ou want to ask someone down to keep you
company, do. I'm going to be late for dinner."

Miss Bennett smiled and nodded, recognizing this as a peace
demonstration. Fourteen years had taught her that Lydia was not without
generosity.

Fourteen years ago this coming winter the Thornes had entered Miss
Bennett's life. Old Joe Thorne had come by appointment to her little New
York apartment. The appointment had been made by a friend of Miss
Bennett's--Miss Bennett's friends were always looking for something
desirable for her in those days. Her family, who had been identified
with New York for a hundred and fifty years, had gradually declined in
fortune until the panic of 1893 had almost wiped out the little fortune
of Adeline and her mother, the last of the family. Adeline had been
brought up, not in luxury but in a comfortable, unalterable feminine
idleness. She had always had all the clothes she needed to go about
among the people she knew, and they were the people who had everything.
The Bennetts had never kept a carriage, but they had never stinted
themselves in cabs. The truth was they had never stinted themselves in
anything that they really wanted. And Adeline, when she found herself
alone in the world at thirty, with an income of only a few thousand,
continued the family tradition of having what she wanted. She took a
small apartment, which she contrived to make charming, and she lived
nicely by the aid of her old French nurse, who came and cooked for her
and dressed her and turned her out as perfectly as ever. She continued
to dine out every night, and though nominally she spent her summers in
New York as an economy, she was always on somebody's yacht or in
somebody's country house. She paid any number of visits and enjoyed life
more than most people.

Her friends, however, for she had the power of creating real
attachments, were not so well satisfied. At first they were persuaded
that Adeline would marry--it was so obviously the thing for Adeline to
do--but she was neither designing nor romantic. She lacked both the
reckless emotion which may lead one to marry badly and the cold-blooded
determination to marry well.

She was just past forty the day Joe Thorne came. She could still see him
as he entered in his blue overcoat with a velvet collar. A big powerful
man with prominent eyes like Bismarck's, and a heavy dark brown mustache
bulging over his upper lip. He did not expect to give much time to the
interview.