t out of my lap, Jimmy. I don't want a boy that runs to his Mama
and doesn't trust his Auntie," Lydia would say patiently, firmly, and
kindly. Martie and Sally, wives for years, were able to refrain from
any comment. To be silent when children are disciplined is one of the
great lessons of marriage.

"But I don't believe that a woman who ever had had a baby COULD rebuff
a child like that," Martie told Sally. "I don't know, though, some
aunts are wonderful! Only that pleasant justice does seem wasted on a
child; it merely stings without being comprehensible in the least!"

So the younger girls dismissed it philosophically. But it was one of
the results of a life like Lydia's that human intercourse had no
lighter phases for her. She must analyze and suspect and brood.
Wherever a possible slight was hidden Lydia found it. She sometimes
disappeared for a few hours upstairs, and came back with reddened eyes.

Her father's devotion to Martie she bore with martyred sweetness. When
they laughed together at dinner she listened with downcast eyes, a
faint, pained smile on her lips.

"Would you like Martie to sit in Ma's place, Pa?" she asked one
morning, when she was folding her napkin neatly into the orange-wood
napkin-ring marked "Souvenir of Santa Cruz." Her father's surprised
negative hardly interrupted the account he was giving his youngest
daughter of the law-suit he had won years ago against old man Thomas.
But after breakfast Martie found Lydia crying into one of the aprons
that Were hanging in the side-entry. "It's nothing!" she gulped as
Martie's warm arms went about her. "Only--only I can't bear to have Ma
forgotten already! You heard how Pa spoke-so short and so cold!"

"Oh, Lyddy, DARLING!" Martie protested, half-amused, half-sympathetic.
Lydia straightened herself resentfully.

"I suppose I'm foolish," she said. "I suppose the best thing for us all
to do is to forget and laugh, and go on as if life and death were only
a JOKE!"

But these storms were rare. Lydia's was a placid life. She was deeply
delighted when her cooking was praised, although she pretended to be
annoyed by it. She was wearing dresses now that had been hers six years
ago; sometimes a blue gingham or a gray madras was worn a whole season
by Lydia without one trip to the tub. She carried a red and gray
parasol that Cliff Frost had given her ten years ago; her boots were
thin, unadorned kid, creased by her narrow foot; they seemed never to
wea