d not as a time when
she was humiliated by being different from other girls."

"Well, my goodness! you're not criticizing them for that, are you? I
think it was just as sweet and lovely of them as can be to realize how a
girl feels."

Rankin looked at her, smiled slightly, and said nothing. His silence
made Lydia thoughtful. After a time, "I see what you mean, of course,"
she said slowly, "that it would be _better_ for her, perhaps--but if he
_loves_ her, her father _wants_ to do things for her."

Rankin's roar of exasperation at this speech was so evidently directed
at an old enemy of an argument that Lydia was only for an instant
startled by it. "I _don't_ say he can do too much for her," he cried.
"He can't! Nobody can do too much for anybody else if it's the right
thing."

"And what in the world do you think _would_ be the right thing in this
case?" Lydia put the question as a poser.

"Why, of course, to pamper her vanity; to feed her moral cowardice; to
make her more afraid than ever of senseless public opinion; to deprive
her of a fine exercise for her spiritual force; to shut her off from a
sense of her material situation in life until the knowledge of it will
come as a tragedy to her; to let her grow up without any knowledge of
her father's point of view--"

"There, there! That's enough!" said Lydia.

"I didn't need to be so violent about it, that's a fact," apologized
Rankin.

"But you're talking of people the way they ought to be," objected Lydia,
apparently drawing again from a stock of inculcated arguments. "Do you
really, honestly, suppose that that girl would rather have an
opportunity to do something for her parents and--and--and all that, than
have a fine dress that would cost a lot and make the other girls
envious?"

"Oh, Lydia!" cried her companion, not noticing the betrayal of a mental
habit in the slipping out of her name. "You're just in a state of
saturated solution of Dr. Melton. Don't you believe a word he says
about folks. They're lots better than he thinks. The only reason anybody
has for raging at them for being a bad lot is because they are such a
good lot! They are so chuck-full of good possibilities! There's so much
more good in them than bad. You think that, don't you? You _must_!
There's nothing to go on, if you don't."

As Lydia began to answer she felt herself, as once or twice before when
with Rankin, suddenly an immeasurable distance from her usual ways of
mental life. S