p changing the
policemen. Just as you reached a satisfactory arrangement with one of
them you found yourself confronted by another. She wasn't in the least
alarmed, though he was scolding her roughly--scolding, to be candid,
very much as her own father had done. She did not object to his words,
but she hated the power of the law behind them--hated the idea that she
herself was not the final judge of the rate at which she should drive.

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 to