are in these
ideals for public service of her husband and father--these ideals so
distantly glimpsed by her, and perhaps not very consciously felt by
them. It was not that they refused to answer any one of her questions,
but they were so little in the habit of articulating this phase of their
activities that their tongues balked stubbornly before her ignorant and
fumbling attempts to enter this inner chamber.

"Oh, it's all right, Lydia! Just you trust me!" Paul would cry, with a
hint of vexation in his voice, as if he felt that questions could mean
only suspicion.

Lydia's tentative efforts to construct a bridge between her world and
his met constantly with this ill success. She had had so little training
in bridge-building, she thought sadly.

One evening that spring, such a futile attempt of hers was interrupted
by the son of one of their neighbors, a lad of eighteen, who had just
been given a subordinate position in his father's business. As he
strolled up to their veranda steps, Lydia looked up from the dress she
was enlarging for the rapidly growing baby and reflected that
astonishingly rapid growth is the law of all healthy youth. The tall boy
looked almost ludicrous to her in his ultra-correct man's outfit, so
vividly did she recall him, three or four years before, in short
trousers and round-collared shirt-waist. His smooth, rosy face had still
the downy bloom of adolescence.

"Howd' do, Walter!" said Paul, glancing up from a pile of blue-prints
over which he had been straining his eyes in the fading evening light.

"Evening," answered the boy, nodding and sitting down on the top step
with one knee up. "D'you mind if I smoke, Mrs. Hollister?"

"Not at all," she answered gravely, tickled by the elaborate
carelessness with which he handled his new pipe.

"What you working on, Hollister?" he went on with the manner of one old
business man to another.

Lydia hid a smile. She found him delicious. She began to think how she
could make Dr. Melton laugh with her account of Walter the Man.

"The lay-out of the new power-house--Elliott-Gridley works in Urbana,"
answered Paul, in a straightforward, reasonable tone, a little absent.

Lydia stopped smiling. It was a tone he had never used to answer any
business question she had ever put to him. "I'm figuring on their
generators," he went on in explanation.

"Big contract?" asked Walter.

"Two thousand kilowatt turbo generator," answered Paul.

The other whis