The Squirrel-Cage Part 24

"No, no, no!" she protested with a soft energy. "I'm weak, as weak as water. You must give me a lot of your strength or I'll go under."

"G.o.d knows I'll give you anything I have."

"Then, never let things come between us--never, never, never! I'm all right as long as I'm close to you. If we just keep that, nothing else can matter."

They were silent, standing with clasped hands in the pa.s.sage-way that was to be the thoroughfare of their common life. It was a moment that was to come back many times to Lydia's memory during later innumerable, hurried daily farewells. The thought of the significance of the place came to her mind now. She said softly, "This must be a foretaste of what we're to have under this roof. How good it seems not to be in a hurry to--"

With a start Paul came to himself from his unusual forgetfulness of his surroundings. "We _ought_ to be in a hurry now, dearest. Dr. Melton keeps me stirred up all the time to take care of you, and I'm sure I'm not doing that to let you stand here in this cold evening air. Come, let me show you--the closet under the stairs, you know, and the place for the refrigerator."

Lydia yielded to his care for her with her sweet pa.s.sivity, echoed his opinion about the details, and ran beside him down the driveway, to catch the next car to Endbury, with a singular light grace for a tall woman enc.u.mbered with long skirts.

In spite of their haste, they missed the car and were obliged to wait for a quarter of an hour beside the tracks. They talked cheerfully on indifferent topics, the sense of intimate comrades.h.i.+p gilding all they said. In their hearts was fresh the memory of the scene in the new house. They looked at each other and smiled happily in the intervals of their talk.

Paul was recapitulating to Lydia the advantages of the location of their house. "We are in the vanguard of a new movement in American life," he said, "the movement away from the cities. Madeleine tells me that she and Lowder are planning a house at the other end of this street, and you can be sure they know what they are about."

Lydia did not dissent from this opinion of her future sister-in-law, but she interrupted Paul a moment later, to say fondly, "_Oh_, but I'm glad that you aren't fifty-five and bald and with lots of money!"

Paul laughed. "Madeleine'll get on all right. She knows what she's about. It's a pair of them."

"Well, I am church-thankful that that is not what _we_ are about!"

exclaimed Lydia.

Her lover voiced the extreme content with his lot which had been his obsession that day. "We have _everything_, darling. We shall have all that Madeleine and old Lowder have and we have now all this heavenly happiness that they'll never know--or miss," he added, giving them their due.

"I didn't mean that," protested Lydia. "It seems to me that being like them and being like us are two contradictory things. You _can't_ be both and have the things that go with both. And what I'm so thankful for is that we're us and not them."

Paul laughed. "You just see if there's anything so contradictory. Trust me. You just see if you don't beat Madeleine on her own ground yet."

"I don't _want_--" began Lydia; but Paul had gone back to his first theme and was expanding it for her benefit. "Yes; we're getting the English idea. In twenty years from now you'll find the social center of every moderate-sized American city s.h.i.+fted to some such place as this."

Lydia craned her neck down the tracks impatiently. "I hope we don't miss a trolley car every day of those twenty years," she said, laughing.

"We'll have an automobile," he said. Then, reflecting that this was a somewhat exaggerated prophecy, he went on, with the honesty he meant always to show Lydia (so far as should be wise), "No; I'm afraid we sha'n't, either--not for some time. It'll take several years to finish paying altogether for the house, and we'll have to pull hard to keep up our end for a time. But we're young, so much won't be expected of us--and if we just dig in for a few years now while we're fresh, we can lie back and--"

"Well, _gracious_!" said Lydia, "who wants an automobile, anyhow! Only I wish the trolley didn't take so long. It's going to take the best part of an hour, you know; the ten or twelve minutes to get here from the house, the two or three minutes to wait, the thirty minutes on the car, the ten minutes to your office--and then all that turned inside out when you come back in the evening."

"Oh, I'll be able to do a lot of business figuring in that time. It won't be wasted."

They fell into happy picture-making of their future. Lydia wanted to have chickens and a garden, she said. She'd always wanted to be a farmer's wife--an idea that caused Paul much laughter. They revised the plans for the furnis.h.i.+ng of the hall--the china closet could stand against the west wall of the dining-room; why had they not thought of that before? The little room upstairs was to be a sewing-room "Although I hate sewing," cried Lydia, "and nowadays, when ready-mades are so cheap and good--"

"n.o.body expected you to make yourself tailored street dresses," said Paul; "but don't I all the time hear Madeleine and my aunt saying how the 'last _chic_ of a costume, the little indefinable touches that give a toilet distinction,' they have to fuss up themselves out of bits of lace and ribbon and fur and truck?" He was quoting, evidently, with an amused emphasis.

