ke
into her good-natured laughter at Lydia's notions. "What can a man know
about a baby?" she cried conclusively.

"Why, I didn't know about one till Ariadne came. I learned on her.
What's to hinder a man's doing the same thing?"

Madeleine was so much amused by this fantastic idea that she repeated it
to Dr. Melton, who came in just then.

"Don't it take _Lydia_!" she appealed to him.

The doctor considered the lovely, fair-haired creature in silence for a
moment before answering. Then, "Yes; of course you're right," he
assented. "It's a strictly feminine monopoly. It's as true that all men
are incapable of understanding the significance of a baby in the
universe and in their own lives, as it is true that all women love
babies and desire them." His tone was full of a heavy significance. He
could never keep his temper with Paul's sister.

Madeleine received this without a quiver. She neither blushed nor looked
in the least abashed, but there was an unnecessary firmness in her voice
as she answered, looking him steadily in the eye: "Exactly! That's just
what I've been telling Lydia." She often said that she was the only
woman in Endbury who wasn't afraid of that impertinent little doctor.

After Madeleine had gone away, Lydia looked at her godfather with
shining eyes. "I am living! I am living!" she told him, holding up the
baby to him with a gesture infinitely significant; "and I like it as
well as I thought I should!"

"Most people do," he informed her, "when they get a peck at it. It
generally takes something cataclysmic, too, to tear them loose from
their squirrel-cages--like babies, or getting converted."

If he thought that early married life could also be classed among these
beneficently uprooting agencies, he kept his thoughts to himself.
Lydia's marriage had been eminently free from disagreeable shocks or
surprises, and amply deserved to be called successful in the usual
reasonable and moderate application of that adjective to matrimony; but
there had been nothing in it, certainly, to destroy even temporarily
anyone's grasp on what are known as the realities of life.

The doctor considered, and added to his last speech: "Getting converted
is surer. Babies grow up!"

Lydia felt that her godfather was right, and that babies gave one only a
short respite, when, toward spring, she observed in all the inhabitants
of her world repeated signs of uneasy dissatisfaction with her
"submergence in domesticity,"