Dr. Melton fixed her with an ironical and melancholy smile: "Now, Lydia, I did think you had it in you to realize that your health and the strength of your child are worth more than--" Lydia sprang up and confronted him with an apparent anger of face and accent that was contradicted by her trembling chin and suffused eyes. "Oh, go away!" she commanded him, shaking her head and motioning him off. "Don't talk so to me! I can't help it--what I do! Everything's a part of the whole system, and I'm in that up to my neck--you know I am. If that's right, why, everything's all right, just the way everybody thinks it is. And if it's wrong--" She caught her breath, and turned back to her desk. "If it's wrong, what good would be done by little dribbling compromises of an occasional walk." She sat down wearily, and leaned her head on her hand. "I just wish you wouldn't keep me so stirred up--when I'm trying so _hard_ to settle down!" Dr. Melton seemed to divine perfectly the significance of this incoherent outbreak. He thrust out his lips in his old grimace that denoted emotion, and observed the speaker in a frowning silence. When she finished, he nodded: "You are right, Lydia, I do no good." He twirled his hat about between his fingers, looking absently into the crown, and added, "But you must forgive me, I love you very dearly." Lydia ran over to him, conscience-stricken. He took her embrace and remorseful kiss quietly. "Don't be sorry, Lydia dear. You have just shown me, as in a flash of lightning, how much more powerful a grasp on reality you have than I." Lydia recoiled from him with an outcry of exasperation. "I! Why, I'm almost an idiot! I haven't a grasp on anything! I can't see an inch before my nose. I'm in a perfect nightmare of perplexity all the time because I can't make out what I'm driving at--or ought to--" She went on more quietly, with a reasoning air: "Only look here, Godfather, it came over me the other night, when I couldn't sleep, that perhaps what's the trouble with me is that I'm _lazy_! I believe that's it! I don't want to work the way Marietta does, and Mother does, and even Madeleine does over her dresses and parties and things. It must be I'm a shirk, and expect to have an easier time than most people. That _must_ be it. What else can it be?" The doctor made no protest against this theory, taking himself off in a silence most unusual with him. Lydia did not notice this; nor did she in the next two or three months remark that her godfather took quite literally and obeyed scrupulously her exhortation to leave her in peace. She was in the grasp of this new idea. It seemed to her that in phrasing it she had hit upon the explanation of her situation which she had been so long seeking, and it was with a resolve to scourge this weakness out of her life that she now faced the future.