Lydia liked Tim Andrews too--a young man of universal friendships and no emotions; but most necessary of all to her enjoyment was Bobby Dorset, who came out to meet her, sauntering down the steps with his hands in his pockets. He looked exactly as a young man ought to look--physically fit, masculine. He was young--younger than his twenty-six years. There wasn't a line of any kind in his clean-shaven face, and the time had come--had almost come--when something ought to have been written there. The page was remaining blank too long. That was the only criticism possible of Bobby's appearance, and perhaps only an elderly critic would have thought of making it. Lydia certainly did not. When he smiled at her, showing his regular, handsome teeth, she thought he was the nicest-looking person she knew. Just as she had expected, the bridge table was set inside the house, and while she was protesting and having it moved to the terrace she mentioned that she was late because she had had a fuss with Miss Bennett. "Dear little Benny," said Andrews. "She's like a nice brown-eyed animal with gray fur, isn't she?" "Tim always talks as if he were in love with Benny." "She's so gentle, Lydia, and you are so ruthless with her," said Dorset. "I have to be, Bobby," answered Lydia, and perhaps to no one else would she have stooped to offer an explanation. "She's gentle, but marvelously persistent. She gets her own way by slow infiltration. I wish you'd all tell me what to do. Benny is a person on whom what you say in a critical way makes no impression until you say it so as to hurt her feelings, and then it makes no impression because she's so taken up with her feelings being hurt. That's my problem with her." "It's everybody's problem with everybody," replied Eleanor. "She likes to ask her dull friends to the house when I'm there to entertain them." "Entertain them with a blackjack," said Bobby. "She had two prison reformers there to-day--old women with pear-shaped faces, and I had a perfectly horrid morning in town trying to get some rags to put on my back, and--Nell, will you tell me why you recommended Lurline to me? I never saw such atrocious clothes." "I didn't recommend her," answered Nellie, unstampeded by the attack. "I told you that pale, pearl-like chorus girl dressed there, and your latent desire to dress like a chorus girl----" "Oh, Lydia doesn't want to dress like a chorus girl!" "Thank you, Bobby." "She wants to dress like the savages in Aida." "In mauve _maillots_ and chains?" "In tiger skins and beads, and crouch through the jungle." "I was so sulky I didn't give a cent to prison reform. Do you think prisons ought to be made too comfortable? I don't want to be cruel, but----" "Well, it's something, my dear, that you don't want to be." "You mean I am? That's what Benny says. But I'm not. Is this ten cents a point?"