if they made you nurse
it!"

Lydia did not even attempt a protest. Her submissive, entire acceptance
of spiritual isolation seemed an answer to many of the conflicting
impulses which had hitherto distracted her. She wished that she could
reassure Madeleine by telling her that she would never again make
another "odd" speech to her. She renounced all common life except the
childlike, harmless, animal-like one of mutual material wants, and this
renunciation brought her already a peace which, though barren, was
infinitely calming after her former struggling uncertainties. "How did
those waists come out that you sent to the cleaner's, Madeleine?" she
asked, in a bright, natural tone of interest. "I hope the blue one
_didn't_ fade."

Madeleine reported to her husband that Lydia had seemed in one of her
queer notional moods at first, but cheered up afterward and talked more
"like folks," and seemed more like herself than she had since her father
died. They had a real good visit together she said, and she began to
think she could get some good satisfaction out of having Lydia for a
neighbor, after all.

But after Lydia was alone, there sprang upon her the terror of living on
such terms with Paul. No, no! Never that! It would be dying by inches!
Beaten back to this last inner stronghold of the dismantled castle of
her ideals of life, she prepared to defend it with the energy of
desperation.

She did not believe Madeleine's story, or, at least, not her
interpretation of Paul's attitude, but she felt a dreary chill at his
silence toward her. It seemed to her that their marriage ought to have
brought her husband an irresistible impulse to have in all their
relations with each other a perfect openness. She resolved that she
would begin to help him to that impulse that very day; now, at once.

When Paul came in, he seemed abstracted, and went directly upstairs to
pack a satchel, stating with his usual absence of explanatory comment
that he was called to Evanston on business. He ate his dinner rather
silently, glancing furtively at the paper. Only at the
breakfast-table--such was their convention--did he allow himself to
become absorbed in the news.

Ariadne prattled to her mother of her adventures in the kitchen, where
Patsy O'Hern, 'Stashie's cousin Patsy, was visiting her, and he made
Ariadne a "horse out of a potato and toothpicks for legs, and a little
wagon out of a matchbox, and a paper doll to sit and drive, and Patsy