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.
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."
"Attaching!" he broke out with a suppressed irritation she had never seen--a strange hate of her, Eleanor, for saying such a thing. "Arrogant, inflexible, using all her gifts--her brains and her incredible beauty--just to advance her own selfish ends!"
An impulse based partly on pure loyalty but partly on the idea that she could improve her position by showing her friend was not quite a monster made her answer, "You wouldn't believe, Dan, how if she really cares for you she can be tender almost clinging."