red fast to the
facts of any case under discussion.

"_Is_ she?" queried the doctor with a sincerity of interrogation which
his sister found distracting.

"Oh, Marius!" she reproached him again; and then helplessly, "How did we
get on to Marietta, anyhow? I thought we were talking of Lydia's
engagement."

"I was," he assured her.

"And I was going to ask you really seriously, just straight out, what
you are so down on the Emerys for? What have they done that's so bad?"

"They've brought her up so that now in her time of need she hasn't a
weapon to resist them."

"Oh, Ma--" began Mrs. Sandworth despairingly.

"Well, then, I will tell you--I'll explain in words of one syllable.
Mind you, I don't undertake to settle the question--Heaven forbid! It
may be all right for Marietta Mortimer to kill herself body and soul by
inches to keep what bores her to death to have--a social position in
Endbury's two-for-a-cent society, but, for the Lord's sake, why do they
make such a howling and yelling just at the time when Lydia's got the
tragically important question to decide as to whether that's what _she_
wants? It's like expecting her to do a problem in calculus in the midst
of an earthquake."

Mrs. Sandworth had a mortal antipathy to figures of speech, acquired of
much painful experience with her brother's conversation. She sank back
in her chair and waved him off. "Calculus!" she cried, outraged;
"earthquakes! And I'm sure you're as unfair as can be! You can't say her
father's obscured any question. You _know_ he's not a dictatorial
father. His principle is not to interfere at all with his children."

"Yes; that's his principle all right. His specialties are in other
lines, and they have been for a long time. His wife has seen to that."

Mrs. Sandworth had one of her lucid divinations of the inner meaning of
a situation. "Oh, the poor Emerys! Poor Lydia! Oh, Marius, aren't you
glad we haven't any children!"

"Every child that's not getting a fair chance at what it ought to have,
should be our child," he said.

He went up to her and kissed her gently. "Good-night," he said.

"Where are you going?"

"To the Black Rock woods."

"Tell him--" she was inspired--"tell him to try to see Lydia again."

"I was going to do that. But she won't be allowed to. It's pretty late
now. She ought to have seen him a great many years ago--from the time he
was born."

"But she's ever so much younger than he," cried Mrs. Sandworth