Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net [Illustration: Paul stood by her, looking down into her eyes, bending over her, smiling, pressing, confident, masterful. (Page 96)] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE SQUIRREL-CAGE By DOROTHY CANFIELD With Illustrations By JOHN ALONZO WILLIAMS New York HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1912 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright, 1911, 1912, By THE RIDGWAY COMPANY Copyright, 1912, By HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY Published March, 1912 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CONTENTS BOOK I THE FAIRY PRINCESS CHAPTER PAGE I An American Family 3 II American Beauties 12 III Picking up the Threads 22 IV The Dawn 32 V The Day Begins 42 VI Lydia's Godfather 55 VII Outside the Labyrinth 61 VIII The Shadow of the Coming Event 78 IX Father and Daughter 88 X Casus Belli 99 BOOK II IN THE LOCOMOTIVE CAB XI What is Best for Lydia 115 XII A Sop to the Wolves 122 XIII Lydia Decides in Perfect Freedom 131 XIV Mid-Season Nerves 139 XV A Half-Hour's Liberty 154 XVI Engaged to be Married 165 XVII Card-Dealing and Patent Candles 177 BOOK III A SUITABLE MARRIAGE XVIII Two Sides to the Question 193 XIX Lydia's New Motto 207 XX An Evening's Entertainment 215 XXI An Element of Solidity 226 XXII The Voices in the Wood 233 XXIII For Ariadne's Sake 244 XXIV "Through Pity and Terror Effecting a Purification of the Heart" 261 XXV A Black Mile-stone 270 XXVI A Hint from Childhood 277 XXVII Lydia Reaches Her Goal and has Her Talk with Her Husband 289 XXVIII "The American Man" 307 XXIX ".........In Tragic Life, God Wot, No Villain Need be. Passions Spin the Plot" 318 XXX Tribute to the Minotaur 328 BOOK IV BUT IT IS NOT TOO LATE FOR ARIADNE XXXI Protection from the Minotaur 337 XXXII As Ariadne Saw It 342 XXXIII What is Best for the Children? 351 XXXIV Through the Long Night 359 XXXV The Swaying Balance 365 XXXVI Another Day Begins 369 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ILLUSTRATIONS Paul stood by her, looking down into her eyes, bending over her, smiling, pressing, confident, masterful (Page 96) Frontispiece PAGE "You say beautiful things!" he replied quietly. "My rough quarters are glorified for me" 69 "No, no; I can't--see him--I can't stand any more--" 137 "I see everything now," she went on. "He could not stop." 272 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE SQUIRREL-CAGE BOOK I THE FAIRY PRINCESS CHAPTER I AN AMERICAN FAMILY The house of the Emery family was a singularly good example of the capacity of wood and plaster and brick to acquire personality. It was the physical symbol of its owners' position in life; it was the history of their career, written down for all to see, and as such they felt in it the most justifiable pride. When Mr. and Mrs. Emery, directly after their wedding in a small Central New York village, had gone West to Ohio they had spent their tiny capital in building a small story-and-a-half cottage, ornamented with the jig-saw work and fancy turning popular in 1872, and this had been the nucleus of their present rambling, picturesque, many-roomed home. Every step in the long series of changes which had led from its first state to its last had a profound and gratifying significance for the Emerys, and its final condition, prosperous, modern, sophisticated, with the right kind of woodwork in every room that showed, with the latest, most unobtrusively artistic effects in decoration, represented their culminating well-earned position in the inner circle of the best society of Endbury. Moreover, they felt that just as the house had been attained with effort, self-denial and careful calculations, yet still without incurring debt, so their social position had been secured by unremitting diligence and care, but with no loss of self-respect or even of dignity. They were honestly proud both of their house and of their list of acquaintances and saw no reason to regard them as less worthy achievements of an industrious life than their four creditable grown-up children or Judge Emery's honorable reputation at the bar. In their youth they had conceived of certain things as worth attaining. They had worked hard for these things and their unabashed pleasure in possessing them had the vivid and substantial quality which comes from a keen memory of battles with a world none too ready to grant human desires. The two older children, George and Marietta, could remember those early struggling days with almost as fresh an emotion as that of their parents. Indeed, Marietta, now a competent, sharp-eyed matron of thirty-two, could not see the most innocuous colored lithograph without an uncontrollable wave of bitterness, so present to her mind was the period when they painfully groped their way out of chromos. The date of that epoch coincided with the date of their first acquaintance with the Hollisters. The Hollisters were Endbury's First Family; literally so, for they had come up