Lydia's elder brother, George, the rich one, who lived in Cleveland and manufactured rakes and hoes, wrote her one of his rare letters to the same effect. Lydia thought it likely that he had been moved to this unusual show of interest in her affairs by proddings from her mother and Marietta. If this surmise was correct, and if a similar request had been sent to Henry, the other member of the Emery family, the one who had married the grocer's daughter, the appeal had a strikingly different effect. From Oregon came an impetuous, slangily-worded exhortation to Lydia not to make a fool of herself and miss the best of life to live up to the tommyrot standard of old dry-as-dust Endbury. The Emerys heard but seldom from this erring son, and Lydia, who had been but a child when he left home, had never before received a letter from him. He wrote from a fruit farm in Oregon, the description of which, on the grandiloquent letter-head, gave an impression of ampleness and prosperity which was not contradicted by the full-blooded satisfaction in life which breathed from every line of the breezy, good-natured letter. The incident stirred Lydia's imagination. It spoke of a wider horizon--of a fresher air than that about her. She tried to remember the loud-talking, much-laughing, easy-going young man as she had seen him last. They were too far apart in years to have had much companionship, but there had been between them an unspoken affection which had never died. People always said that George and Marietta were alike and Lydia and Harry. To this Mrs. Emery always protested that Lydia wasn't in the _least_ like Henry, and she didn't know what people were talking about; but the remark gave a secret pleasure to Lydia. She, too, was very fond of laughing, and her brother's vein of light-hearted nonsense had been a great delight to her. It was not present in any of the rest of the family, and certainly did not show itself in her at this period of her life.