wedding present knickknacks, cleaned the stairs, wiped free from dust
the carved balustrades, ordered the bedrooms that were to serve as
dressing rooms in the evening, answered the 'phone a thousand times,
arranged flowers in the vases, received a reportorial call from Miss
Burgess, gave cut glass and china its final polish, laid out Paul's
evening clothes and arranged her own toilet ready--it was five o'clock!
There were innumerable other tasks to accomplish, but she dared no
longer put off setting the table.

It was to be a large dinner--large, that is, for Endbury--of twenty
covers, and Lydia had never prepared a table for so many guests. The
number of objects necessary for the conventional setting of a dinner
table appalled her. She was so tired, and her attention was so fixed on
the complicated processes going on uncertainly in the kitchen, that her
brain reeled over the vast quantity of knives and forks and plates and
glasses needed to convey food to twenty mouths on a festal occasion.
They persistently eluded her attempts to marshal them into order. She
discovered that she had put forks for the soup--that in some
inexplicable way at the plate destined for an important guest there was
a large kitchen spoon of iron--a wild sort of whimsical humor rose in
her from the ferment of utter fatigue and anxiety. When Paul came in,
looking very grave, she told him with a wavering laugh, "If I tried as
hard for ten minutes to go to Heaven as I've tried all day to have this
dinner right, I'd certainly have a front seat in the angel choir. If
anybody here to-night is not satisfied, it'll be because he's harder to
please than St. Peter himself."

"My Aunt Alexandra will be here," said Paul, the humorous side of her
speech escaping him.

Lydia set down a tray of glasses, and broke into open, shaking,
hysterical laughter. Paul surveyed her grimly. Her excitement had
flushed her cheeks and darkened her eyes, and her sudden, apparently
light-hearted, mirth put the finishing touch to a picture that could
seem to her husband nothing but a care-free, not to say childish,
attitude toward a situation of grave concern to him and his prospects
and ambitions in the world. His inborn and highly cultivated regard for
competence and success in any enterprise undertaken, drowned out, as was
by no means infrequent with him, any judicial inquiry into the innate
importance of the enterprise. He had an instant of bitter impatience
with Lydia.