finally, before
attacking a pile of papers, "If I'm going to earn a lot more money, what
good'll it do us if you don't do your share? Besides, we owe it to the
kid. You want to do your best by your little girl, don't you?"

As always, Lydia responded with a helpless alacrity to that appeal.
"Oh, yes! Oh, yes! We must do our best for her." This phrase summed up
the religion she had at last found after so much fervent, undirected
search. The church, as she knew it, was chiefly the social center of
various fashionable activities which differed from ordinary fashionable
enterprises only in being used to bring in money, which money, handed
over to the rector, disappeared into the maw of some unknown, voracious,
charitable institution. And beyond the church there had been no element
in the life she knew, that was not frankly materialistic. But now, as
the miracle of awakening consciousness took place daily in her very
sight, and as the first dawnings of a personality began to look out of
her child's eyes, all Lydia's vague spiritual cravings, all the groping
tendrils of her aspirations, clung about the conviction more and more
summing up her inner life, that she must do her best for Ariadne, must
make the world, into which that little new soul had come, a better place
than she herself had found it. She felt as naively and passionately that
her child must be saved the mistakes that she had made, as though she
were the first mother who ever sent up over her baby's head that
pitiful, universal prayer.

The matter of the social duty of the young Hollisters was finally
compromised by Lydia's accepting a number of invitations for the latter
part of the season, and giving a series of big receptions in May. They
were not by a hair nor a jot nor a tittle to be distinguished from their
predecessors of the year before. As they seemed hardly adequate, Lydia
suggested half-heartedly that they give a dinner party, but Paul
replied, "With 'Stashie to pour soup down people's backs and ask them
how their baby's whooping cough is, as she passes the potatoes?"

The hot weather came with the rush that was always so unexpected and so
invariable, and another season was over. It was a busy, silent,
thoughtful summer for Lydia. Of course (much to Lydia's distress),
Ariadne had been weaned when her mother had been forced to leave her to
"go out" again, and this necessitated such anxious attention to her
diet and general regimen during the hot weat