She admired Albee deeply, almost dangerously, and she wanted to admire him more. She enjoyed all the symbols of his power. She liked the older, more important men of her acquaintance to come suing to her for an opportunity of meeting Albee socially. She liked to watch other women trying to draw him away from her. She even liked the way the traffic policemen would let her car through when he was in it. She liked all these things, not from vanity, as many girls would have liked them, but because they constantly held before her eyes the picture of Albee as a superman. And if Albee were a superman the problem of her life was solved. Then everything would be simple--to give her youth and beauty and money, her courage and knowledge of the world to making him supreme. It was true that he had not as yet asked her to marry him--had not even made love to her, unless admiration is love-making--but to Lydia that was a secondary consideration. The first thing was to make up her own mind. She had two great problems to face. At first he did not want to go out at all--did not want to enter her field. He appeared to think, as so many Americans do, that there was something trivial, almost immoral, in meeting your fellow creatures except in professional relations. The second problem was worse, that having overcome his reluctance, he began to like it too much, to take it too seriously. He had never had time for it before, he said, but actually he must have felt excluded from it, either at college, or as a young man in the legislature of his state. The first time he went to the opera with her--he was genuinely fond of music--she noticed this. Lydia's box was next to Mrs. Little's. The newspapers made her name impressive, but her slim white-haired presence made her more so. Lydia herself admired her, and if ever she thought of her own old age she thought she would like to be like Mrs. Little--a wish very unlikely of realization, for Mrs. Little had been molded by traditional obligations and sacrifices to duties which Lydia had never acknowledged. As they were waiting in the crowded lobby of the Thirty-ninth Street entrance--all the faces above velvets and furs peering out and all the footmen's faces peering in and everyone chattering and shouting and so little apparently accomplished in the way of clearing the crowd--Albee said: "Mrs. Little has asked me to dine on the sixteenth." Lydia caught something complaisant in the tone. The idea that he could be flattered by such an invitation was distasteful to her. "Did you accept?" she asked in a cold tone that she tried to make noncommittal. Fortunately politics had taught Albee caution. He had not accepted. He had said that he would let the great lady know in the morning. "Do you think that sort of thing will amuse you?"