"It came over me with a bang the other day that in Lydia we have in our midst that society-destroying child in _The Kaiser's New Clothes_." "Eh?" said Lydia's father blankly. "You remember the last scene in that inimitable tale? Where the Kaiser walks abroad with all the people shouting and hurrahing for the new clothes, and not daring to trust their own eyes, and suddenly a little child's voice is heard, 'But the Kaiser has nothing on!'" "I don't know what you're talking about," said the Judge with a patient indifference. "Well, you will know when you hear Lydia say that some day. She knows--she'll know! Perhaps you've done well to send her to that idiotic finishing school." "Don't lay it to me!" cried the Judge, laughing; "_I_ didn't send her--or not send her. If you were married you'd know that fathers never have anything to say about what their daughters do." "More fools they!" rejoined the doctor pointedly. "But in this case maybe it's all right. She's as ignorant as a Hottentot, of course, but perhaps any real education might have spoiled her innate capacity to--" "Oh, pshaw!" The Judge was vaguely uneasy. "You let Lydia alone. Talk your nonsense about something else. There's nothing queer about Lydia, thank heavens! She's just like all young ladies." "That's a horrible thing to say about one's own daughter!" cried the doctor, falling immediately into the lightly mournful, satirical vein that was the alternative to his usual racing talk. "There won't be anything queer about her long, that's fact. In real life the child is never really allowed to complete that sentence. A hundred hands are clapped over its mouth, and it's hustled, and shaken, and frightened, and scolded, till it thinks there's something the matter with its eyesight. And Lydia's a sweet, gentle child, who'll want to say whatever pleases people she loves--that'll be another bandage over her eyes. And she's not dowered with an innate fondness for shrieking out contradictions at the top of her voice, and unless you've a real passion for that you get silenced early in life." The lawyer laughed with the good-natured contempt of a large, silent man for a small, voluble one. "That's a tragedy you can't know much about from experience, Melton. No cruel force ever silenced you." He paused at the walk leading to his house. A big street light glowed and sputtered over their heads. "Come in, won't you, and see Lydia?" "No; no cruel force has ever _silenced_ me," the doctor mused, putting his hands slowly into his pockets, "but it has bound me hand and foot. I talk, and I talk, but do you ever see me doing anything different from the worst fools of us all?" "Are you coming in?" The Judge spoke with his absent tolerance of his doctor's fancies. "No, thank you, as the farmer said to the steeple-climber. I'm going home to my lonely office to give thanks to Providence that I'm not responsible for a daughter." The Judge frowned. "Nonsense! Look at Marietta."