from their farm in Kentucky to settle in Endbury when it was but a frontier post. It was a part of their superiority over other families that their traditions took cognizance of the time when great stumps from the primeval forest stood in what was now Endbury's public square, the hub of interurban trolley traffic, whence the big, noisy cars started for their infinitely radiating journeys over the flat, fertile country about the little city. The particular Mrs. Hollister who, at the time the Emerys began to pierce the upper crust, was the leader of Endbury society, had discarded chromos as much as five years before. Mrs. Emery and Marietta, newly admitted to the honor of her acquaintance, wondered to themselves at the cold monotony of her black and white engravings. The artlessness of this wonder struck shame to their hearts when they chanced to learn that the lady had repaid it with a worldly-wise amusement at their own highly-colored waterfalls and snow-capped mountain-peaks. Marietta could recall as piercingly as if it were yesterday, in how crestfallen a chagrin she and her mother had gazed at their parlor after this incident, their disillusioned eyes open for the first time to the futility of its claim to sophistication. As for the incident that had led to the permanent retiring from their table of the monumental salt-and-pepper "caster" which had been one of their most prized wedding presents, the Emerys refused to allow themselves to remember it, so intolerably did it spell humiliation. Even the oldest son, prosperous, well-established manufacturer that he was, could not recall without a shudder his first dinner-party. A branch of the Hollisters had moved next door to the Emerys and, to Mrs. Emery's great satisfaction, an easy neighborly acquaintance had sprung up between the two families. Secure in this familiarity, and not distinguishing the immense difference between a chance invitation to drop in to dinner and a formal invitation to dine, the young business-man had almost forgotten the date for which he had been bidden. Remembering it with a start, he had gone straight from his office to the house of his hosts, supposing that he would be able, as he had done many times before, to wash his face and hands in the bath-room and brush his hair in the room of the son of the house. The sight of a black man in evening dress, who opened the door to him instead of the usual maid, sent a vague apprehension through his preoccupied mind, but it was not until he found himself in the room set apart for the masculine guests and saw everyone arrayed in "swallow-tails," as he thought of them, that he realized what he had done. The emotion of the moment was one that made a mark on his life. He had an instant's wild notion of making some excuse to go home and dress, for his plight was by no means due to necessity. He had a correct outfit of evening clothes, bought at the urgent command of his mother, which he had worn several times at public dinners given by the city Board of Trade and once at a dancing party at the home of the head of his firm. However, the hard sense which made him successful in his business kept him from a final absurdity now. He had been seen, and he decided grimly that he would be, on the whole, a shade more laughable if he appeared later in a changed costume. He was twenty-one years old at that time; he considered himself a man grown. He had been in business for five years and his foot was already set firmly on the ladder of commercial success on which he was to mount high, but not for nothing had he felt about him all his life the inextinguishable desire of his family to outgrow rusticity. He chided himself for unmanly pettiness, but the fact remained that throughout the interminable evening the sight of his gray striped trousers or colored cuffs affected him to a chagrin that was like a wave of physical nausea. Four years later he had married a handsome young lady from among the Hollister connections, and, moving away to Cleveland, where no memory of his antecedents could handicap him, had begun a new social career as eminently successful as his rapid commercial expansion. He forced himself sometimes to think of that long-past evening as one presses on a scar to learn how much soreness is left in an old wound, and he smiled at the little tragedy of egotism it had been to him. But it was a wry smile. A brighter recollection to all the Emerys was the justly complacent and satisfied remembrance of the house grounds during the first really successful social event they had achieved. It was a lawn-fête, given for the benefit of St. Luke's church, which Mrs. Emery and Marietta had recently joined. Socially, it was the first fruits of their conversion from Congregationalism. The weather was fine, the roses were out, the very best people were there, the bazaar was profitable, and the dowager of the Hollister matrons had spoken warm words of admiration of the competent way in which the occasion had been managed to Mrs. Emery, smiling