of all to her enjoyment was Bobby Dorset, who came out to meet her, sauntering down the steps with his hands in his pockets. He looked exactly as a young man ought to look—physically fit, masculine. He was young—younger than his twenty-six years. There wasn't a line of any kind in his clean-shaven face, and the time had come—had almost come—when something ought to have been written there. The page was remaining blank too long. That was the only criticism possible of Bobby's appearance, and perhaps only an elderly critic would have thought of making it. Lydia certainly did not. When he smiled at her, showing his regular, handsome teeth, she thought he was the nicest-looking person she knew.
Just as she had expected, the bridge table was set inside the house, and while she was protesting and having it moved to the terrace she mentioned that she was late because she had had a fuss with Miss Bennett.
"Dear little Benny," said Andrews. "She's like a nice brown-eyed animal with gray fur, isn't she?"
"Tim always talks as if he were in love with Benny."
"She's so gentle, Lydia, and you are so ruthless with her," said Dorset.
"I have to be, Bobby," answered Lydia, and perhaps to no one else would she have stooped to offer an explanation. "She's gentle, but marvelously persistent. She gets her own way by slow infiltration. I wish you'd all tell me what to do. Benny is a person on whom what you say in a critical way makes no impression until you say it so as to hurt her feelings, and then it makes no impression because she's so taken up with her feelings being hurt. That's my problem with her."
"It's everybody's problem with everybody," replied Eleanor.
"She likes to ask her dull friends to the house when I'm there to entertain them."
"Entertain them with a blackjack," said Bobby.
"She had two prison reformers there to-day—old women with pear-shaped faces, and I had a perfectly horrid morning in town trying to get some rags to put on my back, and—Nell, will you tell me why you recommended Lurline to me? I never saw such atrocious clothes."
"I didn't recommend her," answered Nellie, unstampeded by the attack. "I told you that pale, pearl-like chorus girl dressed there, and your latent desire to dress like a chorus girl——"
"Oh, Lydia doesn't want to dress like a chorus girl!"
"Thank you, Bobby."
"She wants to dress like the savages in Aïda."
"In mauve maillots and chains?"
"In tiger skins and beads, and crouch through the jungle."
"I was so sulky I didn't give a cent to prison reform. Do you think prisons ought to be made too comfortable? I don't want to be cruel, but——"
"Well, it's something, my dear, that you don't want to be."
"You mean I am? That's what Benny says. But I'm not. Is this ten cents a point?"
Eleanor, who like many intellectuals found her excitement in fields where chance was eliminated, protested that ten cents a point was too high, but her objections were swept away by Lydia.
"Oh, no, Eleanor; play for beans if you want; but if you are going to gamble at all——"
Tim Andrews interrupted.
"My dear Lydia," he said, "I feel it only right to tell you that the Anti-Lydia Club was being organized when you arrived. Its membership consists of all those you have bullied, and its object is to oppose you in all small matters."
"Whether I'm right or not, Tim?"
"Everybody's worst when they're right," murmured Eleanor.
"We decided before you came that we all wished to play five cents a point," Tim continued firmly.
"All right," said Lydia briskly. "Only you know it bores me, and it bores Bobby, too, doesn't it, Bobby?"
"Not particularly," replied Dorset; "but I know if it bores you none of us will have a pleasant time."
Lydia smiled.
"Is that an insult or a tribute?"
Bobby smiled back at her.
"I think it's an insult, but you rather like it."
Half an hour later they were playing for ten cents a point.
CHAPTER II
Lydia had offered to drop Bobby at the railroad station on her way home, although she had to go a few miles out of her way to do it. He was going back to town. It was dark by the time they started. She liked the feeling of having him there tucked in beside her while she absolutely controlled his destiny for the next half hour. She liked even to take risks with his life, more precious to her at least for the time than any other, in the hope that he would protest, but he never did. He understood his Lydia.
After a few minutes she observed, "I suppose you know Eleanor has a new young man."
"Intensely interesting, or absolutely worth while?" he asked.
"Both, according to her. She's bringing him out at the Piers' this evening. She was just asking me to be nice to him."
"Like asking the boa constrictor to be nice to a newborn lamb, isn't it?"
"If I'm nice to her men it gives her a feeling of confidence in them."
"If you're nice to them you take them away from her."
"No, Bobby. It's a funny thing, but it isn't so easy as you think to get Eleanor's men away from her."
"Ah, you've tried?"
"She has a funny kind of hold on them. It's her brains. She has brains, and they appreciate it. I don't often want her men. They're apt to be so dreadful. Do you remember the biologist with the pearl buttons on his boots? This one is in politics—or something. He has a funny name—O'Bannon."
"Oh, yes—Dan O'Bannon."
"You know him?"
"I used to know him in college. Lord, he was a wild man in those days!" Bobby snickered reminiscently. "And now he's the local district attorney."
"What does a district attorney do, Bobby?"
"Why, he's a fellow elected by the county to prosecute——"
"Look here, Bobby, if the Emmonses ask you to spend this coming Sunday with them, go, because I'm going." She interrupted him because it was the kind of explanation that she had never been able to listen to. In fact she had so completely ceased to listen that she was unaware of having interrupted the answer to her own question, and Bobby did not care to bring the matter to her attention for fear her invitation to the Emmonses might be lost in the subsequent scuffle. Besides he esteemed it his own fault. Most people who ask you a question like that really mean to say, "Would there be anything interesting to me in the answer to this question? If not, for goodness' sake don't answer it." So he gladly abandoned defining the duties of the district attorney and answered her more important statement.
"Of course I'll go, only they haven't asked me."
"They will—or else I won't go. You'll come out on Friday afternoon."
"I can't, Lydia, until Saturday."
"Now, Bobby, don't be absurd. Don't let that old man treat you like a slave."
Lydia's attitude to Bobby's work was a trifle confusing. She wished him to attain a commanding position in the financial world but had no patience with his industry when it interfered with her own plans. The attaining of any position at all seemed unlikely in Bobby's case. He was a clerk in the great banking house of Gordon & Co., a firm which in the course of a hundred and twenty-five years had built itself into the very financial