Lydia went over to the window, and stood looking out as she talked, now with an excited haste, now with a dragging note of fatigue in her voice. Her need of sympathy was so great that she did a violence to the reticence she had always kept, even with herself. She wondered aloud if it were not perhaps Daniel Rankin and his queer ideas that lay at the bottom of her trouble. She added, whirling about from the window, "For mercy's sake! don't go and think I am in love with him, or anything! I haven't so much as thought of him all winter! I see, now that Mother's pointed it out to me, how domineering he really was to me last autumn. I'm just crazy about Paul, too! When I'm with him he takes my breath away! But maybe--maybe I can't forget Mr. Rankin's _ideas_! You know he talked to me so much when I was first back--and if somebody would just argue me out of them, the way he did into them! I don't believe I'd ever have thought it queer to live the way we do, just to have more things and get ahead of other people--if he hadn't put the idea into my head. But nobody else will even _talk_ about it! They laugh when I try to." She came over closer to the matron, and said imploringly, her voice trembling, "I don't _want_ to be queer, Marietta! What makes me? I don't like to have queer ideas, different from other people's--but every once in a while it all comes over me with a rush--what's the _good_ of all we do?" Poor Lydia propounded this question as though it were the first time in the world's history that it had passed the lips of humanity. Her curious, puzzled distress rose up in a choking flood to her throat, and she stopped, looking desperately at her sister. Mrs. Mortimer nodded again, calmly, drew a long breath, and seemed about to speak. Lydia gazed at her, her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright with unshed tears--all one eager expectancy. The older woman's eyes wandered suddenly for an instant. She darted forward, clapped her hands together once, and then in rapid succession three or four times. Then rolling triumphantly something between her thumb and forefinger, she turned to Lydia. The little operation had not taken the third of a moment, but the change in the girl's face was so great that Mrs. Mortimer was moved to hasty, half-shamefaced, half-defiant apology. "I _was_ listening to you, Lydia! I _was_ listening! But it's just the time of year when they lay their eggs, and I have to fight them. Last year my best furs and Ralph's dress suit were perfectly _riddled_! You know we can't afford new."