and flushed in an indomitably self-respecting pleasure. The older Emerys still sometimes spoke of that afternoon and evening as parents remember the hour when their baby first walked alone, with something of the same mixture of pride in the later achievements of the child and of tenderness for its early weakness. The youngest of the Emerys, many years the junior of her brothers and sister, knew nothing at all of the anxious bitter-sweet of these early endeavors for sophistication. By the time she came to conscious, individual life the summit had been virtually reached. It is not to be denied that Lydia had witnessed several abrupt changes in the family ideal of household decoration or of entertaining, but since they were exactly contemporaneous with similar changes on the part of the Hollisters and other people in their circle, these revolutions of taste brought with them no sense of humiliation. Such, for instance, was the substitution for carpets of hardwood floors and rugs as oriental as the purse would allow. Lydia could remember gorgeously flowered carpets on every Emery floor, but since they also covered all the prosperous floors in town at the same time, it was not more painful to have found them attractive than to have worn immensely large sleeves or preposterously blousing shirt waists, to have ridden bicycles, or read E. P. Roe, or anything else that everybody used to do and did no more. She could remember, also, when charades and book-parties were considered amusing pastimes for grown-ups, but in passing beyond these primitive tastes the Emerys had been well abreast of their contemporaries. The last charade party had not been held in _their_ parlors, they congratulated themselves. A philosophic observer who had known the history of Mrs. Emery's life might have found something pathetic in her pleasure at Lydia's light-hearted jesting at the funny old things people used to think pretty and the absurd pursuits they used to think entertaining. It was to her a symbol that her daughter had escaped what had caused her so much suffering, the uneasy, self-distrusting dread lest she might still be finding pretty things that up-to-date people thought grotesque; lest suddenly what she had toiled so painfully to obtain should somehow turn out to be not the "right thing" after all. Marietta did not recall more vividly than did her mother the trying period that had elapsed between their new enlightenment on the subject of chromos and the day when an unexpected large fee from a client of Mr. Emery (not yet Judge) enabled them to hang their Protestant walls with engravings of pagan gods and Roman Catholic saints. For their problem had never been the simple one of merely discovering the right thing. There had always been added to it the complication of securing the right thing out of an income by no means limitless. The head of the household had enjoyed the success that might have been predicted from his whole-souled absorption in his profession, but Judge Emery came of old-fashioned rural stock with inelastic ideas of honesty, and though he was more than willing to toil early and late to supply funds for his family and satisfy whatever form of ambition his women-folk might decree to be the best one, he was not willing to take advantage of the perquisites of his position, and never, as the phrase in the town ran, "made on the side." Of his temptations and of his stout resistance to them, his wife and children knew no more, naturally, than of any of the other details of his professional life, which, according to the custom of their circle, were as remote and hidden from them as if he had departed each morning after his hearty early breakfast into another planet; but his wife was proud of the integrity which she divined in her husband and, as she often declared roundly to Marietta, would not have exchanged his good name for a much larger income. Indeed, the acridity which for Marietta lingered about the recollection of their efforts to make themselves over did not exist in the more amply satisfied mind of her mother. The difference showed itself visibly in the contrast between the daughter's face, stamped with a certain tired, unflagging intensity of endeavor, and the freshness of the older woman. At thirty-two, Marietta looked, perhaps, no older than her age, but obviously more worn by the strain of life than her mother at fifty-six. Sometimes, as she noted in her mirror the sharp lines of a fatigue that was almost bitterness, she experienced a certain unnerving uncertainty, a total lack of zest for what she so eagerly struggled to attain, and she envied her mother's single-minded satisfaction in getting what she wanted. Mrs. Emery had enjoyed the warfare of her life heartily; the victories for their own sake, the defeats because they had spurred her on to fresh and finally successful efforts, and the remembrance of both was sweet to her. She loved her husband for himself and for what he had been able to give her, and she loved her children