CHAPTER I
Whenever she and Lydia had a scene Miss Bennett thought of the first scene she had witnessed in the Thorne household. She saw before her a vermillion carpet on a mottled marble stair between high, polished-marble walls. There was gilt in the railing, and tall lanky palms stood about in majolica pots. Up this stairway an angry man was carrying an angrier child. Miss Bennett could see that broad back in its heavy blue overcoat, and his neck, above which the hair was still black, crimsoning with fury and exertion. On one side of him she could see the thin arms and clutching hands of the little girl, and on the other the slender kicking legs, expressing passionate rebellion in every spasmodic motion. The clutching hands caught the tip of a palm in passing, and the china pot went rolling down the stairs and crashed to bits, startling the two immense great Dane puppies which had been the occasion of the whole trouble.
The two figures, swaying and struggling, went on up; for though the man was strong, a writhing child of ten is no light burden; and the stairs, for all their grandeur, were steep, and the carpet so thick that the foot sank into it as into new-fallen snow. Just as they passed out of sight Miss Bennett saw the hands of the child, now clenched fists, begin to beat on the man's arms, and she heard the clear, defiant young voice repeating, "I will keep them! I will!" The man's "You won't" was not spoken, but was none the less understood. Miss Bennett knew that when the heads of the stairs was reached the blows would be returned with interest.
Usually in the long struggle between these two indomitable wills Miss Bennett had been on Joe Thorne's side, coarse, violent man though he was, for she was old-fashioned and believed that children ought to obey. But this night he had alienated her sympathy by being rude to her—for the first and last time. He had come home after one of his long absences to the hideous house in Fifth Avenue in which he took so much pride, and had found these two new pets of Lydia's careening about the hall like young calves. He had turned on Miss Bennett.
"What the hell do you let her do such things for?" he had demanded, and Miss Bennett had answered with unusual spirit.
"Because she's so badly brought up, Mr. Thorne, that no one can do anything with her."
Lydia had stood by defiantly, glancing from one to the other, with a hand in the collar of each of her dogs, her face pale, her jaw set, her head not much above the sleek battleship-gray heads of the great Danes, her small body pulled first one way and then the other by their gambols. All the time she was saying over and over, "I will keep them! I will! I will!"
She hadn't kept them; she had lost that particular skirmish in the long war. Not till some years later did she begin to win; but whether she lost or won, Miss Bennett was always conscious of a rush of pity for the slim, black-eyed little girl thrusting her iron will so fearlessly against that of the man from whom she had inherited it.
And for the Lydia of to-day, now engaged in thrusting her will against the will of the world, Miss Bennett felt the same unreasoning pity—pity which rendered her weak in her own defense when any dispute arose between them. She and Lydia had been having a scene now; only a little scene—hardly more than a discussion.
Morson saw it clearly when he came in after luncheon to get the coffee cups, although a complete and decorous silence greeted his entrance. He saw it in the way in which his young employer was standing, as erect as an Indian, looking slantingly down her cheek at her companion. Miss Bennett was sitting on the sofa with her feet in their high-heeled satin slippers crossed, and she was slipping the rings nervously up and down her fine, thin fingers.
She was a small, well-made woman, to whom prettiness had come with her gray hair. The perfection of all her appointments, which might once have been interpreted as the vanity of youth, turned out to be a settled nicety that stood her in good stead in middle life and differentiated her at fifty-five—a neat, elegant little figure among her contemporaries.
The knowledge that he was interrupting a discussion did not hurry Morson any more than the faintest curiosity delayed him. He brushed up the hearth, turned a displaced chair, collected the cups on his tray and left the room at exactly the same pace at which he had entered it. He had known many scenes in his day.
As soon as the door closed behind him Miss Bennett said: "Of course, if you meant you don't want me to ask my friends to your house you are perfectly within your rights, but I could not stay with you, Lydia."
"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,