LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER II

      AMERICAN BEAUTIES

      On the morning of Lydia’s long-expected return, as Mrs. Emery moved restlessly about the large double parlors opening out on a veranda where the vines were already golden in the September sunlight, it seemed to her that the very walls were blank in hushed eagerness and that the chairs and tables turned faces like hers, tired with patience, toward the open door. She had not realized until the long separation was almost over how unendurably she had missed her baby girl, as she still thought of the tall girl of nineteen. She could not wait the few hours that were left. Her fortitude had given way just too soon. She must have the dear child now, now, in her arms.

      She moved absently a spray of goldenrod which hid a Fra Angelico angel over the mantel and noted with dramatic self-pity that her hand was trembling. She sat down suddenly, and lost herself in a vain attempt to recall the well-beloved sound of Lydia’s fresh young voice. A knot came in her throat, and she covered her face with her large, white, carefully-manicured hands.

      Marietta came in briskly a few moments later, bringing a bouquet of asters from her own garden. She was dressed, as always, with a severe reticence in color and line which, though due to her extreme need for economy, nevertheless gave to the rather spare outlines of her tall figure a distinction, admired by Endbury under the name of stylishness. Her rapid step had carried her half-way across the wide room before she saw to her surprise that her mother, usually so self-contained, was giving way to an inexplicable emotion.

      “Good gracious, Mother!” she began in the energetic fashion which was apt to make her most neutral remarks sound combative.

      Mrs. Emery dried her eyes with a gesture of protest, adjusted her gray pompadour deftly, and cut off her daughter’s remonstrance, “Oh, you needn’t tell me I’m foolish, Marietta. I know it. I just suddenly got so impatient it didn’t seem as though I could wait another minute!”

      The younger woman accepted this explanation of the tears with a murmured sound of somewhat enigmatic intonation. Her thin dark face settled into a repose that had a little grimness in it. She began putting the flowers into a vase that stood between the reproduction of a Giotto Madonna and a Japanese devil-hunt, both results of the study of art taken up during the past winter by her mother’s favorite woman’s club. Mrs. Emery watched the process in the contemplative relief which follows an emotional outbreak, and her eyes wandered to the objects on either side the vase. The sight stirred her to speech. “Oh, Marietta, how do you suppose the house will seem to Lydia after she has seen so much? I hope she won’t be disappointed. I’ve done so much to it this last year, perhaps she won’t like it. And Oh, I was so tried because we weren’t able to get the new sideboard put up in the dining-room yesterday!”

      Mrs. Mortimer glanced without smiling at a miniature of her sister, blooming in a shrine-like arrangement on her mother’s writing-desk. She shook her dark head with a gesture like her father’s, and said with his blunt decisiveness, “Really, Mother, you must draw the line about Lydia. She’s only human. I guess if the house is good enough for you and father it is good enough for her.”

      She crossed the room toward the door with a brisk rattle of starched skirts, but as she passed her mother her hand was caught and held. “That’s just it, Marietta—that’s just what came over me! Is what’s good enough for us good enough for Lydia? Won’t anything, even the best, in Endbury be a come-down for her?”

      The slightly irritated impatience with which Mrs. Mortimer had listened to the first words of this speech gave way to a shrewd amusement. “You mean that you’ve put Lydia up on such a high plane to begin with that whichever way she goes will be a step down,” she asked.

      “Yes, yes; that’s just it,” breathed her mother, unconscious of any irony in her daughter’s accent. She fixed her eyes, which, in spite of her having long since passed the half-century mark, were still very clear and blue, anxiously upon Marietta’s opaque dark ones. She felt not only a need to be reassured in general by anyone, but a reluctant faith in the younger woman’s judgment.

      Marietta released herself with a laugh that was like a light, mocking tap on her mother’s shoulder. “Well, folks that haven’t got real worries will certainly manufacture them! To worry about Lydia’s future in Endbury! Aren’t you afraid the sun won’t rise some day? If ever there was any girl that had a smooth road in front of her—”

      The door-bell rang. “They’ve come! They’ve come!” cried Mrs. Emery wildly.

      “Lydia wouldn’t ring the bell, and her train isn’t due till ten,” Mrs. Mortimer reminded her.

      “Oh, yes. Well, then, it’s the new sideboard. I am so—”

      “It’s a boy with a big pasteboard box,” contradicted Mrs. Mortimer, looking down the hall to the open front door.

      Seeing someone there to receive it, the boy set the box inside the screen door and started down the steps.

      “Bring it here! Bring it here!” called Mrs. Mortimer, commandingly.

      “It’s for Lydia,” said Mrs. Emery, looking at the address. She spoke with an accent of dramatic intensity, and a flush rose to her fair cheeks.

      Her olive-skinned daughter looked at her and laughed. “What did you expect?”

      “But he didn’t care enough about her coming home to be in town to-day!” Mrs. Emery’s maternal vanity flared up hotly.

      Mrs. Mortimer laughed again and began taking the layers of crumpled wax-paper out of the box. “Oh, that was the trouble with you, was it? That’s nothing. He had to be away to see about a new electrical plant in Dayton. Did you ever know Paul Hollister to let anything interfere with business?” This characterization was delivered with an intonation that made it the most manifest praise.

      Her mother seconded it with unquestioning acquiescence. “No, that’s a fact; I never did.”

      Mrs. Mortimer in her turn had an accent of dramatic intensity as she cried out, “Oh! they are American Beauties! The biggest I ever saw!”

      The two women looked at the flowers, almost awestruck at their size.

      “Have you a vase?” Mrs. Mortimer asked dubiously.

      Mrs. Emery rose to the occasion. “The Japanese umbrella stand.”

      There was a pause as they reverently arranged the great sheaf of enormous flowers. Then Mrs. Emery began, “Marietta—” She hesitated.

      “Well,” Mrs. Mortimer prompted her, a little impatiently.

      “Do you really think that he—that Lydia—?”

      Marietta accepted with a somewhat pinched smile her mother’s boundary lines of reticence. “Of course. Did you ever know Paul Hollister to give up anything he wanted?”

      Her mother shook her head.

      Mrs. Mortimer rose with a “Well, then!” and the air of one who has said all there is to be said on a subject, and again crossed the room toward the door. Her mother drifted aimlessly in that direction also, as though swept along by the other’s energy.

      “Well, it’s a pity he is not here now, anyhow,” she said, adding in a spirited answer to her daughter’s expression, “Now, you needn’t look that way, Marietta. You know yourself that Lydia is very romantic and fanciful. It would be a very different matter if she were like Madeleine Hollister. She wouldn’t need any managing.”

      Mrs. Mortimer smiled at the idea. “Yes, I’d like to see somebody try

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