Manslaughter

								

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