Now he was getting his summons ready. Glancing idly into her mirror, she saw far away, like a little moving picture, the governess cart come into view. She intended to settle the matter before those giggling, goggle-eyed children came abreast. She was a person in whom action followed easily and instantly from the decision to act. Most people, after making a decision, hesitate like a stream above a waterfall, and then plunging too quickly, end in foam and whirlpools. But Lydia's will, for good or evil, flowed with a steady current. She looked down at the seat beside her for her mesh bag, opened it and found that Evans, who was a good deal of a goose, had forgotten to put her purse in it, although she knew bridge was to be played. Lydia looked up and saw that the officer of the law had followed her gesture with his eyes. She slipped Bobby's bracelet off her arm, and holding her hand well over the edge of the car dropped it on the road. She heard it tinkle on the hard surface. "You dropped something," he said. "No." He swung a gaitered leg from the motorcycle and picked up the bracelet. "Isn't this yours?" She smiled very slightly and shook her head, once again in complete mastery of the situation. "Whose is it then?" "I think it must be yours," she answered with a sort of sweet contempt, and still looking him straight in the eye she leaned over and put her gear in first. He said nothing, and her car began to move forward. Presently she heard the sound of a motorcycle going in the opposite direction. She smiled to herself. There was always a way. She found them waiting for her at Eleanor's, and she felt at once that the atmosphere was hostile; but when Lydia really liked people, and she really liked all the three who were waiting, she had command of a wonderfully friendly cooperative sort of gayety that was hard to resist. She liked Eleanor Bellington better than any woman she knew. They had been friends since their school days. Eleanor had brains and a dry, bitter tongue, usually silent, and she wasn't the least bit afraid of Lydia. She was blond, plain, aristocratic, independent and some years Lydia's senior. Fearless in thought, she was conservative in conduct. All her activity was in the intellectual field, or else vicariously, through the activity of others. There were always two or three interesting men, coming men, men of whom one said on speaking of them "You know, he's the man----" who seemed to be intimately woven into Eleanor's everyday life. A never-ending subject of discussion among Miss Bellington's friends was the exact emotional standing of these intimacies of Nellie's.