So the younger girls dismissed it philosophically. But it was one of the results of a life like Lydia's that human intercourse had no lighter phases for her. She must analyze and suspect and brood. Wherever a possible slight was hidden Lydia found it. She sometimes disappeared for a few hours upstairs, and came back with reddened eyes. Her father's devotion to Martie she bore with martyred sweetness. When they laughed together at dinner she listened with downcast eyes, a faint, pained smile on her lips. "Would you like Martie to sit in Ma's place, Pa?" she asked one morning, when she was folding her napkin neatly into the orange-wood napkin-ring marked "Souvenir of Santa Cruz." Her father's surprised negative hardly interrupted the account he was giving his youngest daughter of the law-suit he had won years ago against old man Thomas. But after breakfast Martie found Lydia crying into one of the aprons that Were hanging in the side-entry. "It's nothing!" she gulped as Martie's warm arms went about her. "Only--only I can't bear to have Ma forgotten already! You heard how Pa spoke-so short and so cold!" "Oh, Lyddy, DARLING!" Martie protested, half-amused, half-sympathetic. Lydia straightened herself resentfully. "I suppose I'm foolish," she said. "I suppose the best thing for us all to do is to forget and laugh, and go on as if life and death were only a JOKE!" But these storms were rare. Lydia's was a placid life. She was deeply delighted when her cooking was praised, although she pretended to be annoyed by it. She was wearing dresses now that had been hers six years ago; sometimes a blue gingham or a gray madras was worn a whole season by Lydia without one trip to the tub. She carried a red and gray parasol that Cliff Frost had given her ten years ago; her boots were thin, unadorned kid, creased by her narrow foot; they seemed never to wear out. As the years went by she quoted her mother more and more. The rather silent Mrs. Monroe had evidently left a fund of advice behind her. Nothing was too trivial to be affected by the memory of Ma's opinion. "Nice thick cream Williams is giving us," Lydia might say at the breakfast table. "Dear Ma used to say that good cream was half the secret of good coffee!" "I remember Ma used to say that marigolds were rather bold, coarse flowers," she confided to Martie, "and isn't it true?"