and gathering up his blue-prints. "Well, I can't
think of any problem that torments me but the everlasting one of how to
sell more generators and motors than my competitors. Come on indoors,
Honey; I've got to have some light if I finish going over these
to-night."

His accent was evidently intended to end the discussion, and Lydia
allowed it to do so, although the incident was one she could not put out
of her mind. She watched Walter going back and forth to Endbury with a
jealousy the absurdity of which she herself realized, and she listened
with a painful intentness to the boy's talk during his occasional idle
sojourns on their veranda steps. Yet she had been used to hearing Paul
talk unintelligibly to the business associates whom, from time to time,
he brought out to the house to dine and to talk business afterward.
Somehow, she said to herself, it's being just _Walter_ seemed to bring
it home to her. To have that boy--and yet she liked him, too, she
thought. She looked sometimes into his fresh, innocently keen face with
a yearning apprehension. Paul was amused at his precocious airs, and yet
was not without respect for his rapidly developing business capacity. He
said once, "Walter's a real nice boy. I shouldn't mind having a son like
that myself!"

The remark startled Lydia. If she were to have a son he _would_ be like
that, she realized. And he would grow up and marry some--she sprang up
and caught Ariadne to her in a sudden fierce embrace.

"You'll break your back lifting that heavy baby 'round so," Paul
remonstrated with justice.

For all her aversion to the set forms of "society" as understood by
Endbury, Lydia was fond of having people about her, "to try to get
really acquainted with them" she said, and during that summer the
Hollister veranda in the evening became a rendezvous for their Bellevue
neighbors. Paul rather deplored the time wasted in this unprofitable
variety of informal social life which, in his phrase, "counted for
nothing" but he was always glad to see Walter. "At the rate he's going
and the way he's taking hold, he'll be a valuable business friend in a
few years," he said prophetically to Lydia, and he assumed more and more
the airs of a comrade with the lad.

One evening when Walter came lounging over to the veranda, Lydia was
busy indoors, but later she stepped to the door in time to hear Paul
say, laughing: "Well, for all that, he's not so good as Wellman Phelps'
stenographer."

"Ho