ardently, although she had been sorely vexed by her second son's unfortunate marriage. He had always been a discordant note in the family concert, the veiled, unconscious, uneasy skepticism of Marietta bursting out openly in Henry as a careless, laughing cynicism, excessively disconcerting to his mother. She sometimes thought he had married the grocer's daughter out of "contrariness." The irritation which surrounded that event, and the play of cross-purposes and discord which had filled the period until the misguided young people had voluntarily exiled themselves to the Far West, remained more of a sore spot in Mrs. Emery's mind than any blow given or taken in her lifelong campaign for distinction. She admitted frankly to herself that it was a relief that Harry was no longer near her, although her mother's heart ached for the Harry he had seemed to her before his rebellion. She fancied that she would enjoy him as of old if the litter of inconvenient persons and facts lying between them could but be cleared away; with a voluntary blindness not uncommon in parents, refusing to recognize that these superficial differences were only the outward expression of a fundamental alienation within. At all events, it was futile to speculate about the matter, since the width of the continent and her son's intense distaste for letter-writing separated them. She had come, therefore, to turn all her attention and proud affection on her youngest child. It seemed to her sometimes that Lydia had been granted her by a merciful Providence in order that she might make that "fresh start all over again" which is the never-realized ideal of erring humanity. Marietta had been a young lady fourteen years before, and fourteen years meant much--meant everything to people who progressed as fast as the Emerys. Uncertain of themselves, they had not ventured to launch Marietta boldly upon the waves of a society the chart of which was so new to them. She had no coming-out party. She simply put on long skirts, coiled her black hair on top of her head, and began going to evening parties with a few young men who were amused by the tart briskness of her tongue and attracted by the comeliness of her healthful youth. She had married the first man who proposed to her--a young insurance agent. Since then they had lived in a very comfortable, middling state of harmony, apparently on about the same social scale as Marietta's parents. That this feat was accomplished on a much smaller income was due to Marietta's unrivaled instinct and trained capacity for keeping up appearances. All this history had been creditable, but nothing more; and Mrs. Emery often looked at her elder daughter with compunction for her own earlier ignorance and helplessness. She could have done so much more for Marietta if she had only known how. Mrs. Mortimer was, however, a rather prickly personality with whom to attempt to sympathize, and in general her mother felt the usual -in-law conclusion about her daughter's life: that Marietta could undoubtedly have done better than to marry her industrious, negligible husband, but that, on the whole, she might have done worse; and it was much to be hoped that her little boy would resemble the Emerys and not the Mortimers. No such philosophical calm restrained her emotions about Lydia. She was in positive beauty and charm all that poor Marietta had not been, and she was to have in the way of backing and management all that poor Marietta had lacked. It seemed to Mrs. Emery that her whole life had been devoted to learning what to do and what not to do for Lydia. As the time of action drew nearer she nerved herself for the campaign with a finely confident feeling that she knew every inch of the ground. Her expectancy grew more and more tense as her eagerness rose. During the long year that Lydia was in Europe, receiving a final gloss, even higher than that imparted by the expensive and exclusive girls' school where she had spent the years between fourteen and eighteen, Mrs. Emery laid her plans and arranged her life with a fervent devotion to one end--the success of Lydia's first season in society. Every room in the house seemed to her vision to stand in a bright vacancy awaiting the arrival of the débutante. 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 to manage Paul's sister," she commented. "They wouldn't _have_ to," her mother pointed out, "she's so levelheaded and sane. But Lydia's different. It's part of her loveliness, of course, only you do have to manage her. And she'll be in a very unsettled state for the first week or two after she gets home after such a long absence. The impressions she gets then--well, I wish he were here!" Mrs. Mortimer waved her hand toward the roses. "Of course, of course," assented her mother, subsiding peaceably down the scale from anxiety to confidence with the phrase. She looked at the monstrous flowers with the gaze of acquired admiration so usual in her eyes. "They don't look much like roses, do they?" she remarked