m, dry, safe place!"

Judge Emery broke in, impatient of this fantastic word-bandying. "Oh,
come, Melton, I can't stand here while you spin your paradoxes. I've got
to get home before young Hollister leaves or my wife won't like it."

"I'll go with you, then," cried the little doctor, clapping on his hat.
"You sha'n't escape me that way. I'm in full cry after the best figure
of speech I've hit on in months."

"Good Lord!" The lawyer looked down laughingly at his friend as the two
set off, a stork beside a sparrow. "You and your figures!"

"It came over me with a bang the other day that in Lydia we have in our
midst that society-destroying child in _The Kaiser's New Clothes_."

"Eh?" said Lydia's father blankly.

"You remember the last scene in that inimitable tale? Where the Kaiser
walks abroad with all the people shouting and hurrahing for the new
clothes, and not daring to trust their own eyes, and suddenly a little
child's voice is heard, 'But the Kaiser has nothing on!'"

"I don't know what you're talking about," said the Judge with a patient
indifference.

"Well, you will know when you hear Lydia say that some day. She
knows--she'll know! Perhaps you've done well to send her to that idiotic
finishing school."

"Don't lay it to me!" cried the Judge, laughing; "_I_ didn't send
her--or not send her. If you were married you'd know that fathers never
have anything to say about what their daughters do."

"More fools they!" rejoined the doctor pointedly. "But in this case
maybe it's all right. She's as ignorant as a Hottentot, of course, but
perhaps any real education might have spoiled her innate capacity to--"

"Oh, pshaw!" The Judge was vaguely uneasy. "You let Lydia alone. Talk
your nonsense about something else. There's nothing queer about Lydia,
thank heavens! She's just like all young ladies."

"That's a horrible thing to say about one's own daughter!" cried the
doctor, falling immediately into the lightly mournful, satirical vein
that was the alternative to his usual racing talk. "There won't be
anything queer about her long, that's fact. In real life the child is
never really allowed to complete that sentence. A hundred hands are
clapped over its mouth, and it's hustled, and shaken, and frightened,
and scolded, till it thinks there's something the matter with its
eyesight. And Lydia's a sweet, gentle child, who'll want to say whatever
pleases people she loves--that'll be another bandage over her eyes