Manslaughter. Alice Duer Miller
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In almost any part of the civilized globe to say you were with Gordon & Co. was a proud boast. But pride was all that a man of Bobby's type was likely to get out of it. Promotion was slow. Lydia talked of a junior partnership some day, but Bobby knew that partnerships in Gordon & Co. went to qualities more positively valuable than his. Sometimes he thought of leaving them, but he could not bear to give up the easy honor of the connection.
It was better to be a doorkeeper with Gordon & Co. than a partner with some ephemeral firm.
It amused him to hear her talk of Peter Gordon treating him like a slave. The dignified, middle-aged head of the firm, whose business was like an ancestral religion to him, hardly knew his clerks by sight.
"It isn't exactly servile to work half a day on Saturday," he said mildly.
"They'd respect you more if you asserted yourself. Do come on Friday, Bobby. I shall be so bored if you're not there."
He reflected that after all he would rather be dismissed by Gordon & Co. than by the young lady beside him.
"Dearest Lydia, how nice you can be when you want to—like all tyrants."
They had reached the small deserted wooden hut that served as a railroad station, and Lydia stopped the car.
"I suppose it's silly, but I wish you wouldn't say that—that I'm a tyrant," she said appealingly. "I don't want to be, only so often I know I know better what ought to be done. This afternoon, for instance, wasn't it much better for us all to play outside instead of in that stuffy little room of Eleanor's? Was that being a tyrant?"
"Yes, Lydia, it was; but I like it. All I ask is a little tyrant in my home."
She sighed so deeply that he leaned over and kissed her cool cheek.
"Good-by, my dear," he said.
The kiss did not go badly. He had done it as if, though not sure of success, he was not adventuring on absolutely untried ground.
"I think you'd better not do that, Bobby."
"Do you hate it?"
"Not particularly, only I don't want you to get dependent on it."
He laughed as he shut the car door. The light of the engine was visible above the low woods to their left.
"I'll take my chances on that," he said.
As she drove away she felt the injustice of the world. Everyone did ask your advice; they did want you to take an interest, but they complained when this interest led you to exert the slightest pressure on them to do what you saw was best. That was so illogical. You couldn't give a person advice that was any good unless you entered in and made their problem yours, and of course if you did that—only how few people except herself ever did it for their friends—then you were concerned, personally concerned that they should follow your advice. They were all content, too, she thought, when her tyranny worked out for their good. Bobby, for instance, had not complained of her having forced the Emmonses to ask him for Sunday. He thought that commendable. Perhaps the Emmonses hadn't. And yet how much better to be clear. She did not want to go and spend Sunday with anyone unless she could be sure of having someone to amuse her. Suppose she had gone there and found that like Benny they were using her to entertain some of their dull friends. That would have made her angry. She might have been disagreeable and broken up a friendship. This way it was safe.
She did not get home until half past seven, and she was dining at eight, fifteen minutes' drive away.
A pleasant smell of roses and wood smoke greeted her as she entered the house. She loved her house, with the broad shingles and classic pilasters of the front still untouched. Ten years ago her father had bought it—a nice old farmhouse with an ornamental band running round it below the eaves and a perfect little porch before the door. Since then she had been becoming more and more attached to it as it became more and more the work of her own creation. She had added whatever she needed without much regard to the effect of the whole—a large paneled room, English as much as anything, an inner garden suggestive of a Spanish patio, a tiled Italian hall and a long servant's wing that was nothing at all.
She put her head in the dining room, where Miss Bennett in a stately tea gown was just beginning a solitary dinner.
"Hello, Benny! Have a good dinner. I forgot to tell you I'm going to the Emmonses for Sunday, so if you want to ask someone down to keep you company, do. I'm going to be late for dinner."
Miss Bennett smiled and nodded, recognizing this as a peace demonstration. Fourteen years had taught her that Lydia was not without generosity.
Fourteen years ago this coming winter the Thornes had entered Miss Bennett's life. Old Joe Thorne had come by appointment to her little New York apartment. The appointment had been made by a friend of Miss Bennett's—Miss Bennett's friends were always looking for something desirable for her in those days. Her family, who had been identified with New York for a hundred and fifty years, had gradually declined in fortune until the panic of 1893 had almost wiped out the little fortune of Adeline and her mother, the last of the family. Adeline had been brought up, not in luxury but in a comfortable, unalterable feminine idleness. She had always had all the clothes she needed to go about among the people she knew, and they were the people who had everything. The Bennetts had never kept a carriage, but they had never stinted themselves in cabs. The truth was they had never stinted themselves in anything that they really wanted. And Adeline, when she found herself alone in the world at thirty, with an income of only a few thousand, continued the family tradition of having what she wanted. She took a small apartment, which she contrived to make charming, and she lived nicely by the aid of her old French nurse, who came and cooked for her and dressed her and turned her out as perfectly as ever. She continued to dine out every night, and though nominally she spent her summers in New York as an economy, she was always on somebody's yacht or in somebody's country house. She paid any number of visits and enjoyed life more than most people.
Her friends, however, for she had the power of creating real attachments, were not so well satisfied. At first they were persuaded that Adeline would marry—it was so obviously the thing for Adeline to do—but she was neither designing nor romantic. She lacked both the reckless emotion which may lead one to marry badly and the cold-blooded determination to marry well.
She was just past forty the day Joe Thorne came. She could still see him as he entered in his blue overcoat with a velvet collar. A big powerful man with prominent eyes like Bismarck's, and a heavy dark brown mustache bulging over his upper lip. He did not expect to give much time to the interview. He had come to see if Miss Bennett would do to bring up his daughter, who at ten years was giving him trouble. He wanted her prepared for the social opportunities he intended her to have. It seemed strange to him that a person who lived as simply as Miss Bennett could really have these social opportunities in her control, but he had been advised by people whom he trusted that such was the fact, and he accepted it.
He was the son of a Kansas farmer, had left the farm as a boy and settled in a small town, and had learned the trade of bricklaying. By hard work he gradually amassed a few hundred dollars, and this he invested in a gravel bank just outside the town. It was the only gravel bank in the neighborhood and brought him a high return on the money. Then just as the gravel was exhausted the town began to spread in that direction, and Thorne was arranging to level his property and sell it in building lots, when a still more unexpected development took place. Oil was struck in the neighborhood, and beneath Thorne's gravel lay a well.
If Fate had intended him to be poor she should never have allowed him to make his first thousand dollars, for from the moment he had any surplus everything he touched did well. In one of his trips to the Louisiana oil district he met and married a local belle, a slim, pale girl with immense dark-circled black eyes and a skin like a gardenia. She followed him meekly about the country from oil wells to financial centers until after the birth of her daughter. Then she settled down in Kansas City and waited his rare visits. The only inconsiderate thing she had ever done to him was to die and leave him with an eight-year-old daughter.
For several stormy years he tried various solutions—foreign