irrelevantly. Mrs. Mortimer turned in the doorway, her face expressing an extreme surprise. "Good gracious, no," she cried. "Why, of course not. They cost a dollar and a half apiece." She did not stop to hear her mother's vaguely assenting reply. Mrs. Emery heard her firm, rapid tread go down the hall to the front door and then suddenly stop. Something indefinable about the pause that followed made the mother's heart beat thickly. "What is it, Marietta?" she called, but her voice was lost in Mrs. Mortimer's exclamation of surprise, "Why it can't be--why, _Lydia_!" As from a great distance, the mother heard a confused rush in the hall, and then, piercing through the dreamlike unreality of the moment, came the sweet, high note of a girl's voice, laughing, but with the liquid uncertainty of tears quivering through the mirth. "Oh, Marietta! Where's Mother? Aren't you all slow-pokes--not a soul to meet us at the train--where's Mother? Where's Mother? Where's--" The room swam around Mrs. Emery as she stood up looking toward the door, and the girl who came running in, her dark eyes shining with happy tears, was not more real than the many visions of her that had haunted her mother's imagination during the lonely year of separation. At the clasp of the young arms about her face took light as from an inner source, and breath came back to her in a sudden gasp. She tried to speak, but the only word that came was "Lydia! Lydia! Lydia!" The girl laughed, a half-sob breaking her voice as she answered whimsically, "Well, who did you expect to see?" Mrs. Mortimer performed her usual function of relieving emotional tension by putting a strong hand on Lydia's shoulder and spinning her about. "Come! I want to see if it _is_ you--and how you look." For a moment the ardent young creature stood still in a glowing quiet. She drank in the dazzled gaze of admiration of the two women with an innocent delight. The tears were still in Mrs. Emery's eyes, but she did not raise a hand to dry them, smitten motionless by the extremity of her proud satisfaction. Never again did Lydia look to her as she did at that moment, like something from another sphere, like some bright, unimaginably happy being, freed from the bonds that had always weighed so heavily on all the world about her mother. Before she could draw breath, Lydia moved and was changed. Her mother saw suddenly, with that emotion which only mothers know, reminiscences of little-girlhood, of babyhood, even of long-dead cousins and aunts, in the lovely face blooming under the wide hat. She felt the sweet momentary confusion of individuality, the satisfied sense of complete ownership which accompanies a strong belief in family ties. Lydia was not only altogether entrancing, but she was of the same stuff with those who loved her so dearly. It gave a deeper note to her mother's passion of affectionate pride. The girl turned with a pretty, defiant tilt of her head. "Well, and how _do_ I look?" she asked; and before she could be answered she flew at Mrs. Mortimer with a gentle roughness, clasping her arms around her waist until the matron gasped. "_You_ look too good to be true--both of you--if you are such lazybones that you wouldn't go to the station to meet the prodigal daughter!" "Well, if you will come on an earlier train than you telegraphed--" began Mrs. Mortimer, "Everybody's getting ready to meet you with a brass band. What did you do with Father?" The girl moved away, putting her hands up to her hat uncertainly as though about to take out the hat-pins. There was between the three a moment of that constraint which accompanies the transition from emotional intensity down to an everyday level. In Lydia's voice there was even a little flatness as she answered, "Oh, he put me in the hack and went off to see about business. I heard him 'phoning something to somebody about a suit. We got through the customs sooner than we thought we could, you see, and caught an earlier train." Mrs. Emery turned her adoring gaze from Lydia's slim beauty and looked inquiringly at her elder daughter. Mrs. Mortimer understood, and nodded. "What are you two making faces about?" Lydia turned in time to catch the interchange of glances. Mrs. Emery hesitated. Marietta spoke with a crisp straightforwardness which served as well in this case as nonchalance for keeping her remark without undue significance. "We were just wondering if now wasn't a good time to show you what Paul Hollister did for your welcome home. He couldn't be here himself, so he sent those." She nodded toward the bouquet. As Lydia turned toward the flowers her two elders fixed her with the unscrupulously scrutinizing gaze of blood-relations; but their microscopic survey showed them nothing in the girl's face, already flushed and excited by her home-coming, beyond a sudden amused surprise at the grotesque size of the tribute. "Why, for mercy's sake! Did you ever see such monsters! They are as big as my head! Look!" She whirled her hat from the pretty disorder of her brown