Manslaughter. Alice Duer Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ the idea that she herself was not the final judge of the rate at which she should drive.

      Now he was getting his summons ready. Glancing idly into her mirror, she saw far away, like a little moving picture, the governess cart come into view. She intended to settle the matter before those giggling, goggle-eyed children came abreast. She was a person in whom action followed easily and instantly from the decision to act. Most people, after making a decision, hesitate like a stream above a waterfall, and then plunging too quickly, end in foam and whirlpools. But Lydia's will, for good or evil, flowed with a steady current.

      She looked down at the seat beside her for her mesh bag, opened it and found that Evans, who was a good deal of a goose, had forgotten to put her purse in it, although she knew bridge was to be played. Lydia looked up and saw that the officer of the law had followed her gesture with his eyes. She slipped Bobby's bracelet off her arm, and holding her hand well over the edge of the car dropped it on the road. She heard it tinkle on the hard surface.

      "You dropped something," he said.

      "No."

      He swung a gaitered leg from the motorcycle and picked up the bracelet.

      "Isn't this yours?"

      She smiled very slightly and shook her head, once again in complete mastery of the situation.

      "Whose is it then?"

      "I think it must be yours," she answered with a sort of sweet contempt, and still looking him straight in the eye she leaned over and put her gear in first. He said nothing, and her car began to move forward. Presently she heard the sound of a motorcycle going in the opposite direction. She smiled to herself. There was always a way.

      She found them waiting for her at Eleanor's, and she felt at once that the atmosphere was hostile; but when Lydia really liked people, and she really liked all the three who were waiting, she had command of a wonderfully friendly coöperative sort of gayety that was hard to resist.

      She liked Eleanor Bellington better than any woman she knew. They had been friends since their school days. Eleanor had brains and a dry, bitter tongue, usually silent, and she wasn't the least bit afraid of Lydia. She was blond, plain, aristocratic, independent and some years Lydia's senior. Fearless in thought, she was conservative in conduct. All her activity was in the intellectual field, or else vicariously, through the activity of others. There were always two or three interesting men, coming men, men of whom one said on speaking of them "You know, he's the man——" who seemed to be intimately woven into Eleanor's everyday life. A never-ending subject of discussion among Miss Bellington's friends was the exact emotional standing of these intimacies of Nellie's.

      Lydia liked Tim Andrews too—a young man of universal friendships and no emotions; but most necessary 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.

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