ingingly for Lydia the long, hot
days of the quiet summer that ensued. As for Ariadne, she did not for
months stop talking of "nice, laughy, Unkie Hawy." Her fluency of speech
was increasing out of all proportion to her age.

Whatever slow changes might be taking place in Lydia, went on silently
and obscurely during that summer; but in the fall a new moral horizon
burst upon her with the realization that she was again to become a
mother. Another life was to be entrusted to her hands, to hers and
Paul's, and with the knowledge came the certainty that she must now
begin to take some action to place her outer life more in accord with
her new inner self. It would be the worst moral cowardice longer to
evade the issue.

Thus bravely did she exhort herself, and, though shrinking with
apprehension at the very thought of entering upon a combat, attempted to
shame herself into a little courage.

When Paul heard of his wife's hopes, he was enchanted. He cried out
jubilantly: "I bet you it'll be a boy this time!" and caught her to him
in an embrace of affection so ardent that for a moment she glowed like a
bride. She clung to him, happy in the warmth of feeling that,
responsive, as always, to his touch, sprang up in her; and when in his
good-natured, half-laughing, dictatorial way he made her lie down at
once and promise to rest and be quiet, the boyish absurdity of his
solicitude was sweet to her.

He disappeared in answer to a telephone call, and she closed her eyes,
savoring the pleasure of the little scene. How she needed Paul to
reconcile her to life! How kind he really was! How good! His was the
clean, honorable affection he had promised her on their wedding day. If
she were to have any faith in the novels she read (like most American
women of the leisure class, her education after her marriage consisted
principally in reading the novels people talked about), if there was any
truth in what she read in these stories, she felt she was blest far
above most women in that there had come to her since her marriage no
revelation of a hidden, unclean side to her husband's nature.

But Lydia had never felt herself closely touched by reading; it all
seemed remote from her own life and problems. The sexual questions on
which the plots invariably turned, which formed the very core and center
of the lives of the various female characters, had, as a matter of fact,
according to her honest observation of her acquaintances, a very
subo