"There's no harm in engaging a cabin, is there?" she answered.
Her plan was to take in the end of the London season, with a few house parties in the English country, to spend September in Venice, two weeks in Paris buying clothes, and to come home in October.
"To Long Island?" Miss Bennett asked.
"Of course. Where else?" answered Lydia. "Do you think I shall allow myself to be driven out of my own home?"
But July came without the decision, and Lydia was obliged to cancel her passage. She was annoyed.
"Those lazy old judges," she said, "have actually adjourned for two months, and now I can't get off until September." Her tone indicated that she was doing a good deal for the law of her country, changing her plans like this.
O'Bannon, she heard, was taking a holiday too—going to Wyoming for a month. She thought that she would like to see something of the West, but instead she took a house at Newport for August—a fevered month. Blythe came to spend Sunday with her and stayed two weeks, fell in love with May Swayne, attempted to use his position as a guest of Lydia's to make himself appear a more desirable suitor in the eyes of the Swayne family—a solid old-fashioned fortune—and was turned out by Lydia after a scene of unusual violence.
A feud followed in which many people took—and changed—sides. Lydia fought gayly, briskly in the open. Her object was not Blythe's death, but his social extinction, and her method was not cold steel but ridicule. The war was won when May was made to see him as an impossible figure, comic, on the make—as perhaps he was, but no more so than when Lydia herself had received him. After this, though he lingered on a few days at a hotel, his ultimate disappearance was certain. Lydia and May remained friends throughout—as much friends as they had ever been. Since the day of their first meeting the two women had never permitted any man to be a friend of both of them.
Albee came and spent a brief twenty-four hours with her between a midnight train and Sunday boat. He was in the midst of a campaign as United States senator from his own state—certain of election. Lydia was kind and patient with him, but frankly bored.
"There's more stuff in Bobby," she confided to Benny, "who doesn't expect you to tremble at his nod. I hate fake strong men. I always feel tempted to call their bluff. It's a hard rôle they want to play. If they don't break you, you despise them. If they do—why, you're broken, no good to anyone."