ver
she really wished to do and considered important; and that previous
conditions must have been due to her unwillingness to set herself
seriously at the problems before her. It was a new theory about his
wife's character, which the intelligent young man laid by on a mental
shelf for future use after this period of intense domesticity should be
past.

At present, he accepted thankfully his clean house and his savory food,
was not too much put out by 'Stashie's eccentricities, since there was
no one but the immediate families to see them, and rejoiced with a
whimsical tenderness in Lydia's passion of satisfaction with her baby.
He saw so little of the droll, sleeping, eating little mite that he
could not as yet take it very seriously as his baby. But it was, on the
whole, a happy half-year for him too. He was much moved and pleased by
Lydia's joy. He had meant to make his wife happy.

Lydia herself was transported by the mere physical intoxication of new
motherhood, a potion more exciting, so her much experienced physician
said, than any wine ever fermented. She hung over her sleeping baby,
poring upon the exquisite fineness of the skin, upon the rosy little
mouth, still sucking comically at an imaginary meal, upon the dimpled,
fragile hands, upon the peaceful relaxation of the body, till the very
trusting, appealing essence of babyhood flooded her senses like a strong
drug; and when the child was awake, and she could bathe the much creased
little body, and handle the soft arms, and drop passionate kisses on the
satin-smooth skin, and rub her cheek on the downy head, she found
herself sometimes trembling and dizzy with emotion. She felt constantly
buoyed up by a deep trust and belief in life which she had not known
before. The huge and steadying continuity of existence was revealed to
her in those days. It was a revelation that was never to leave her. She
outgrew definitely the sense of the fragmentary futility of living which
had always been, inarticulate, unvoiced, but intensely felt, the torment
of her earlier life.

It grieved her generous heart and her aspiration to share all with her
husband that the exigences of his busy life deprived him of any
knowledge of this newly-opened well of sweet waters, that he had
nothing from his parenthood but an amused, half shame-faced pride in
points about the baby which, he was informed, were creditable.

At a faint hint of this feeling on Lydia's part, her sister-in-law bro