remember that all girls who'd been popular at all--let alone a girl like
Lydia--looked thin and worn by the end of the season; but during the
last week of April, when the first hot days had arrived, a small
incident surprised her into thinking that perhaps the doctor had some
right on his side.

Not that there was in itself anything so very alarming about a nervous
explosion from a girl so high-strung and susceptible as Lydia. The
startling thing was that this explosion proceeded, so far as her mother
could see, from nothing at all, from the idlest of chance remarks by
Mrs. Sandworth, as always, whitely innocent of the smallest intention to
wound.

She and Mrs. Emery were much given to watching Lydia dress for the
innumerable engagements that took her away from the house. They made a
pretext of helping her, but in truth they were carried away by the
delight in another's beauty which is more common among women than is
generally imagined. They took the profoundest interest in the selection
of the toilet she should wear, and regarded with a charmed surprise the
particular aspect of Lydia's slim comeliness which it brought out. They
could not decide whether they liked her best in clinging, picture
costumes, big hats, plumes, trailing draperies, and the like, or
dashing, jaunty effects. Once in the winter, after she had left them on
her way to an evening skating party and they had seen her from the
window join Hollister and add her skates to those glittering on his
shoulder, Mrs. Sandworth promulgated one of her unexpected apothegms:
"Do you know what we are, Susan Emery? We're a couple of old children
playing with a doll." Mrs. Emery protested with an instant, reproving
self-justification: "_You_ may be--you're not her mother; but I
understand Lydia through and through."

Mrs. Emery felt that if Lydia had overheard that remark of her aunt's
her excitement and resentment might have been natural; but the one which
led to the distressing little scene in late April was as neutral as an
ordinary morning salutation. The two were watching Lydia dress for a
luncheon which Mrs. Hollister--_the_ Mrs. Hollister--was giving in her
honor. It was about noon of a warm day, and the air that came in at the
open windows was thrillingly alive with troubling, disquieting
suggestions of the new life of spring. Lydia, however, showed none of
the languor which the sudden heat had brought to the two elder women.
She was a little late, and her h