to ask him
here?"

Esther made what sounded like an irrelevant answer, but it meant
apparently something even solemn to her.

"My grandmother," said she, "is an old lady. She's bedridden. She's
upstairs, and I keep the house very quiet on her account."

Lydia had a hot desire to speak out what she really felt: to say, "Your
grandmother's being bedridden has no more to do with it than the cat."
Lydia was prone to seek the cat for exquisite comparison. Persons, with
her, could no more sing--or dance--than the cat. She found the cat, in
the way of metaphor, a mysteriously useful animal. But the very
embroidery of Esther's mode of speech forbade her invoking that
eccentric aid. Lydia was not eager to quarrel. She would have been
horrified if circumstance had ever provoked her into a rash word to her
father, and with Anne she was a dove of peace. But Esther by a word, it
seemed, by a look, had the power of waking her to unholy revolt. She
thought it was because Esther was so manifestly not playing fair. Why
couldn't she say she wouldn't have Jeff in the house, instead of sitting
here and talking like a nurse in a sanitarium, about bedridden
grandmothers?

"It isn't because we don't want him to come to us," said Lydia.
"Farvie's been living for it all these years, and Anne and I don't talk
of anything else."

"Isn't that interesting!" said Esther, though not as if she put a
question. "And you're no relation at all." She made it, for the moment,
seem rather a breach of taste to talk of nothing else but a man to whom
Lydia wasn't a sister, and Lydia's face burned in answer. A wave of
childish misery came over her. She wished she had not come. She wished
she knew how to get away. And while she took in Esther's harmony of
dress, her own little odds and ends of finery grew painfully cheap to
her. But the telephone bell rang in the next room, and Esther rose and
excused herself. While she was gone, Lydia sat there with her little
hands gripped tightly. Now she wished she knew how to get out of the
house another way, before Esther should come back. If it were not for
the credit of the family, she would find the other way. Meantime
Esther's voice, very liquid now that she was not talking to a sister
woman, flowed in to her and filled her with a new distrust and hatred.

"Please come," said Esther. "I depend upon it. Do you mean you weren't
ever coming any more?"

When she appeared again, Lydia was quivering with a childish a