He was so used to delighting in Lydia's understanding of his perversely obscure figures of speech that he turned about, surprised to hear no appreciative comment. She was looking away with troubled eyes.
"Paul will think I ought not to have let Marietta talk to me like that--that I ought to have resented it. I never can remember to resent things."
The doctor began setting out polished water glasses on a tray. "It is the glory of a man to pass by an offense," he quoted. "Ah, don't you suppose if we knew all about things we'd feel as relieved at not having resented an injury as if we had held our hands from striking a blind man who had inadvertently run against us?"
There was no response. It was the second time that one of his metaphors, far-fetched as he loved them, but usually intelligible to Lydia, had missed fire. He turned on her sharply. "What are you thinking about?" he asked.
She raised her tragic eyes to his. "About the mashed potatoes last night--they didn't have a bit of salt in them--they were too nasty for--"
"Oh, pshaw! It makes no difference whether your dinner party was a success or not! You know that as well as I do. A dinner party is a relic of the Dark Ages, anyhow--if not of the Stone Age! As a physician, I shudder to see people sitting down to gorge themselves on the richest possible food, all carefully rendered extra palatable in order that they may put upon their bodies the burden of throwing off an enormous amount of superfluous food. A hundred years from now people will be as ashamed of us for our piggishness as we are of our eighteenth-century forbears for their wine-swilling to the detriment of their descendants. A dinner party of to-day bears no more relation to a rational gathering of rational people for the purpose of rational social intercourse than--"
He had run on with his usual astonishing loquacity without drawing breath, overwhelming Lydia with a fresh flood of words when she tried to break in; but she now sprang up and motioned him peremptorily to silence.
"Please, please, Godfather, don't! I asked you not to unsettle me--you're not kind to do it! You're not kind! I must think it's important and, and--the necessary thing to do. I _must_!" She put her hands over her eyes as she spoke. She was trying to shut out a vision of Paul's embittered face of wrathful chagrin. "That's the trouble with me," she went on. "Something in me makes it hard for me to think it important enough to give up everything else for it--and I--"
