"

"Now, Bobby, don't be absurd. Don't let that old man treat you like a
slave."

Lydia's attitude to Bobby's work was a trifle confusing. She wished him
to attain a commanding position in the financial world but had no
patience with his industry when it interfered with her own plans. The
attaining of any position at all seemed unlikely in Bobby's case. He was
a clerk in the great banking house of Gordon & Co., a firm which in the
course of a hundred and twenty-five years had built itself into the very
financial existence of the country. In almost any part of the civilized
globe to say you were with Gordon & Co. was a proud boast. But pride was
all that a man of Bobby's type was likely to get out of it. Promotion
was slow. Lydia talked of a junior partnership some day, but Bobby knew
that partnerships in Gordon & Co. went to qualities more positively
valuable than his. Sometimes he thought of leaving them, but he could
not bear to give up the easy honor of the connection.

It was better to be a doorkeeper with Gordon & Co. than a partner with
some ephemeral firm.

It amused him to hear her talk of Peter Gordon treating him like a
slave. The dignified, middle-aged head of the firm, whose business was
like an ancestral religion to him, hardly knew his clerks by sight.

"It isn't exactly servile to work half a day on Saturday," he said
mildly.

"They'd respect you more if you asserted yourself. Do come on Friday,
Bobby. I shall be so bored if you're not there."

He reflected that after all he would rather be dismissed by Gordon & Co.
than by the young lady beside him.

"Dearest Lydia, how nice you can be when you want to--like all tyrants."

They had reached the small deserted wooden hut that served as a railroad
station, and Lydia stopped the car.

"I suppose it's silly, but I wish you wouldn't say that--that I'm a
tyrant," she said appealingly. "I don't want to be, only so often I know
I know better what ought to be done. This afternoon, for instance,
wasn't it much better for us all to play outside instead of in that
stuffy little room of Eleanor's? Was that being a tyrant?"

"Yes, Lydia, it was; but I like it. All I ask is a little tyrant in my
home."

She sighed so deeply that he leaned over and kissed her cool cheek.

"Good-by, my dear," he said.

The kiss did not go badly. He had done it as if, though not sure of
success, he was not adventuring on absolutely untried ground.

"I think you'd better