Precise consideration by Lydia of her feelings for her betrothed—and presently her husband, as they were married in the following January—were rendered superfluous for the time being by the worship which he lavished upon her. There were so many other things to think of: first her engagement ring, which called forth ejaculations of envious admiration from her contemporaries; then her trousseau, the costumes of her bridesmaids, the details of the ceremony and the wedding breakfast, and the important question whether the honeymoon was to be spent in Europe. There was never any doubt as to this in Lydia's mind. After deliberation she had decided on a winter passage by the Mediterranean route to Nice and Cannes, followed by a summer in the Tyrol and Switzerland, with a fortnight in Paris to repair the ravages in her wardrobe made by changing fashion. It must not be understood that Maxwell demurred to this attractive programme. He merely intimated that if he remained at home and demonstrated what he called his serious side, he would probably receive a nomination for the Legislature in the autumn; that the party managers had predicted as much; and that the favorable introduction into politics thus obtained might lead to Congress or a foreign mission, as he had the means to live up to either position worthily.

Lydia listened alertly. "I should like you to go as ambassador to Paris or London some day, of course, but to serve in the Legislature now would scarcely conduce to that, Herbert. I've set my heart on going abroad—I've never been but once, you know—and it's just the time to go when we are building our two houses. Where should we live if we stayed at home? The sensible plan is to store our presents, buy some tapestries and old furniture on the other side, and come back in time to get the autumn hunting at Westfield and inaugurate our two establishments."

This settled the matter. The only real uncertainty had been whether she did not prefer a trip around the world instead. But that would take too long. She was eager to figure as the mistress of the most stately modern mansion and the most consummate country house which money and architectural genius could erect. These two houses were perhaps the most engrossing of all among the many concerns which led her to postpone precise analysis of her feelings to a period of greater leisure. That is the exact quality of her love—whether it were eighteen carat or not, to adopt a simile suggested to her by her wedding-ring. That she loved Herbert sufficiently well to marry him was the essential point; and it seemed futile to play hide-and-seek with her own consciousness over the abstract proposition whether she could have loved someone else better, especially as there were so many immediately pressing matters to consider that both her physician and Herbert had warned her she was liable, if not prudent, to fall a victim to that lurking ailment, nervous prostration.

It was certainly no slight responsibility to select the lot in town which seemed to combine most advantages as the site for a residence. The matter of the country house was much simpler, for who could doubt that the ideal location was an expanse of undulating country, higher than the rest of the neighborhood, known as Norrey's Farm? These fifty acres, with woods appurtenant, were reputed to be out of the market unless to a single purchaser. Many a pioneer had picked out Norrey's Knoll as his choice, only to be thwarted by the owner with the assertion that he must buy the whole farm or could have none. Later would-be purchasers had recoiled before the price, which had kept not merely abreast but had galloped ahead of current valuations, until it had become a by-word in the colony that Farmer Norrey would bite his own nose off if he were not careful. But the shrewd rustic was more than vindicated by the upshot. Lydia, from the moment when she first seriously thought of Herbert Maxwell as a husband, had cast sheeps' eyes at this stately property, and within a short period after the engagement was announced the title deeds passed. Rumor declared that the canny grantor had divined that the opportunity of his life was at hand and had held out successfully for still higher figures. But, as everybody cheerfully remarked, ten thousand dollars more or less was but a flea-bite to Herbert Maxwell.

Then came the selection of the architects and divers inspections of plans for the two establishments, which, to the joy of the bridegroom, were interrupted by the wedding ceremony. They sailed, and their honeymoon was somewhat of a social parade. Special quarters—the most expensive and exclusive to be had—were engaged for them in advance on steamships and in railroad trains, in hotels and wherever they appeared. Maxwell's manifest tender purpose was to gratify his bride's slightest whim, and in regard to the choice of the objects on which his ready money was to be lavished he avoided taking the initiative except when an occasional mania seized him to buy her costly gems on the sly. Otherwise he danced attendance on her taste, which was discriminating and perspicuous. Lydia yearned for distinction, not extravagance; for superlative effects, not garishness. Her eye was on the lookout in regard to all the affairs of life, from food to the manifestations of art, for the note which accurately expressed elegant and fastidious comfort and gave the rebuff to every-day results or the antics of vulgarity.

