Manslaughter

								

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.