Manslaughter

								

unaccustomed to setting up her will against anyone's least of all
against a man like Joe Thorne, who had successfully battled his way up
against the will of the world. The contest went on for weeks and weeks.
Poor Miss Bennett kept consulting her friends, almost agreeing to go
when she saw Thorne, and then telephoning him that she had changed her
mind, and bringing him round to her apartment--which was just what she
didn't want--to argue her into it again.
Some of her friends opposed her going to the house of a widower whose
reputation in regard to women was not spotless. Others thought--though
they did not say--that if she went, and succeeded in marrying him, she
would be doing better than she had any right to expect. Perhaps if Miss
Bennett could have fallen in love with Lydia she might have yielded, but
even at ten, Lydia, a black-eyed determined little person, inspired fear
more than love.
Poor Adeline grew pale and thin over the struggle. At last she decided,
after due consultation with friends, to end the matter by being a little
bit rude, by telling Thorne that she just didn't like the whole
prospect; that she preferred her own little place and her own little
life.
"Like it--like this cramped little place?" he said, looking about at the
sunshine and chintz and potted daisies of her cherished home. "But I'd
make you comfortable, give you what you ought to have--Europe, your
friends, your carriage, everything."
He went on to argue with her that she was wrong, utterly wrong to like
her own life. Her last card didn't win. She yielded at last for no
better reason than that her powers of resistance were exhausted.
Thorne was then living in a house on a corner of upper Fifth Avenue,
with a pale-pink brocade ballroom running across the front and taking
all the morning sunshine, and a living room and library at the back so
dark that you couldn't read in it at mid-day, with marble stairs and
huge fire-places that didn't draw--a terrible house. Some years later,
under Miss Bennett's influence, he had bought the more modest house in
the Seventies where Lydia now spent her winters. But it was to the
Fifth Avenue house that Miss Bennett came, and found herself plunged
into one of the most desperate struggles in the world. Thorne, whose
continuous interest was given to business, attempted to rule Lydia in
crises--by scenes, scenes of a violence that Miss Bennett had never seen
equaled. As it turned out, her coming weakened Thorne's power; not that
she wasn't usually on his side--she was--but she was an audience, and
Thorne had some sense of shame before an audience, while Lydia had none
at all.
Many a time she had seen him box Lydia's ears and, mild as she was, had
been glad to see him do it. But it was his violence that undid him. It
was then that Lydia became suddenly dignified and, unbroken, contrived
to make him appear like a brute.
There is nothing really more unbreakable than a child who considers