her that Lydia was very
grateful to have little to interfere with her.

The General Office had accepted provisionally Paul's redistributing
plan, and in his anxiety to prove its value he was away from home more
even than usual. The heat was terrible, but Lydia and he both knew no
other climate, and Lydia loved the summer as the time of year when the
fierceness of Nature forced on all her world a reluctant adjournment of
their usual methods of spending their lives. She was absorbed in
Ariadne, and the slow, blazing summer days were none too long for her.

The child began to develop an individuality. She was a sensitive,
quickly-responsive little thing; exactly, so Mrs. Emery said, like Lydia
at her age, except that she seemed to have none of Lydia's native mirth,
but, rather, a little pensive air that made her singularly appealing to
all who saw her, and that pierced her mother's heart with an anguish of
protecting love.

Lydia said to her godfather one day, suddenly, "I wonder if people can
be taught how to fight?"

He had one of his flashes of intuition. "The baby, you mean?"

Lydia evaded the directness of this. "Oh, in general, aren't folks
better off if they like to fight for themselves? Don't they _have_ to?"

He considered the question in one of his frowning silences, so long that
Lydia started when he spoke again. "They don't need to fight with claws
for their food, as they used to do. Things are arranged now so that the
physically strong, who like such a life, are the ones who choose it.
They get food for the others. Why shouldn't the morally strong fight for
the weaker ones and make it possible for everyone to have a chance at
developing the best of himself without having to battle with others to
do it?"

"That's pretty vague," said Lydia.

"Why, look here," said the doctor. "You don't plow the field to plant
the wheat that makes your bread. That's a man of a coarser physical
fiber than yours, who is strengthened by the effort, and not exhausted
as you would be. Why shouldn't the world be so organized that somebody
of coarser moral texture than yours should do battle with the forces of
materialism and tragic triviality that--"

"But Ariadne's growing up! She will need all that so _soon_-- and the
world won't be organized then, you know it won't--and she's no fighter
by instinct, any more than--" She was silent. The doctor filled in her
incomplete sentence mentally, and found no answer to make.