this, the neutrality of which gave a
sharper edge to the words.

"Now, Marietta, that's mean!" Lydia defended herself very energetically;
"you know I didn't say it for that." There was a moment's pause, of
which Marietta did not avail herself for a retraction, and then Lydia
went on pensively, "Well, he may be handsome or not, but he's certainly
not very polite."

"He didn't say anything to you, did he?" asked her father in surprise,
laying down the paper he had raised again during the passage between the
sisters.

Lydia hastily proffered an explanation. "He couldn't help speaking; he
almost ran into me, you know. I was standing under the maple tree in the
corner as he came around from Garfield Avenue. He just took off his cap
and said good morning, and what a fine day it was, and a few words like
that."

"I don't see anything so impolite in that. Perhaps he wasn't European in
his manners," suggested Mrs. Mortimer dryly. She had evidently arisen in
the grasp of a mood, not uncommon with her, when an apparently causeless
irritability drove her to say things for which she afterward suffered an
honest but fruitless remorse. Dr. Melton had recently evolved for this
characteristic of hers one of the explanations which the Emerys found so
enigmatic. "Marietta," he said critically, "is in a perpetual state of
nervous irritation from eye-strain. She has naturally excellent and
normal eyesight, but she has always been trained to wear other people's
spectacles. It puts her out of focus all the time, and that makes her
snappy."

She had answered explicitly to this vague diagnosis, "Nonsense! The
thing that makes me snappy is the lack of an oriental rug in our
parlor."

"You're looking at that through Mrs. Gilbert's magnifying glasses,"
suggested the doctor.

"I'm not looking at it at all, and that's the trouble," Marietta had
assured him.

"Absence makes the heart--" the doctor had the last word.

Lydia tried this morning at breakfast to obtain the same advantage over
her sister. She flushed with a mixture of emotions and tried in a
resentful silence to think of some definable cause for her accusation
against Rankin's manners. Finally, "Well, I gave him a bunch of grapes,
and he never so much as said thank you. He just took them and marched
off."

"Perhaps he doesn't like grapes," suggested Mrs. Mortimer, grim to the
last.

After breakfast, when Mrs. Mortimer and her father disappeared, Lydia
found herself with a