. I know it. I just suddenly got so
impatient it didn't seem as though I could wait another minute!"

The younger woman accepted this explanation of the tears with a murmured
sound of somewhat enigmatic intonation. Her thin dark face settled into
a repose that had a little grimness in it. She began putting the flowers
into a vase that stood between the reproduction of a Giotto Madonna and
a Japanese devil-hunt, both results of the study of art taken up during
the past winter by her mother's favorite woman's club. Mrs. Emery
watched the process in the contemplative relief which follows an
emotional outbreak, and her eyes wandered to the objects on either side
the vase. The sight stirred her to speech. "Oh, Marietta, how _do_ you
suppose the house will seem to Lydia after she has seen so much? I hope
she won't be disappointed. I've done so much to it this last year,
perhaps she won't like it. And Oh, I _was_ so tried because we weren't
able to get the new sideboard put up in the dining-room yesterday!"

Mrs. Mortimer glanced without smiling at a miniature of her sister,
blooming in a shrine-like arrangement on her mother's writing-desk. She
shook her dark head with a gesture like her father's, and said with his
blunt decisiveness, "Really, Mother, you must draw the line about Lydia.
She's only human. I guess if the house is good enough for you and father
it is good enough for her."

She crossed the room toward the door with a brisk rattle of starched
skirts, but as she passed her mother her hand was caught and held.
"That's just it, Marietta--that's just what came over me! _Is_ what's
good enough for us good enough for Lydia? Won't anything, even the best,
in Endbury be a come-down for her?"

The slightly irritated impatience with which Mrs. Mortimer had listened
to the first words of this speech gave way to a shrewd amusement. "You
mean that you've put Lydia up on such a high plane to begin with that
whichever way she goes will be a step down," she asked.

"Yes, yes; that's just it," breathed her mother, unconscious of any
irony in her daughter's accent. She fixed her eyes, which, in spite of
her having long since passed the half-century mark, were still very
clear and blue, anxiously upon Marietta's opaque dark ones. She felt not
only a need to be reassured in general by anyone, but a reluctant faith
in the younger woman's judgment.

Marietta released herself with a laugh that was like a light, mocking
tap on her