Consequently the wedding trip after the first surprises was but a change of scene. There were still too many absorptions for retrospective thought and nice balancing of soul accounts. At Nice and Cannes they found themselves in a vortex of small gayeties. While travelling, Lydia was on the alert to pick up old tapestries, porcelain, and other works of art; in Paris, shopping and the dressmakers left no time for anything but a daily lesson to put the finishing touch to her French. She had said to herself that she would draw a trial balance of her precise emotions when she was at rest on the steamer—for Lydia by instinct was a methodical person; but a batch of letters reciting complications in regard to the last details on the new houses was a fresh distraction, and the society of several engaging men on the ship another. Nevertheless the thought that she was nearing home struck her fancy favorably, and on the evening before they landed she eluded everybody else to seize her husband's arm for a promenade on deck. There was elasticity in her step as she said, "Won't it be fun to be at Westfield again, Herbert? I long for a good run with the hounds, and I'm beginning to pine for the autumn colors and smells."

"Yes, indeed. And we shall be settled at our own fireside at last," he answered with a lover's animation.

The remark recalled bothersome considerations to Lydia's mind. She felt sure from the contents of the last packet of correspondence that the architect had failed to carry out her instructions in several instances.

"Settled?" she echoed. "If we are settled a year from now we may consider ourselves very fortunate."

Lydia's immediate plans met with interruption from an unexpected source. Before the hunting season had fairly begun it was privately whispered in Westfield circles that a stork would presently visit the new establishment on Norrey's Farm. Open inquiries from tactless interrogators, why the Maxwells did not follow the hounds, were answered by the explanation that the young people had so many matters to attend to in connection with their two houses that they had decided to postpone hunting to another year. Later it was known that they would pass the winter in the country, and not furnish the town house until spring. When the baby was actually born, in February, everyone knew that it was expected; but the advent of the infant in the flesh caused a flutter among Lydia's immediate feminine acquaintances. As soon as the mother was able to receive visitors, Mrs. Walter Cole came down from town to offer her warm felicitations and incidentally to satisfy the curiosity of those who took an interest. She had arranged to lunch after the interview with the Andrew Cunninghams, who lived all the year round at Westfield, and thither at the close of the visit to her intimate friend she repaired, replete with information. It happened to be Saturday, and the master of the house had brought down Gerald Marcy by an early train for a winter's afternoon tramp across country, so that the two women had only a few minutes of unreserved conversation.

"Well, she was just as one would have expected—Lydia all over," Mrs. Cole began with the intensity of a pent-up stream which has regained its freedom. "She looked sweet, and everything in her room and in the nursery was bewitching, as though she had been preparing for the event for years and doted on it. That's just like her, of course. She bemoaned her fate at losing the hunting season, and she has decided not to nurse the baby. As an experienced mother," continued Mrs. Cole contemplatively, "I felt bound to remind her that there are two sides to that question, and that I had nursed Toto and Jim not only because Walter insisted on it, but to give the children the benefit of the doubt as to any possible effect on character from being suckled by a stranger. But she had thought it all out, and had her arguments at her fingers' ends. She declared it a case of Anglo-Saxon prejudice, and that every Frenchwoman of position sends her babies to a foster-mother. Of course it is a bother, and frightfully confining, but my husband wouldn't hear of it, though half the mamas can't satisfy their babies anyway."

Mrs. Cunningham nodded understandingly. "I daresay it's just as well. And of course she regards the rest of us as old-fashioned. But tell me about the baby."

Mrs. Cole laughed. "You ought to have heard Lydia on the subject. She talks of it in the most impersonal way, as though it belonged to someone else or were a wedding present. I never cared much for babies before I was married, but could not endure anyone who wouldn't make flattering speeches about mine. Lydia's is a dear little thing as they go, and has a fascinating wardrobe already, and I think she is rather devoted to it in her secret soul, but one of the first things she said to me—before I could get in a single compliment—was, 'She's the living image of Grandma Maxwell, Fannie. She has her mouth and nose.' And the embarrassing part was that it's true. The moment Lydia called my attention to it I saw. Her eagle maternal eye had detected what the ordinary mother would have failed to perceive. But it's Grandma Maxwell to the life. 'Why evade the truth?' remarked Lydia after one of her deliberate pauses. 'I shall name her for her, and I can discern in advance that she will never be a social success.'"

"Poor little thing!" murmured Mrs. Cunningham. Such an anathema so early in life was certainly heart-rending.

