r
anything else that everybody used to do and did no more. She could
remember, also, when charades and book-parties were considered amusing
pastimes for grown-ups, but in passing beyond these primitive tastes the
Emerys had been well abreast of their contemporaries. The last charade
party had not been held in _their_ parlors, they congratulated
themselves.

A philosophic observer who had known the history of Mrs. Emery's life
might have found something pathetic in her pleasure at Lydia's
light-hearted jesting at the funny old things people used to think
pretty and the absurd pursuits they used to think entertaining. It was
to her a symbol that her daughter had escaped what had caused her so
much suffering, the uneasy, self-distrusting dread lest she might still
be finding pretty things that up-to-date people thought grotesque; lest
suddenly what she had toiled so painfully to obtain should somehow turn
out to be not the "right thing" after all. Marietta did not recall more
vividly than did her mother the trying period that had elapsed between
their new enlightenment on the subject of chromos and the day when an
unexpected large fee from a client of Mr. Emery (not yet Judge) enabled
them to hang their Protestant walls with engravings of pagan gods and
Roman Catholic saints. For their problem had never been the simple one
of merely discovering the right thing. There had always been added to it
the complication of securing the right thing out of an income by no
means limitless. The head of the household had enjoyed the success that
might have been predicted from his whole-souled absorption in his
profession, but Judge Emery came of old-fashioned rural stock with
inelastic ideas of honesty, and though he was more than willing to toil
early and late to supply funds for his family and satisfy whatever form
of ambition his women-folk might decree to be the best one, he was not
willing to take advantage of the perquisites of his position, and never,
as the phrase in the town ran, "made on the side." Of his temptations
and of his stout resistance to them, his wife and children knew no more,
naturally, than of any of the other details of his professional life,
which, according to the custom of their circle, were as remote and
hidden from them as if he had departed each morning after his hearty
early breakfast into another planet; but his wife was proud of the
integrity which she divined in her husband and, as she often declared