Lydia had not happened to hear that conversation, but she heard innumerable ones like it without Dr. Melton's footnotes. On her wedding day, therefore, she conceived it an essential feature of her duty toward Paul to keep entirely to herself all of the dismaying difficulties of housekeeping and keeping up a social position in America. She knew, as a matter of course, that they would be dismaying. The talk of all her married friends was full of the tragedies of domestic life. It had occurred to her once or twice that it was an odd, almost a pathetic, convention that they tried to maintain about their social existence--a picture of their lives as running smoothly with self-adjusting machinery of long-established servants and old social traditions; when their every word tragically proclaimed the exhausting and never-ending personal effort that was required to give even the most temporary appearance of that kind. "We all know what a fearful time everybody has trying to give course dinners--why need we pretend we don't?" she had thought on several painful occasions; but this, like many of her fancies, was a fleeting one. There had been as little time since her wedding day as before it for leisurely speculation. The business of being _the_ bride of a season had been quite as exciting and absorbing as being _the_ debutante. The first of February, six months after her marriage, found her as thin and restlessly active as she had been on that date a year before. It was at that time that she had the first intimation of a great change in her life, and since the one or two obscure and futile revolts of her girlhood, nothing had moved her to more rebellious unresignation than the fact that her life left her no time to take in the significance of what was coming to her. "Oh, my dear! Isn't it too good!" said her mother, clasping her for a moment as they stood, after removing their wraps, in the dressing-room of a common acquaintance. "Aren't you the lucky, lucky thing!" "I don't know. I don't know a thing about it," Lydia returned unexpectedly, though her face had turned a deep rose, and she had smiled tremulously. "Ever since Dr. Melton told me it was probably so, I've been trying to get a moment's time to think it over, but you--" "It's something to _feel_, not to think about!" cried her mother. "You don't need time to feel." "But I'd like to think about everything!" cried Lydia, as they moved down the stairs. "I get things wrong just feeling about them. But I'm not quick to think, and I never have any time--they're always so many other things to do and to think about--the dinner, getting Paul off in time in the morning, how badly the washwoman does up the table linen--" "Oh, Lydia! Why will you be so contrary? Everybody says _laundress_ now!" "--And however Paul and I can pay back all the social debts we've incurred this winter. Everybody's invited us. It makes me wild to think of how we owe everybody."