ll, so dependent on its
framing of situation, accent, expression and gesture as scarcely to be
recordable, gave her a sudden glimpse of quite another side to the
matter. She was shocked into realizing that just as their way of life
hid from Paul what was going on in her mind, so he also, in all
probability, was rapidly changing without her knowledge.

Paul finished his figuring, pushed the papers to one side with a sigh of
fatigue, and turned his eyes thoughtfully on his wife. "That's very good
news of yours, Lydia dear, about the expected son and heir. But it's
rather a pity it didn't come last winter, isn't it?"

"How so?" she asked.

"Why, you had to be out of things on account of being in mourning,
anyhow. If this had happened the year your father died, you could have
killed two birds with one stone, don't you see?"

Lydia's perception of a thousand reasonable explanations and excuses for
this speech was so quick that it was upon her almost before she was
aware of her resentment. She hurried to shut the door on a blighting new
vision of her husband, by telling herself loudly that it was to be
expected Paul should feel so; but, rapid as her loyal, wifely movement
had been, she had felt a gust of hot revulsion against something in her
husband which her affection for him forbade her to name.

She could not put out of her mind, his look, his accent, his air of
taking for granted that the speech was a natural one. The knowledge that
Marietta would be too bewildered by her dwelling on the incident even to
laugh at her, did not avail to free her of the heavy doubts that filled
her. Was she mistaken in feeling that it indicated an alarming increase
of materialism in Paul? She was really too fanciful, she told herself
many times a day, surprised to find herself going over it again. Was it
a mere chance remark--a little stone in the garden path--or was it the
first visible outcropping of a stratum of unconquerable granite which
grimly underlay all the flower beds of his good nature?

The final impression on her mind was of a new motive for coming to a
better, closer understanding with Paul about the fundamentals of their
life. It had not occurred to her before, in spite of all her struggles
"to be good," as she put it to herself with her childlike naivete, that
Paul might be needing her as much as she needed him! Spurred on by this
new reason for breaking through the impalpable wall that separated their
inner lives, she