Mrs. Cole put her head on one side like an arch bird by way of reflective protest. "It sounds dreadful, of course, but remember she's Lydia. What she will really do will be to metamorphose her, body and soul, so that by the time she is eighteen there will not be one trace of Maxwell visible to the naked eye. See if I'm not right," she said with the gusto of a brilliant inspiration which seemed to her a logical defence of her friend.

The arrival of the men interrupted the dialogue, but the general topic was presently resumed from another point of view. Not many minutes had elapsed after they sat down to luncheon before Gerald Marcy hazarded the observation that, prophecies and innuendoes to the contrary notwithstanding, events in the Maxwell household appeared to have followed the course of nature. Mrs. Cole, to whom this remark was directly addressed, ignored the sly impeachment of her abilities as a seer, and, having finished her piece of buttered toast, said blandly:

"I think Lydia is very happy."

"I felt sure she would be tamed," continued Marcy with a tug at his mustache. "I look to see her become a model of the domestic virtues."

"Don't be too sure that she is tamed, Gerald," said Mrs. Cunningham. "Lydia is Lydia." Perhaps the knowledge that she had been longing in vain for years for a child of her own gave the cue to this slightly brusk comment.

"Lydia will never be exactly like the rest of us; that's her peculiarity—virtue—what shall I call it?" interposed Mrs. Cole, looking round the table with a philosophic air. "The rest of us demur at conventions, but accept them in the end. She follows what she deems the truth. I don't say that she is always right or that she doesn't do queer things," she added by way of conservative qualification of her bubbling encomium.

"And how about Maxwell?" asked Andrew Cunningham, who had seemed temporarily lost in the contemplation of his lobster salad so long as any of that lusciously prepared viand remained on his plate. "Infatuated as ever, I suppose," he added, sitting back in his chair and exposing benignly his broad expanse of neckcloth and fancy check waistcoat.

"Yes, and he ought to be, surely. But Lydia has a rival in the daughter of the house," answered Mrs. Cole, reinspired by the inquiry. "He came in just as I was leaving, and is almost daft on the subject of the baby. If Lydia's ecstasy is somewhat below the normal, he more than makes up for the deficiency. There never was such a proud parent. He just 'chortled in his joy.' He discerns in her already all the graces and virtues, and would like to do something at once—he doesn't know exactly what—to bring them to the attention of an unappreciative world. If it were a boy, he could put his name down on the waiting lists at the clubs, but as she is only a girl, he must content himself with hanging over her crib for the present."

"Only a girl!" echoed Marcy. "Born with a golden spoon in her mouth, an heiress to all the virtues and graces, and predestined doubtless, like her mother, to rest her dainty foot upon the neck of man. Nevertheless, as I have already prophesied, I am inclined to think that the yoke—now a double yoke—will not bear too severely on Maxwell, though it may not yield him the bliss which we unregenerate bachelors are wont to associate with the ideal marital relation."

"Hear—hear!" exclaimed Andrew Cunningham. "You need some further liquid refreshment after that silver-tongued sophistry, Gerald.—Mary," he said to the maid, "pass the whiskey and soda to Mr. Marcy."

Mrs. Cole put her head on one side. "I have my doubts whether the ideal marital relation is a modern social possibility—the strictly ideal such as you bachelors mean," she added, feeling, doubtless, as the wife of a man to whom she had described herself in heart-to-heart talks with other women—not many, for she eschewed the subject ordinarily as sacred—as deeply attached, that this homily on wedlock needed a qualifying tag.

But May Cunningham was not in the mood to become a party to even so tempered an imputation on connubial happiness. "Speak for yourself, Fannie," she said sturdily. "Ideals or no ideals, Andrew and I trot in double harness better than any single animal of my acquaintance."

"Listen to the old woman, God bless her!" exclaimed the master of the house, raising his tumbler and smiling at his better-half with chivalrous expansiveness.

Mrs. Cole was a little nettled at Mrs. Cunningham's obtuseness—wilful obtuseness, it seemed to her. As though the subtle social problem suggested by her was to be solved by a reference to the homely affection of this amiable but limited couple! She sighed and murmured, "Everyone knows, my dear, that you and Andrew are as happy as the day is long. But I'm afraid that you don't understand exactly what I meant."

Mrs. Cunningham compressed her lips ominously. She felt that she understood perfectly well, and that it was simply another case of Fannie Cole's nonsense. But any retort she may have been meditating was averted by the timely and genial inspiration of her husband.

"One thing is certain," he said: "we all know that our Gerald is the ideal bachelor."

