Manslaughter. Alice Duer Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ friends to your house you are perfectly within your rights, but I could not stay with you, Lydia."

      "You know I don't mean that, Benny," said the girl without either anger or apology in her voice. "I'm delighted to have you have anyone at all when I'm not here and anyone amusing when I am. The point is that those old women were tiresome. They bored you and you knew that they were going to bore me. You sacrificed me to make a Roman holiday for them."

      Miss Bennett could not let this pass.

      "You should feel it an honor—a woman like Mrs. Galton, whose work among the female prisoners of this——"

      "Noble women, noble women, I have no doubt, but bores, and it makes me feel sick, literally sick, to be bored."

      "Don't be coarse, Lydia."

      "Sick—here," said Lydia with a sharp dig of her long fingers on her diaphragm. "Let's be clear about this, Benny. I can't stand having my own tiresome friends about, and I will not put up with having yours."

      Lydia had come home after a morning of shopping in town. Disagreeable things had happened, only Benny did not know that. She had bought a hat—a tomato-colored hat—had worn it a block and decided it was a mistake, and had gone back and wanted to change it, and the woman had refused to take it back. There had been little consolation in removing her custom from the shop forever—she had been forced to keep the hat. Then motoring back to Long Island a tire had gone, and she had come in late for luncheon to find Benny amiably entertaining the two old ladies.

      The very fact that they were, as she said, noble women, that their minds moved with the ponderous exactitude characteristic of so many good executives, made their society all the more trying to Lydia. She wearied of them, wearied, as Mariana in the Moated Grange. She had so often asked Benny not to do this to her and after all it was her house.

      "You're very hard, my dear," said her companion—"very hard and very ignorant and very young. If you could only find an interest in such work as Mrs. Galton is doing——"

      "Good heavens, was this a benevolent plot on your part to find me an interest?"

      Miss Bennett looked dignified and a little stubborn, as if she were accustomed to being misunderstood, as if Lydia ought to have known that she had had a reason for what she did. As a matter of fact, she had no plan; she was not a plotter. That was one of the difficulties between her and Lydia. Lydia arranged her life, controlled her time and her surroundings. Miss Bennett amiably drifted, letting events and her friends control. She could never understand why Lydia held her responsible for situations which it seemed to her simply happened, and yet she could never resist pretending that she had deliberately brought them about. She began to think now that it had been her idea, not Mrs. Galton's, to get Lydia interested in prison reform.

      "No one can be happy, Lydia, without an unselfish interest, something outside of themselves."

      Lydia smiled. There was something pathetic in poor little ineffective Benny trying to arrange her life for her.

      "I contrive to be fairly happy, thank you, Benny. I've got to leave you, because I have an engagement at Eleanor's at four, and it's ten minutes before now."

      "Lydia, it's ten miles!"

      "Ten miles—ten minutes."

      "You'll be killed if you drive so recklessly."

      "No Benny, because I drive very well."

      "You'll be arrested then."

      "Even less."

      "How can you be so sure?"

      That was something that it was better not to tell, so Lydia went away laughing, leaving Miss Bennett to wonder, as she always did after one of these interviews, how it was possible to feel so superior to Lydia when they were apart and so ineffectual when they were together. She always came to the same conclusion—that she was betrayed by her own fineness; that she was more aware of shades, of traditions than this little daughter of a workingman. Lydia was not little. She was half a foot taller than Adeline Bennett's own modest five-feet-two, but the adjective expressed a latent wish. Miss Bennett often introduced it into her descriptions. A nice little man, a clever little woman, a dear little person were some of her favorite tags. They made her bulk larger in her own vision.

      The little daughter of the workingman ran upstairs for her hat. She found her maid, Evans, engaged in polishing her jewels. The rite of polishing Miss Thorne's jewels took place in the bathroom, which was also a dressing room, containing long mirrors, a dressing table, cupboards with glass doors through which Miss Thorne's bright hats and beribboned underclothes showed faintly. It was carpeted and curtained and larger than many a hall bedroom.

      Here Evans, a pale, wistful English girl, was spreading out the jewelry as she finished each piece, laying them on a white towel where the rays of the afternoon sun fell upon them—the cabochon ruby like a dome of frozen blood, the flat, clear diamond as blue as ice, and the band of emeralds and diamonds for her hair flashing rays of green and orange lights. Lydia liked her jewelry for the best of all reasons—she had bought most of it herself. She particularly liked the emerald band, which made her look like an Eastern princess in a Russian ballet, and in her opinion exactly fitted her type. But her beauty was not so easily classified as she thought. To describe her in words was to describe a picture by Cabanel of The Star of the Harem—such a picture as the galleries of the second half of the nineteenth century were sure to contain—the oval face, the splendid dark eyes, the fine black eyebrows, the raven hair; but Lydia's skin was not transparently white, and a slight heightening of her cheek bones and a thrust forward of her jaw suggested something more Indian than Eastern, something that made her seem more at home on a mountain trail than on the edge of a marble pool.

      As she entered, Evans was brushing the last traces of powder from a little diamond bracelet less modern than the other pieces. Lydia took it in her hand.

      "I almost forgot I had that," she said.

      Three or four years before, when she had first known Bobby Dorset, when they had been very young, he had given it to her. It had been his mother's, and she had worn it constantly for a year or so. An impulse of tenderness made her slip it on her arm now, and as it clung there like a living pressure the heavy feeling of it faintly revived a whole cycle of old emotions. She thought to herself that she had some human affections after all.

      "It ought to be reset, miss," said Evans. "The gold spoils the diamonds."

      "You do keep my things beautifully, Evans."

      The girl colored at the praise, not often given by her rapidly moving young mistress, and the muscles twitched in her throat.

      "A hat—any hat, Evans."

      She pulled it on with one quick, level glance in the glass, and was gone with the bracelet, half forgotten, on her arm.

      During the few minutes that Lydia had been upstairs a conflict had gone on in the mind of Miss Bennett downstairs. Should she be offended or should she be superior? Was it more dignified to be angry because she really could not allow herself to be treated like that? Or should she forgive because she was obviously so much older and wiser than Lydia?

      She decided—as she always did—in favor of forgiveness, and as she heard Lydia's quick light footsteps crossing the hall she called out, "Don't drive the little car too fast!"

      "Not СКАЧАТЬ