Dr. Melton's approval of this answer was immense. "Why, Lydia, I'm proud of you! You're one in a thousand. You'll break the hearts of everyone who knows you by turning out a sensible woman if you don't look out. I don't believe there's another girl in Endbury who would have had the nerve to tell the truth and not fake up a headache, or a broken heart, or _Weltschmerz_, or some such trifle, for a reason." He pulled himself up to his feet. "Of course, you don't know what's the matter with you, my dear. _I_ do. _I_ know everything, and can't do a thing. That's me! Physically, you're upset by Endbury heat after an ocean voyage, and mentally it's the reaction caused by your subsidence into private life after being the central figure of the returned traveler. Last evening, now, with that mob of friends and the family pawing at you and trying to cram-jam you back into the Endbury box and shut the lid down--_that_ was enough to kill anybody with a nerve in her body. What's the history of the morning? I hope you slept late." Lydia shook her head. "No; I was up ever so early.--Marietta came over to borrow the frames for drying curtains, and stayed to breakfast." Something about her accent struck oddly on the trained sensitiveness of the physician's ear. Her tone rang empty, as with something kept back. "Marietta's been snapping at you," he diagnosed rapidly. "Well, a little," Lydia admitted. The doctor laid the palm-leaf fan aside and took Lydia's slim fingers in both his firm, sinewy hands. "My dear, I'm going to do as I have always done with you, and talk with you as though you were a grown-up person and could take your share in understanding and bearing family problems. Your sister Marietta is not a very happy woman. She has too many of your father's brains for the life she's been shunted into. She might be damming up a big river with a finely constructed concrete dam, and what she is giving all her strength to is trying to hold back a muddy little trickle with her bare hands. The achievement of her life is to give on a two-thousand-a-year income the appearance of having five thousand like your father. She does it; she's a remarkably forceful woman, but it frets her. She ought to be in better business, and she knows it, though she won't admit it. So, don't you mind if she's sharp-tongued once in a while. It's when she feels the muddy water oozing through her fingers." He fancied that Lydia's eyes on his were a little blank, perhaps absent, and broke off with a short laugh. He was quite hardened to the fact that people never understood his fanciful metaphors, but Lydia, as a child, had used to have a curious intuitive divination of his meaning. After his laugh he sighed and turned the talk. "Well, and has Flora Burgess been after you to get your impression of Endbury as compared with Europe? Your mother said she wanted an interview with you for next Sunday's _Society Notes_."