dsome 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-fete, 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, o