“Would you like Martie to sit in Ma’s place, Pa?” she asked one morning, when she was folding her napkin neatly into the orange-wood napkin-ring marked “Souvenir of Santa Cruz.”  Her father’s surprised negative hardly interrupted the account he was giving his youngest daughter of the law-suit he had won years ago against old man Thomas.  But after breakfast Martie found Lydia crying into one of the aprons that Were hanging in the side-entry.  “It’s nothing!” she gulped as Martie’s warm arms went about her.  “Only—­only I can’t bear to have Ma forgotten already!  You heard how Pa spoke-so short and so cold!”

“Oh, Lyddy, darling!” Martie protested, half-amused, half-sympathetic.  Lydia straightened herself resentfully.

“I suppose I’m foolish,” she said.  “I suppose the best thing for us all to do is to forget and laugh, and go on as if life and death were only a joke!”

But these storms were rare.  Lydia’s was a placid life.  She was deeply delighted when her cooking was praised, although she pretended to be annoyed by it.  She was wearing dresses now that had been hers six years ago; sometimes a blue gingham or a gray madras was worn a whole season by Lydia without one trip to the tub.  She carried a red and gray parasol that Cliff Frost had given her ten years ago; her boots were thin, unadorned kid, creased by her narrow foot; they seemed never to wear out.

As the years went by she quoted her mother more and more.  The rather silent Mrs. Monroe had evidently left a fund of advice behind her.  Nothing was too trivial to be affected by the memory of Ma’s opinion.

“Nice thick cream Williams is giving us,” Lydia might say at the breakfast table.  “Dear Ma used to say that good cream was half the secret of good coffee!” “I remember Ma used to say that marigolds were rather bold, coarse flowers,” she confided to Martie, “and isn’t it true?”

Her appetite for the news of the village was still insatiable; it was rarely uncharitable, but it never ended.  Martie came to recognize certain tones in Lydia’s voice, when she and Alice Clark or Angela Baxter or young Mrs. King were on the shady side porch.  There was the delicately tentative tone in which she trod upon uncertain ground:  “How do you mean she’s never been the same since last fall, Lou?  I don’t remember anything special happening to Minnie Scott last fall.”  There was a frankly and flatly amazed tone, in which Lydia might say:  “Well, Clara told me yesterday about Potter Street, and if you’ll tell me what possessed that boy, I’ll be obliged to you!” And then there was the tone of incredible announcement:  “Alice, I don’t know that I should tell this, because I only heard it last night, but I haven’t been able to think of one other thing ever since, and I believe I’ll tell you; it won’t go any further.  Mrs. Hughie Wilson came in here last night, and we got to talking about old Mrs. Mulkey’s death—­”