"You know I don't mean that, Benny," said the girl without either anger or apology in her voice. "I'm delighted to have you have anyone at all when I'm not here and anyone amusing when I am. The point is that those old women were tiresome. They bored you and you knew that they were going to bore me. You sacrificed me to make a Roman holiday for them."
Miss Bennett could not let this pass.
"You should feel it an honor—a woman like Mrs. Galton, whose work among the female prisoners of this——"
"Noble women, noble women, I have no doubt, but bores, and it makes me feel sick, literally sick, to be bored."
"Don't be coarse, Lydia."
"Sick—here," said Lydia with a sharp dig of her long fingers on her diaphragm. "Let's be clear about this, Benny. I can't stand having my own tiresome friends about, and I will not put up with having yours."
Lydia had come home after a morning of shopping in town. Disagreeable things had happened, only Benny did not know that. She had bought a hat—a tomato-colored hat—had worn it a block and decided it was a mistake, and had gone back and wanted to change it, and the woman had refused to take it back. There had been little consolation in removing her custom from the shop forever—she had been forced to keep the hat. Then motoring back to Long Island a tire had gone, and she had come in late for luncheon to find Benny amiably entertaining the two old ladies.
The very fact that they were, as she said, noble women, that their minds moved with the ponderous exactitude characteristic of so many good executives, made their society all the more trying to Lydia. She wearied of them, wearied, as Mariana in the Moated Grange. She had so often asked Benny not to do this to her and after all it was her house.
"You're very hard, my dear," said her companion—"very hard and very ignorant and very young. If you could only find an interest in such work as Mrs. Galton is doing——"
"Good heavens, was this a benevolent plot on your part to find me an interest?"