had offered to drop Bobby at the railroad station on her way home, although she had to go a few miles out of her way to do it. He was going back to town. It was dark by the time they started. She liked the feeling of having him there tucked in beside her while she absolutely controlled his destiny for the next half hour. She liked even to take risks with his life, more precious to her at least for the time than any other, in the hope that he would protest, but he never did. He understood his Lydia.
After a few minutes she observed, "I suppose you know Eleanor has a new young man."
"Intensely interesting, or absolutely worth while?" he asked.
"Both, according to her. She's bringing him out at the Piers' this evening. She was just asking me to be nice to him."
"Like asking the boa constrictor to be nice to a new-born lamb, isn't it?"
"If I'm nice to her men it gives her a feeling of confidence in them."
"If you're nice to them you take them away from her."
"No, Bobby. It's a funny thing, but it isn't so easy as you think to get Eleanor's men away from her."
"Ah, you've tried?"
"She has a funny kind of hold on them. It's her brains. She has brains, and they appreciate it. I don't often want her men. They're apt to be so dreadful. Do you remember the biologist with the pearl buttons on his boots? This one is in politics—or something. He has a funny name—O'Bannon."
"Oh, yes—Dan O'Bannon."
"You know him?"
"I used to know him in college. Lord, he was a wild man in those days!" Bobby snickered reminiscently. "And now he's the local district attorney."
"What does a district attorney do, Bobby?"
"Why, he's a fellow elected by the county to prosecute"
"Look here, Bobby, if the Emmonses ask you to spend this coming Sunday with them, go, because I'm going." She interrupted him because it was the kind of explanation that she had never been able to listen to. In fact she had so completely ceased to listen that she was unaware of having interrupted the answer to her own question, and Bobby did not care to bring the matter to her attention for fear her invitation to the Emmonses might be lost in the subsequent scuffle. Besides he esteemed it his own fault. Most people who ask you a question like that really mean to say, "Would there be anything interesting to me in the answer to this question? If not, for goodness' sake don't answer it." So he gladly abandoned defining the duties of the district attorney and answered her more important statement.
"Of course I'll go, only they haven't asked me."
"They will—or else I won't go. You'll come out on Friday afternoon."
"I can't, Lydia, until Saturday."
"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.