hair and poised it on the topmost of the great flowers, stepping back to see the effect and laughing, "They don't look any more like roses, do they?" she added, turning to her mother. Mrs. Emery's answer rose so spontaneously to her lips that she was not aware that she was echoing Marietta. "Good gracious, no; of course not. They cost a dollar and a half apiece." Lydia neither assented to nor dissented from this apothegm. It started another train of thought in her mind. "As much as all that! Why, Paul oughtn't to be so extravagant! He can't afford it, and I should have liked something else just as--" Her sister broke in with an ample gesture of negation. "You don't know Paul. If he goes on the way he's started--he's district sales manager for southern Ohio already." Lydia paid to this information the passing tribute of a moment's uncomprehending surprise. "Think of that! The last time Paul told me about himself he was working day and night in Schenectady, learning the business, and getting--oh, I don't know--fifty cents an hour, or some such starvation wages." Mrs. Mortimer's bitterly acquired sense of values revolted at this. "What are you talking about, Lydia? Fifty cents an hour starvation wages!" "Well, perhaps it was five cents an hour. I don't remember. And he worked with his hands and was always in danger of getting shot through with a million volts of electricity or mashed with a breaking fly-wheel or something. He said electricians were the soldiers of modern civilization. I told that to a German woman we met on the boat when she said Americans have no courage because they don't fight duels. The idea!" She began pulling off her gloves, with a quick energetic gesture. Mrs. Mortimer went on, "Well, he certainly has a brilliant future before him. Everybody says that--" She stopped, struck by her rather heavy emphasis on the theme and by a curious look from Lydia. The girl did not blush, she did not seem embarrassed, but for a moment the childlike clarity of her look was clouded by an expression of consciousness. Mrs. Emery made a rush upon her, drawing her away toward the door with a displeased look at Marietta. "Never mind about Paul's prospects," she said. "With Lydia just this minute home, to begin gossiping about the neighbors! Come up to your room, darling, and see the little outdoor sitting-room we've had fixed over the porch." Mrs. Mortimer was not given to bearing chagrin, even a passing one, with undue self-restraint. She threw into the intonation of her next sentence her resentment at the rebuke from her mother. "I still live, you know, even if Lydia has come home!" As Mrs. Emery turned with a look of apology, she added, "Oh, I only wanted to make you turn around so that I could tell you that I am going to bring my two men-folks over here to-night, to the gathering of the clans, and that I must go home until then. Dr. Melton and Aunt Julia are coming, aren't they?" "Oh, yes!" cried Lydia. "It doesn't seem to me I can wait to see Godfather. I sort of half hoped he might be here now." "Well, _Lydia_!" her mother reproached her jealously. "Oh, you might as well give in, Mother, Lydia likes the little old doctor better than any of the rest of us." "He talks to me," said Lydia defensively. "_We_ never say a word," commented Mrs. Mortimer. Lydia broke away from her mother's close clasp and ran back to her sister. She was always running, as though to keep up with the rapidity of her swift impulses. She held her subtly-curved cheek up to the other's strongly-marked face. "You just kiss me, Etta dear," she pleaded softly, "and stop teasing." Mrs. Mortimer looked long into the clear dark eyes with an unmoved countenance. Then her face melted suddenly till she looked like her mother. She put her arms about the girl with a fervent gesture of tenderness. "Dear little Lydia," she murmured, with a quaver in her voice. CHAPTER III PICKING UP THE THREADS After she was alone she looked again at the miniature of Lydia. The youthful radiance of the face had singularly the effect of a perfect flower. Mrs. Mortimer glanced at the hat still drooping its wide brim over the rose where Lydia had forgotten it, and stood still in a reverie that had, from her aspect, something of sadness in it. After a moment she sighed out, "Poor little Lydia!" "What's the matter with Lydia?" asked someone behind her. She turned and faced a dark, elderly personage, the robust dignity of whose bearing was now tempered with shamefacedness. Mrs. Mortimer's face sharpened in affectionate malice. "What are you doing here at this hour of the morning?" she asked with a humorously exaggerated air of amazement. "No self-respecting man is ever seen in his house during business hours!" She went on, "Oh, I know well enough. You let Mother have her first to make up for her being sick and not able to go to meet her ship; but you can't stay away." The Judge waved her raillery away with a smile. The physical resemblance between father and daughter was remarkable. "I asked you