She asked Eleanor to come and spend August with her, but Eleanor refused, saying, what was true enough, that she couldn't bear Newport. She could bear even less constant association with Lydia at this moment. Lydia's one preoccupation when they were together was to destroy Eleanor's friendship for O'Bannon. Often in old times Eleanor had laughed at the steady persistence that Lydia put into this sort of campaign of hate, but she could not laugh now, for as a matter of fact her friendship with O'Bannon was already destroyed. She hardly saw him, and if she did there was a veil between them. He was kind, he was open with her, he was everything except interested.
Eleanor loved O'Bannon, but with so intellectual a process that she was not far wrong in considering it was a friendship. She would have married him if he had asked her, but she would have done so principally to insure herself of his company. If anyone could have guaranteed that they would continue all their lives to live within a few yards of each other she would have been content—content even with the knowledge that every now and then some other less reasonable woman would come and sweep him away from her. She knew he was of a temperament susceptible to terrible gusts of emotion, but she considered that that was her hold upon him—she was so safe.
The remoteness that came to their relation now indicated another woman, and yet she knew his everyday life well enough to know that he was seeing no one except herself and Alma Wooley; and though there was some gossip about his attention to the girl, Eleanor felt she understood the reason for it. Alma made him feel emotionally what he knew rationally—that his prosecution of Lydia had been merely an act of justice. Alma thought him the greatest of men and was tremulously grateful to him for establishing her dead lover as a hero—a man killed in the performance of his duty. To her imagination Lydia was an unbelievable horror, like a wicked princess in a fairy tale. Eleanor wondered if she did not seem somewhat the same to O'Bannon. He never mentioned her name when she, Eleanor, spoke of her. It was like dropping a stone into a bottomless well. She listened and listened, and nothing came back from O'Bannon's abysmal silence. He spoke of her only once, and that was when he came to say good-by to Eleanor the day he started for Wyoming. He was eager to get away—into those mountains, to sleep under the stars and forget everything and everybody in the East.
"Mercy," Eleanor thought, "how ruthless men are! I wouldn't let any friend of mine see I was glad to leave him, even if I were."
"It's a rotten job—mine," he said. "I'm always sending people to prison who are either so abnormal they don't seem human or else so human they seem just like myself."
Presently Eleanor mentioned that Lydia had asked her to go to Newport for a month. O'Bannon turned on her sharply.
"And are you going?"
She said no, but it did not save her from his contempt.
"I don't see how you can be a friend of that woman's, Eleanor," he said.
"Lydia has the most attaching qualities when you know her, Dan."