"Now, Bobby, don't be absurd. Don't let that old man treat you like a slave."
Lydia's attitude to Bobby's work was a trifle confusing. She wished him to attain a commanding position in the financial world but had no patience with his industry when it interfered with her own plans. The attaining of any position at all seemed unlikely in Bobby's case. He was a clerk in the great banking house of Gordon & Co., a firm which in the course of a hundred and twenty-five years had built itself into the very financial existence of the country. 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?"