Lydia's unmarried life had given her but few abstract ideas for the regulation of conduct, and fewer still ideals of self-discipline, but chief among the small assortment that she took away from her mother's house had been the high morality of keeping one's husband unworried by one's domestic difficulties. "Domestic difficulties" meant, apparently, anything disagreeable that happened to one. Not only her mother, but all the matrons of her acquaintance had concentrated on the extreme desirability of this wifely virtue. "It pays! It pays!" Mrs. Emery had often thus chanted the praises of this quality in her daughter's presence. "I've noticed ever so many times that men who have to worry about domestic machinery and their children don't get on so well. Their minds are distracted. Their thoughts _can't_ be, in the nature of things, all on their business." She was wont to go on, to whatever mother she was addressing, "We know, my dear Mrs. Blank, don't we, how perfectly distracting the problems are in bringing up children--to say nothing of servants. How much energy would men have for their own affairs if they had to struggle as we do, I'd like to know! Besides, if one person's got to be bothered with such things, she might as well do it all and be done with it. It's easier, besides, to have only one head. Men that interfere about things in the house are an abomination. You can't keep from quarreling with them--angels couldn't." She had once voiced this universally recognized maxim before Dr. Melton, who had cut in briskly with a warm seconding of her theory. "Yes, indeed; in the course of my practice I have often thought, as you do, that it would be easier all around if husbands didn't board with their wives at all." Mrs. Emery had stared almost as blankly as Mrs. Sandworth herself might have done. "I never said such a crazy thing," she protested. "Didn't you? Perhaps I don't catch your idea then. It seemed to be that every point of contact was sure to be an occasion for friction between husband and wife, and so, of course, the fewer they were--" "Oh, bother take you, Marius Melton!" Mrs. Emery had quite lost patience with him. "I was just saying something that's so old, and has been said so often, that it's a bromide, actually. And that is that it's a poor wife who greets her tired husband in the evening with a long string of tales about how the children have been naughty and the cook--" "Oh, yes, yes; now I see. Of course. The happiest ideal of American life, a peaceful exterior presented to the husband at all costs, and the real state of things kept from him because it might interfere with his capacity to pull off a big deal the next day." Mrs. Emery had boggled suspiciously at this version of her statement, but finding, on the whole, that it represented fairly enough her idea, had given a qualified assent in the shape of silence and a turning of the subject.