This assertion called forth cordial acquiescence from both the ladies, and turned the current of the conversation into a smoother channel. The subject of the remark bowed decorously.

"In this company I am free to admit that I sometimes sigh in secret for a happy home. Yet even venerable bachelorhood has its compensations. By the way," he added, "our colony at Westfield is likely to have an addition to its stud of bachelors. I hear that Harry Spencer is coming home."

"Harry Spencer? How interesting," cried the two women in the same breath.

"The fascinator," continued Mrs. Cole with slow, sardonic articulation.

"To break some other woman's heart, I suppose," said Mrs. Cunningham.

"And yet it is safe to say that he will be received with open arms by your entire sex, including the present company," remarked Gerald with a tug at his mustache.

The sally was received with pensive silence as a deduction apparently not to be gainsaid.

"He is very agreeable," said Mrs. Cunningham flatly.

"And extremely handsome," said Mrs. Cole. "Not the type of manly beauty which would cause my mature heart to flutter, but dangerous to the youthful imagination. He used to look like a handsome pirate, and if he had whispered honeyed words to me instead of to Laura—who knows?"

"Poor Laura!"

"They had neither of them a cent; there was nothing for him to do but withdraw. And yet there is no doubt he broke her heart, though there is consumption in her family." Mrs. Cole knit her brows over this attempt on her part to formulate complete justice.

"He's a woman's man," said Andrew Cunningham. He had stepped to the mantel-piece to fill his pipe, and having uttered this fell speech, he lit it and smoked for some moments in silence with his back to the cheerful wood fire before proceeding. No one had seen fit to contradict him. The gaps between his assertions and the subsequent explanations thereof were expected and rarely interrupted. "He does everything well—rides, shoots, plays rackets, golf, cards—is infernally good-looking, as you say, has a pat speech and a flattering eye for every woman he looks at, and yet somehow he has always struck me as a poseur. I wouldn't trust him in a tight place, though he prides himself on his sporting blood. It may be prejudice on my part. Gerald likes him, I believe, because he is a keen rider and always has a good mount. He always has the best of everything going, but what does he live on anyway?"

"Wild oats, perhaps," suggested Marcy. But he hastened to atone for this levity by adding, "He had a little money from his mother, while it lasted, and just after he and Miss Wilford drifted apart, I am told that he followed a tip from Guy Perry on copper stocks and cleaned up enough to enable him to travel round the world."

"Poor Laura!" interjected Mrs. Cole. "What a pity he didn't get a tip earlier!"

"It wasn't enough to marry on," said Marcy, "and it's probably mostly gone by this time."

"That's the sort of thing I complain of," exclaimed Cunningham. "I'm no martinet in morals, Heaven knows, but I always feel a little on my guard with fellows who live by their wits and spend like princes. Confound it, you know it isn't quite respectable even in a free country." Andrew spoke with a wag of his head as though he expected to be adjudged an old fogy for this conservative utterance.

"He's an attractive fellow on the surface anyway," answered Marcy after a pause, "and will be an addition from the hunting standpoint. And—give the devil his due, Andrew—if he was looking for money only, there were several heiresses he might have married. That would have made him irreproachable at once."

Mrs. Cole drew a long breath. "Perfectly true, Mr. Marcy. I never thought of it before. Harry Spencer doesn't look at a woman twice unless he admires her, no matter how rich she is. He could have married several, of course, if he had tried."

"Dozens. That's the humiliating part of it," assented Mrs. Cunningham.

"When he is ready to settle down that's what he'll do—pick out some woman with barrels of money," said Andrew. Having once got a proposition in his head he was wont to stick to it tenaciously, like a puppy to a root.

"You misjudge him—you misjudge him!" cried Mrs. Cole eagerly. "He won't do anything of the kind. He will never marry any woman unless she has money—or he has; that I'm ready to admit. But, on the other hand, he'll never ask anyone to marry him unless he loves her for herself alone, and—and," she continued with a gasp born of the thrill which the definiteness of her insight caused her, "there are very few women in the world whom he is liable to fall in love with. That's what makes him so interesting. He is polite to us all, but the majority of women bore him at heart."

Marcy laughed. "A masterly diagnosis," he said. "And now that he has seen the world and is returning heart-free, so far as we know, there will naturally be curiosity as to how he will bear the ordeal of a fresh contact with native loveliness."

"Exactly," said the two women together, and with an engaging frankness which quite overshadowed the grunt by which the master of the house indicated his suspicious dissent from this exposition of character.