"Oh, dear! why can't Lydia be just bright and wholesome
and fun-loving and _natural_ like Madeleine Hollister!" She added
darkly, "I just feel in my bones that this has something to do with that
Rankin and his morbid ideas."

Mrs. Sandworth was startled. "Good gracious! You don't suppose she--"

"No; of course I don't! I never thought of such a thing. You ought to
see her when she is with Paul. She's just _fascinated_ by him! But you
know as well as I do that ideas go right on underneath all that!" Her
tone implied a disapproval of their tenacity of life. "And yet, Lydia's
really nothing unusual! Before they get married and into social life,
and settled down and too busy to think, most girls have a queer spell.
Only most of them take it out on religion. Oh, why couldn't she have met
that nice young rector--if she had to meet somebody to put ideas into
her head--instead of an anarchist."

"Well, it's certainly all past now," Mrs. Sandworth reassured her.

"Yes; hasn't it been a lovely winter! Everybody's been so good to Lydia.
Everything's succeeded so! But I suppose Dr. Melton's right. We ought to
call her season over, except for the announcement party--and the
wedding, of course--and oh, dear! There are so many things I'd planned
to do I can't possibly get in now. It seems strange a child of mine
should be so queer and have such notions."

However, after the two had talked over the plans for a great evening
garden-party in the Emery "grounds" and Mrs. Emery's creative eye had
seen the affair in a vista of brilliant pictures, she felt more
composed. She went up quietly to Lydia's door and looked in.

The girl was lying on her back, her wide, dark eyes fixed on the
ceiling. Something in the expression of her face gave her mother a throb
of pain. She yearned over the foolish, unbalanced young thing, and her
heart failed her, in that universal mother's fear for her child of the
roughnesses of life, through which she herself has passed safely and
which have given savor to her existence. In her incapacity to conceive
other roughnesses than those she could feel herself, she was, it is
probable, much like the rest of humankind. She advanced to the bed, her
tenderest mother-look on her face, and cut Lydia off from speech with
gentle wisdom. "No, no, dear; don't try to talk. You're all tired out
and nervous and don't know--"

Lydia had begun excitedly: "I've been feeling it for a long time, but
when Aunt Julia said right