, who met his eyes
with a look of fright. She opened the box, from which arose a column of
strong, spicy odor, almost like something visible, and naively read the
card aloud: "To the little girl grown up at last--to the young lady I've
waited so long to see."

She laid the card down beside her plate and kept her eyes upon it,
hanging her head in silence. Her father began to consume his dessert
rapidly. The cream in it was delicious, and he ate with appreciation. To
him, as to many middle-aged Americans, the two vital parts of a meal
were the meat and the dessert. The added pleasures or comforting
consolations of soup, salads, vegetables, entrees, made dishes, were not
for him. He ate them, but with a robust indifference. "Meat's business,"
he was wont to say, "and dessert's fun. The rest of one's victuals is
society and art and literature and such--things to leave to the women."

He now stopped his consumption of his dessert and recalled himself with
an effort to his daughter's impalpable difficulties. She was murmuring,
"But, Father--you must be mistaken-- Why, nobody so much as hinted at
such a--"

"That's your mother's doings. She'd be furious now if she knew I'd
spoken right out. But you don't want to be treated like a little girl
all your life, do you?" He laughed at her speechless embarrassment with
a kind obtuseness to the horror of youth at seeing its shy fastnesses of
reserve laid open to indifferent feet. Divining, however, through his
affection for her, that she was really more than pleasantly startled by
his bluntness, he began to make everything smooth by saying: "There
aren't many girls in Endbury who don't envy my little Lydia, I guess.
Paul is considered--"

At this point Lydia rose hurriedly and actually ran away from the sound
of his voice. She fled upstairs so rapidly that he heard the click of
her heel on the top step before he could draw his breath. He laughed
uneasily, finished his dessert in one or two huge mouthfuls, and
followed her. He was recalled by the ringing of the telephone bell, and
when he went upstairs again he was smiling broadly. With his lawyer's
caution, he waited a moment outside his wife's room, where he heard
Lydia's voice, to see if her mother had hit upon some happy inspiration
to quiet the girl's exaggerated maidenly shyness. He had the tenderest
indulgence to his daughter's confusion, but he was not without a
humorous, middle-aged realization of the extremely transitory