Lydia smiled. The subject was an old joke with them. "No; she hasn't appeared yet. I haven't seen her--not since my birthday a year ago, the time she described the supper-table as a 'glittering, scintillating mass of cut-glass and silver, and yet without what could really be called ostentation.' Isn't she delicious! How is the little old thing, anyway?" "Still trotting industriously about Endbury back yards sowing the dragon's teeth of her idiotic ideas and standards." "Oh, I remember, you don't like her," said Lydia. "She always seems just funny to me--funny and pathetic. She's so dowdy, and reverential to folks with money, and enjoys other people's good times so terrifically." "She's like some political bosses--admirable in private life, but a menace to the community just the same." Lydia laughed involuntarily, in spite of her preoccupation. "Flora Burgess a menace to the community!" The doctor turned away and began to mount the stairs. "Me and Cassandra!" he called over his shoulder in his high, sweet treble. "Just you wait and see!" He disappeared down the upper hall, finding his way about the darkened house with a familiarity that betokened long practice. Lydia sat down on the bottom step to wait for his return. The clock in the dining-room struck twelve. It came over her with a clap that but half a day had passed since she had run out into the dawn. For an instant she had the naive, melodramatic instinct of youth to deck out its little events in the guise of crises. She began to tell herself with gusto that she had passed some important turning-point in her life; when, as was not infrequent with her, she lost the thread of her thought in a sudden mental confusion which, like a curtain of fog, shut her off from definite reflection. Complicated things that moved rapidly always tired Lydia. She had an enormous capacity for quiet and tranquillity. To-day she felt that more complicated things were moving rapidly inside her head than ever before--as though she had tried to keep track of the revolutions of a wheel and had lost her count and could now only stare stupidly at the spokes, whirling till they blended into one blur. What was this Endbury life she had come back to? What in the world had that man been talking about? What a strange person he was! How very bright his eyes were when he looked at you--as though he were, somehow, seeing you more than most people did. What did the doctor mean by all that about Marietta? It had never occurred to her that the life of anyone about her might have been different from what it was. What else was there for people to do but what everybody else did? It was all very unsettling and, in this heat and loneliness, daunting.