resist the relief that came from expression. "And the cost of living--the necessities are bad enough, but the other things--the things you have to have not to be out of everything! I lie awake nights. I think of it in church. I can't think of anything else but the way the expenses mount up. Everybody's getting so reckless and extravagant and I _won't_ go into debt! I'll come to it, though. Everybody else does!

We're the only people that haven't oriental rugs now. Why, the Gilberts--and everybody knows how much they still owe Dr. Melton for Ellen's appendicitis, and their grocer told Ralph they owe him several hundred dollars--well, they have just got an oriental rug that they paid a hundred and sixty dollars for. Mrs. Gilbert said they 'just _had_ to have it, and you can always have what you have to have.' It makes me sick! Our parlor looks so common! And the last dinner party we gave cost--" She detected a wavering in her father's attention, as though he were listening for sounds inside the house, and broke off abruptly with a hurt and impatient "Oh, well, no matter!" and ran down the steps.

Judge Emery called after with a relieved belittling of her complaints, "Oh, if that's all you mean. Why, that's half the fun. I remember when you were a baby your mother did the washings so that we could have a nurse to take you out with the other children and their nurses."

Mrs. Mortimer was palpably out of earshot before he finished his exhortation, so he wasted no more breath but turned back eagerly in response to a call from Lydia, who came skimming down the hall. "Oh, Daddy dearest, it's a jewel of a little sitting-room, the one you fixed up for me--and Mother says we can serve punch there the night of my coming-out party."

Mrs. Emery was at her heels. Her husband laughed at his wife's expression, and drew her toward him. "Here, Mother, stop staring at Lydia long enough to welcome me home, too." He bent over her and rubbed his cheek against hers. "Come, tell me the news. Are you feeling better?" He gave her a little playful push toward the door of the parlor. "Here, let's go in and visit for a while. I'm an old fool! I can't do any work this morning. I kept Lydia from telling me a thing all the way from New York, so that we could hear it together."

Lydia protested. "Tell you! After those monstrous great letters I've written! There's nothing you don't know. There's nothing much to tell, anyhow. I've been museumed and picture-galleried, and churched, and cultured generally, till I'm full--up to there!" She drew her hand across her slim white throat and added cheerfully, "But I forgot the most of that the last three months in Paris. Nearly 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, l.u.s.terless 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? n.o.body 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.