what was the matter with Lydia," he repeated. Mrs. Mortimer's face clouded. "Oh, it's a hateful, horrid sort of world we're all so eager to push her into. It's like a can full of angleworms, everlastingly squirming and wriggling to get to the top. I was just thinking that it would be better for her, maybe, if she could always stay a little girl and travel 'round to see things." "Why, Etta! I tell you _I'm_ glad to have Lydia get through with her traveling 'round. Maybe I can see something of her if I hurry up and do it now before your mother gets things going. I won't after that, of course. I never have." To this his daughter had one of her abrupt, disconcerting responses. "You'd better hurry and do it before you get so deep in some important trial that you wouldn't know Lydia from a plaster image. There are more reasons than just Mother and card parties why you don't see much of her, I guess." Judge Emery forbore to argue the point. "Where are they now?" he asked. "Oh, upstairs, out of my way. Mother's usual state of mind about Lydia is more so than ever, I warn you. She thought I wasn't refined enough company." "Now, Etta, you know your mother never thought any such thing." "Well, I know she was inconsistent, whatever she thought. While we were here alone she was speculating about Paul Hollister like anything. And yet, because I just happened to mention to Lydia that he is getting on in the world, I got put down as if I'd tried to make her marry him for his prospects." There was an edge in her voice which her father deprecated, rubbing his shaven chin mildly. He deplored the appearance of a flaw in the smooth surface of harmony he loved to see in his family. "Well, you know, Marietta, we aim to have everything about right for Lydia. She's all we've got left now the rest of you are settled." The deepening of the careworn lines in the woman's face seemed a justification for the undisguised bitterness of her answer. "I don't see why nobody must breathe a word to her about what everybody knows is so. What's the use of pretending that we'd be satisfied or she'd be comfortable a minute if Paul didn't promise to be a money-maker--or at least to have a good income?" She turned away and walked rapidly down the hall, followed by her father, half apologetic, half reproachful. "Why, Daughter, you don't grudge your sister! We couldn't do so much for you; but we're better off since you were a young lady and we want Lydia to have the benefit." Mrs. Mortimer paused on the veranda and stood looking in a troubled silence at the broad, well-kept lawn, stretching down to the asphalt street, shaded by vigorous young maples. Her father waited for her to speak, too good a lawyer to spoil by superfluous words the effect of a well-calculated appeal. Finally she turned to him contritely. "I'm hateful, Dad, and I'm sorry. Of course I don't grudge dear little Lydia anything. Only I have a pretty hard time of it scratching along, and when I'm awfully tired of contriving and calculating how to manage somehow and anyhow, it's hard to come up to the standard of saying everything's lovely that you and Mother want for Lydia." "Anything the trouble specially?" asked her father guardedly. "Oh, no; same old thing. Keeping up a two-maid and a man establishment on a one-maid income, and mostly not being able to hire the one maid. There aren't _any_ girls to be had lately. It means I have to be the other maid and the man all of the time, and all three, part of the time." She was starting down the step, but paused as though she could not resist the relief that came from expression. "And the cost of living--the necessities are bad enough, but the other things--the things you have to have not to be out of everything! I lie awake nights. I think of it in church. I can't think of anything else but the way the expenses mount up. Everybody's getting so reckless and extravagant and I _won't_ go into debt! I'll come to it, though. Everybody else does! We're the only people that haven't oriental rugs now. Why, the Gilberts--and everybody knows how much they still owe Dr. Melton for Ellen's appendicitis, and their grocer told Ralph they owe him several hundred dollars--well, they have just got an oriental rug that they paid a hundred and sixty dollars for. Mrs. Gilbert said they 'just _had_ to have it, and you can always have what you have to have.' It makes me sick! Our parlor looks so common! And the last dinner party we gave cost--" She detected a wavering in her father's attention, as though he were listening for sounds inside the house, and broke off abruptly with a hurt and impatient "Oh, well, no matter!" and ran down the steps. Judge Emery called after with a relieved belittling of her complaints, "Oh, if that's all you mean. Why, that's half the fun. I remember when you were a baby your mother did the washings so that we could have a nurse to take you out with the other children and their nurses." Mrs. Mortimer was palpably out of earshot before he finished his exhortation, so