The girl herself insisted that she felt perfectly well and able to stand more than when she first began going out. She affirmed this with some impatience, her eyes very bright, her cheeks flushed, whenever her godfather protested against a new undertaking. "When you get going, you _can't_ stop," she told him, shaking off his detaining hand. Mrs. Emery told the doctor that he'd forgotten the time when he was young or he'd remember that all girls who'd been popular at all--let alone a girl like Lydia--looked thin and worn by the end of the season; but during the last week of April, when the first hot days had arrived, a small incident surprised her into thinking that perhaps the doctor had some right on his side. Not that there was in itself anything so very alarming about a nervous explosion from a girl so high-strung and susceptible as Lydia. The startling thing was that this explosion proceeded, so far as her mother could see, from nothing at all, from the idlest of chance remarks by Mrs. Sandworth, as always, whitely innocent of the smallest intention to wound. She and Mrs. Emery were much given to watching Lydia dress for the innumerable engagements that took her away from the house. They made a pretext of helping her, but in truth they were carried away by the delight in another's beauty which is more common among women than is generally imagined. They took the profoundest interest in the selection of the toilet she should wear, and regarded with a charmed surprise the particular aspect of Lydia's slim comeliness which it brought out. They could not decide whether they liked her best in clinging, picture costumes, big hats, plumes, trailing draperies, and the like, or dashing, jaunty effects. Once in the winter, after she had left them on her way to an evening skating party and they had seen her from the window join Hollister and add her skates to those glittering on his shoulder, Mrs. Sandworth promulgated one of her unexpected apothegms: "Do you know what we are, Susan Emery? We're a couple of old children playing with a doll." Mrs. Emery protested with an instant, reproving self-justification: "_You_ may be--you're not her mother; but I understand Lydia through and through."