Lydia leaned to him, her eyes wide in a mock solemnity. "Paul, I have a horrible confession to make to you. I _loathe_ the 'last _chic_, the little indefinable touches that give a toilet,' and so forth! It makes me sick to spend my time on them. What difference does it make to real folks if their toilets _aren't_ 'and so forth!'"

She looked so deliciously whimsical with her down-drawn face of rebellious contrition that Paul was enchanted. "And this I learn when it's too late for me to draw back!" he cried in horror. "Woman! woman!

this tardy confession"

"Oh, there are lots of other confessions. Just wait."

"Out with them!"

"I don't know _anything_."

"That's something," admitted Paul.

"And you must teach me."

"Oh, this docile little 1840 wife! Don't you know the suffragists will get you if you talk meek like that? What do you want to know? Volts, and dynamos, and induction coils?"

"Everything," said Lydia comprehensively, "that you know. Books, politics, music--"

"Lord! what a has.h.!.+ What makes you think I know anything about such things?"

"Why, you went through Cornell. You must know about books. And you're a man, you must know about politics; and as for music, we'll learn about that together. Aunt Julia and G.o.dfather are going to give us a piano-player--though I know they can't afford it, the dears!"

"People _are_ good to us." Paul's flush of grat.i.tude for his good fortune continued.

"You like music, don't you?" asked Lydia.

"I guess so; I don't know much about it. Some crazy German post-grads at Cornell used to make up a string quartette among themselves and play some things I liked to hear--I guess it was pretty good music, too. They were sharks on it, I know. Yes; now I think of it, I used to like it fine. Maybe if I heard more--"

"Oh, the evenings together!" breathed Lydia. "Doesn't it take your breath away to think of them? We'll read together--"

Paul saw the picture. "Yes; there're lots of books I've always meant to get around to."

They were silent, musing.

Then Paul laughed aloud. Lydia started and looked at him inquiringly.

"Oh, I was just thinking how old married folks would laugh to hear us infants planning our little castles in Spain. You know how they always smile at such ideas, and say every couple starts out with them and after about six months gets down to concentrating on keeping up the furnace fire and making sure the biscuits are good."

Lydia laid her hand eagerly on his arm. "But don't let's, Paul! Please, _please_ don't let us! Just because everybody else does is no reason why we _have_ to. You're always saying folks can make things go their way if they try hard enough--you're so clever and--"

"Oh, I'm a wonder, I know! You needn't tell me how smart I am."

"But, Paul, I'm in earnest--I mean it--"

The car had arrived by this time and he swung her up to the platform.

Like other moderns they were so accustomed to spend a large part of their time in being transported from place to place that they were quite at home in the noisy public conveyance, and after a pause to pay fares, remove wraps, and nod to an acquaintance or two, they went on with their conversation as though they were alone. People looked approvingly at the comely, well-dressed young couple, so navely absorbed in each other, and speculated as to whether they were just married or just about to be.

After they were deposited at the corner nearest the Emery house, the change to the silent street, up which they walked slowly, reluctant to separate, took them back to their first mood of this loveliest of all their hours together--the sweet intimacy of their first meeting in the new house.

Lydia felt herself so wholly in sympathy with Paul that she was moved to touch upon something that had never been mentioned between them. "Paul, dear," she said, her certainty that he would understand, surrounding her with an atmosphere of spiritual harmony which she recognized was the thing in all the world which mattered most to her, "Paul dear, I never told you--there's nothing to tell, really--but when I went to the Mallory's house-party in February I rode from here to Hardville with Mr.

Rankin and had a long talk with him. You don't mind, do you?"

Her lover drew her hand within his arm and gave it an affectionate pressure. "You may not know things, Lydia, as you say, but you are the _nicest_ girl! the straightest! I knew that at the time--Miss Burgess told me. But I'm glad you've given me a chance to say how sorry I was for you last autumn when everybody was pestering you so about him. I knew how you felt--better than you did, I'll bet I did! I wasn't a bit afraid. I knew you could never care for anybody but me. Why, you're _mine_, Lydia, I'm yours, and that's all there is to it. You know it as well as I do."

"_I know it when I'm with you_," she told him with a bravely honest, unspoken reservation.