“I know I will,” Crabbe returned, simply. “I mean I’m certain to if it _is_ interesting. It’s just like I’ve been telling Lily: the only reason I ever had any trouble at all in business, it’s because the luck’s been all one way so far;—it kept against my getting anything to do that had any possibilities in it. But it’ll be different from now on, I guess. All anybody needs to do for me, Mr. Dodge, is to find me a position where I’ll feel some use in getting my brain to work.” Mr. Dodge said he was sure of it, gave his attention to his plate for a few moments, and then, with the gallant assistance of his wife, returned to the weather. Later, when they were alone together in the library, where they could hear from the drawing-room the pretty sound of Lily’s prattling, and, at brief intervals, her happy laughter, the parents faced their misery. “It’s unbelievable,” Mr. Dodge said, huskily. “You don’t run across these extreme cases of self-satisfied asininity more than a few times in your whole life, even counting all the hundreds and thousands of people you come in contact with. And to think you’ve got to take such a case into your _family_!” “It’s your idea!” his wife reminded him. “It isn’t! It’s not my idea; it’s a monstrous delusion that’s got hold of our girl and that we failed to show her _is_ a delusion. Well, since we couldn’t show her it is, and since opposing her in it was injuring her health, what’s left for us to do but to act as if it were a reality? It isn’t my idea to treat this moron as an angel and take him into our family: it’s the dreadful necessity that her delusion has forced upon us.” “Thank you for not ending with, ‘Isn’t that logical?’” she said. “I’ve been under such a strain, keeping my face cordial at the table, I don’t believe I could have stood it!” “Under a strain?” he echoed. “I should say so!” He gave her a commiserating and comradelike pat upon her shoulder as he passed behind her to get a book from the shelves. “We’ve both been under a strain, Lydia, and I’m afraid we’ve got to go on being under it.” “Yes,” she agreed. “That’s the prospect—for the rest of our lives!” “I’m afraid so.” Then, with grave faces, they settled down to their books, or, at least, tried to settle down to them, but looked into vague and troubled distance more than they read;—ever and anon, as Lily’s merriment was made ripplingly vocal in the drawing-room, the silence of the library would become intensified and then be broken by a mother’s sigh. But at ten o’clock the front door was heard to close with soft reluctance; and Lily left upon the air a trail of dance music in slender soprano as she skipped down the hall and into the library. She threw her arms about her mother, then about her father, kissing them in turn. “Now you’ve let yourselves begin to know him,” she cried, “isn’t he wonderful? Isn’t he wonderful, Mamma? Isn’t he wonderful, Papa?”