Lydia felt that her godfather was right, and that babies gave one only a short respite, when, toward spring, she observed in all the inhabitants of her world repeated signs of uneasy dissatisfaction with her "submergence in domesticity," as Mrs. Emery put it in a family council. Her father inquired mildly, one day in March, with the touchingly vague interest he took in his children's affairs, if it weren't about time she returned a few calls and accepted some invitations, and began "to live _like_ folks again." "Ariadne isn't the first baby in the world," he concluded. "She's the first one _I_ ever had," Lydia reminded him, with the humorous smile that was so like his own. "Well, you mustn't forget, as so many young mothers do, that you're a member of society and a wife, as well as a wet-nurse," he said. Marietta had never resumed an easy or genial intercourse with the Hollisters since the affair of the dinner party, but she came to call at not infrequent intervals, and Paul's sister dropped in often, to "keep an eye on Lydia," as she told her husband. She had an affection for her sister-in-law, in spite of an exasperated amusement over her liability to break out with new ideas at unexpected moments. Both these ladies were loud in their exhortations to Lydia not to let maternity be in her life the encumbering, unbeautifying, too lengthy episode it was to women with less force of character than their own. "You do get so _out_ of things," Madeleine told her with her usual breathless italicizing, "if you stay away too long. You just never can catch up! There's a behind-the-timesy _smell_ about your clothes--honest, there is--if you let them go too long." Marietta added her quota of experienced wisdom to the discussion. "If you just hang over a baby all the time, you get morbid, and queer, and different." Madeleine had laughed, and summed up the matter with a terse, "Worse than that! You get left!"