as Mrs. Emery put it in a family council.
Her father inquired mildly, one day in March, with the touchingly vague
interest he took in his children's affairs, if it weren't about time she
returned a few calls and accepted some invitations, and began "to live
_like_ folks again." "Ariadne isn't the first baby in the world," he
concluded.

"She's the first one _I_ ever had," Lydia reminded him, with the
humorous smile that was so like his own.

"Well, you mustn't forget, as so many young mothers do, that you're a
member of society and a wife, as well as a wet-nurse," he said.

Marietta had never resumed an easy or genial intercourse with the
Hollisters since the affair of the dinner party, but she came to call at
not infrequent intervals, and Paul's sister dropped in often, to "keep
an eye on Lydia," as she told her husband. She had an affection for her
sister-in-law, in spite of an exasperated amusement over her liability
to break out with new ideas at unexpected moments. Both these ladies
were loud in their exhortations to Lydia not to let maternity be in her
life the encumbering, unbeautifying, too lengthy episode it was to women
with less force of character than their own. "You do get so _out_ of
things," Madeleine told her with her usual breathless italicizing, "if
you stay away too long. You just never can catch up! There's a
behind-the-timesy _smell_ about your clothes--honest, there is--if you
let them go too long."

Marietta added her quota of experienced wisdom to the discussion. "If
you just hang over a baby all the time, you get morbid, and queer, and
different."

Madeleine had laughed, and summed up the matter with a terse, "Worse
than that! You get left!"

Lydia's elder brother, George, the rich one, who lived in Cleveland and
manufactured rakes and hoes, wrote her one of his rare letters to the
same effect. Lydia thought it likely that he had been moved to this
unusual show of interest in her affairs by proddings from her mother and
Marietta. If this surmise was correct, and if a similar request had been
sent to Henry, the other member of the Emery family, the one who had
married the grocer's daughter, the appeal had a strikingly different
effect. From Oregon came an impetuous, slangily-worded exhortation to
Lydia not to make a fool of herself and miss the best of life to live up
to the tommyrot standard of old dry-as-dust Endbury. The Emerys heard
but seldom from this erring son, and Lydia, who had b