m the cities. Madeleine tells me that she
and Lowder are planning a house at the other end of this street, and you
can be sure they know what they are about."

Lydia did not dissent from this opinion of her future sister-in-law, but
she interrupted Paul a moment later, to say fondly, "_Oh_, but I'm glad
that you aren't fifty-five and bald and with lots of money!"

Paul laughed. "Madeleine'll get on all right. She knows what she's
about. It's a pair of them."

"Well, I am church-thankful that that is not what _we_ are about!"
exclaimed Lydia.

Her lover voiced the extreme content with his lot which had been his
obsession that day. "We have _everything_, darling. We shall have all
that Madeleine and old Lowder have and we have now all this heavenly
happiness that they'll never know--or miss," he added, giving them their
due.

"I didn't mean that," protested Lydia. "It seems to me that being like
them and being like us are two contradictory things. You _can't_ be both
and have the things that go with both. And what I'm so thankful for is
that we're us and not them."

Paul laughed. "You just see if there's anything so contradictory. Trust
me. You just see if you don't beat Madeleine on her own ground yet."

"I don't _want_--" began Lydia; but Paul had gone back to his first
theme and was expanding it for her benefit. "Yes; we're getting the
English idea. In twenty years from now you'll find the social center of
every moderate-sized American city shifted to some such place as this."

Lydia craned her neck down the tracks impatiently. "I hope we don't miss
a trolley car every day of those twenty years," she said, laughing.

"We'll have an automobile," he said. Then, reflecting that this was a
somewhat exaggerated prophecy, he went on, with the honesty he meant
always to show Lydia (so far as should be wise), "No; I'm afraid we
sha'n't, either--not for some time. It'll take several years to finish
paying altogether for the house, and we'll have to pull hard to keep up
our end for a time. But we're young, so much won't be expected of
us--and if we just dig in for a few years now while we're fresh, we can
lie back and--"

"Well, _gracious_!" said Lydia, "who wants an automobile, anyhow! Only I
wish the trolley didn't take so long. It's going to take the best part
of an hour, you know; the ten or twelve minutes to get here from the
house, the two or three minutes to wait, the thirty minutes on the car,
the ten minutes