She was in a little heaven, made up of the most ingenuous aspirations,
the innocence of which seemed to her a guarantee of their certain
fulfillment. Her fervent desire to be good was equal to and of the same
quality as her desire to be a successful debutante. It would make her
family so happy to have her both. These somewhat widely diverging aims
were all a part of the current of her life, the impulse to be what those
she loved would like to have her. It was not that she was willing to
give up her own individuality to gratify the impulse, but rather that
she did not for an instant conceive of the necessity for such a
sacrifice. It was part of her immense happiness that she had always
loved to be what it pleased everyone to have her, and that, apparently,
people wished to have her only what she wished to be. She was like a
child guarded by her elders from any knowledge of forbidden food. All
the goodies of which she had ever heard were hers for the asking. In
such a carefully arranged nursery it would be perversity to doubt the
everlasting quality of the coincidence between one's desires and one's
obedience. It was no more remarkable a coincidence than that both dew
and sunshine were good for the grass over which she now ran lightly to
another corner of the grounds about her parents' house. Here, just
outside the circle of deep shade cast by an exuberantly leaved maple,
she stood for a moment, her hands full of grapes, her eyes wandering
about the green, well-kept double acres called diversely in the family
"the grounds" (Mrs. Emery's name) and "the yard." Lydia always clung to
her father's name; she had very little inborn feeling for the finer
shades of her mother's vocabulary. Mrs. Emery rejoiced in the careless
unconsciousness of the importance of such details, but she felt that
Lydia should be cautioned against going too far. It was one of the
girl's odd ways to be fond of the few phrases left over in the Emery
dictionary from their simpler earlier days. She always called the two
servants "the girls" or "the help" instead of "the maids," spoke of the
"washwoman" instead of the "laundress," and, as did her father, called
the man who took care of the grounds, ran the furnace, and drove the
Emery's comfortable surrey, the "hired man" instead of the "gardener" or
the "coachman," or, in Mrs. Emery's elegantly indefinite phrase, "our
man."
Lydia explained this whimsical reaction rather incoherently by saying
that those nice old words were so much more fun than the others, and in
spite of remonstrance she clung to her fancy with so lightly laughing an
obstinacy that neither she nor anyone suspected it of being a surface
indication of a significant tendency.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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