said Lydia. "Just think how Freddy will order her about!"

It was not in her nature to feel remorse for her well-considered actions, and she soon forgot that Ilseboro had ever existed, except for certain things she had learned from him—a way of being silent while people explained to you you couldn't do something you intended to do, and then doing it instead of arguing about it, as had been her old habit; and an excellent manner with butlers too.

Her foot pressed gently on the accelerator, when the road became straight, holding the car now at forty miles. On either side of the road purple cabbages grew like a tufted carpet to the very edge of the macadam, without fences or hedges to protect them. There was enough mist in the autumn air to magnify the low hills along the Sound to an imposingly vague bulk, and to turn the cloudless sky to a threatening bluish gray. In every other direction the flat, fertile, sandy plains of Long Island stretched uninterruptedly.

It was really a beautiful afternoon—too beautiful to spend playing bridge in a stuffy room. It might be more sensible, she thought, to break up the party, kidnap Bobby and drive him over to sit on the edge of the water and watch the moon rise; only she rather feared the moon was over. Of course she was dining at the Leonard Piers' that evening, but it was a party eminently chuckable—that is to say, she was going to please them rather than herself. Anyhow, she would have Eleanor move the bridge table out on the terrace. Eleanor was so stupid about preferring to play indoors.

A minute figure, smaller than a man's hand, flashed into the little mirror at her left. Was it—no—yes? A bicycle policeman! Well, she would give him a little race for his stupidity in not recognizing her. She loved speed—it made her a little drunk. The needle swung to forty-five—to fifty, and hung there. She passed a governess cart full of children with a sound like "whist" as the wind rushed by. Now there was a straight road, and clear.

The miniature figure kept growing and growing until it seemed to fill the whole circle of the mirror. The sound of the motorcycle drowned the sound of her own car. A voice shouted "Stop!" almost in her ear. Turning her head slightly to the left, she saw a khaki figure was abreast of her. She slowed the car down and stopped it. A sunburned young face flushed with anger glared at her.

"Here, what do you think this is? A race track?"

Lydia did not answer, staring straight ahead of her. She was thinking that it was a foolish waste of taxpayers' money to keep changing the policemen. Just as you reached a satisfactory arrangement with one of them you found yourself confronted by another. She wasn't in the least alarmed, though he was scolding her roughly—scolding, to be candid, very much as her own father had done. She did not object to his words, but she hated the power of the law behind them—hated 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