"putting ideas in girls' heads."
It was an objection at which he had laughed long and loud.

Mrs. Emery liked her doctor in spite of not understanding him; but she
loved her husband because she knew him through and through. In his turn,
Judge Emery bestowed on his wife an esteem the warmth of which was not
tempered by his occasional amusement at her--an amusement which Mrs.
Emery was far from suspecting. He did heartily and unreservedly admire
her competence; though he never did justice to her single-handed battle
against the forces of ignorance and irresponsibility in the kitchen
until an illness of hers showed that the combat must be continuous,
though his wisdom in selecting an ambitious wife had shielded him, as a
rule, from the uproar of the engagement.

This evening, as he looked across the white table-cloth at his daughter,
he had a sudden qualm of doubt, not unusual in parents, as to the
capacity of the younger generation to carry on the work begun by the
older. Of course, he reassured himself, this had scarcely been a fair
trial. The child had been plunged into the business the day after her
return, with the added complication of her mother's illness; but, even
making all allowances, he had been dismayed by the thorough-going
domestic anarchy that had ensued. He was partly aware that what alarmed
him most was Lydia's lack of zest in the battle, an unwillingness to
recognize its inevitability and face it; a strange, apparently willful,
blindness to the value of victory. Her father was disturbed by this
failure to acquiesce in the normal, usual standard of values. He
recalled with apprehension the revolutionary sayings and doings of his
second son, which had been the more disconcerting because they flowed
from the young reactionary in such a gay flood of high spirits. Harry
had no more shared the reverent attitude of his family toward household
aesthetics than toward social values. A house was a place to keep the
weather from you, he had said laughingly. If you could have it pretty
and well-ordered without too much bother, well and good; but might the
Lord protect him from everlastingly making omelets to look at and not to
eat.

Lydia, to be sure, had ventured no irreverent jokes, and, so far as her
father could see, had never conceived them; but a few days before she
had suggested seriously, "Why can't we shut up all of the house we don't
really use, and not have to take care of those big parlors and the
libr