he wasted no more breath but turned back eagerly in response to a call from Lydia, who came skimming down the hall. "Oh, Daddy dearest, it's a jewel of a little sitting-room, the one you fixed up for me--and Mother says we can serve punch there the night of my coming-out party." Mrs. Emery was at her heels. Her husband laughed at his wife's expression, and drew her toward him. "Here, Mother, stop staring at Lydia long enough to welcome me home, too." He bent over her and rubbed his cheek against hers. "Come, tell me the news. Are you feeling better?" He gave her a little playful push toward the door of the parlor. "Here, let's go in and visit for a while. I'm an old fool! I can't do any work this morning. I kept Lydia from telling me a thing all the way from New York, so that we could hear it together." Lydia protested. "Tell you! After those monstrous great letters I've written! There's nothing you don't know. There's nothing much to tell, anyhow. I've been museumed and picture-galleried, and churched, and cultured generally, till I'm full--up to there!" She drew her hand across her slim white throat and added cheerfully, "But I forgot the most of that the last three months in Paris. Nearly every girl in the party was going home to come out in society, and of course we just concentrated on clothes. You don't mind, do you?" As she hesitated, with raised eyebrows of doubt, her mother, heedless of what she was saying, was suddenly overcome by her appealing look and drew her close with a rush of little incoherent tender cries choked with tears. It was as though she were seeing her for the first time. Judge Emery twice tried to speak before his husky voice was under control. He patted his wife on the shoulder. "There, there, Mother," he said vaguely. To Lydia he went on, "You've been gone quite a while, you know, and--well, till you have a baby-girl of your own I guess you won't have much notion of how we feel." Lydia's dark eyes filled, responsive to the emotion about her. "I'm just about distracted," she cried. "I love everybody and everything so, I can't stand it! I want to kiss you both and I can't make up my mind which to kiss first--and it's that way about everything! It's all so good I don't know what to begin on." She brought their faces together and achieved a simultaneous kiss with a shaky laugh. "Now, look here! If we stand here another minute we'll all cry. Come and show me the house. I want to see every single thing. All the old things, and all the new ones Mother's been writing about." She seized their hands and pulled them into the parlor. "I've been in this room already, but I didn't see it. I don't believe I even touched the floor when I walked, I was so excited. Oh, it's lovely--it's lovely!" She darted about the room like a humming-bird, recognizing what was familiar with fond little exclamations. "Oh, that darling little wicker chair!--the picture of the dog!--oh! oh! here's my china lamb!" and crying out in admiration over new acquisitions. "Oh, Mother, what a perfectly lovely couch--sofa--what do you call it? Why, it is so beautifully _different_! Wherever did you get that?" Mrs. Emery turned to her husband. "There, Nathaniel, what did I tell you?" she triumphed. "That's one of your mother's latest extravagances," explained Judge Emery. "There's a crazy fad in Endbury for special handmade furniture. Maybe it's all right, but I can't see it's so much better than what you buy in the department stores. Grand Rapids is good enough for me." "He doesn't like the man who made it," said Mrs. Emery accusingly. "What's the matter with him?" asked Lydia, rubbing her hand luxuriously over the satin-smooth, lusterless wood of the sofa's high back. Judge Emery replied, with his laugh of easy, indifferent tolerance for everything outside the profession of the law, "Oh, I never said I didn't like him; I only said he struck me as a crack-brained, self-willed, conceited--" Lydia laughed. She thought her father's dry, ironic turns very witty. "I never saw anything conceited about him," protested Mrs. Emery, admitting the rest of the indictment. Judge Emery sat down on the sofa in question and pulled his tie into shape. "Well, folks are always conceited who find the ordinary ways of doing things not good enough for them. Lydia, what do you think of this tie? Nobody pays a proper attention to my ties but you." "I've brought you some beauties from London," said Lydia. Then reverting with a momentary curiosity to the subject they had left, "Whatever does this man do that's so queer?" "Oh, he's just one of the back-to-all-fours faddists," said her father. "Back-to-all-fours?" Lydia was dim as to his meaning, but willing to be amused. "That's just your father's way," exclaimed Mrs. Emery, who had not her daughter's fondness for the Judge's tricks of speech. "He lives as no Dago ditch-digger with a particle of get-up-and-get in
{'title': 'The Squirrel-Cage by Dorothy Canfield Fisher', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}