Piers laughed over the telephone. Of course she hadn't been. Really, his tone seemed to say, Eleanor allowed her socialistic ideas to run away with her judgment. Poor Lydia hadn't meant any harm--it was the sort of thing that might happen to anyone. Oh, they might try her--as a matter of form. But what could they do to her?
"Well," said Eleanor, "people have been known to go to prison for killing someone on the highway."
Piers agreed as if her point was irrelevant.
"Oh, yes, some of those careless chauffeurs. But a thing like this is always arranged. You'll see. You couldn't get a grand jury to indict a girl like Lydia. It will be arranged."
"Arranged," thought Eleanor as she hung up the receiver, "only at the expense of Dan O'Bannon's honor or career."
She did not want that, and yet she did want to help Lydia. She felt deeply concerned for the girl, more aware than usual of her warm, honest affection for her. She often thought of Lydia as she had appeared on her first day at school. The head mistress had brought her into the study and introduced her to the teacher in charge. All the girls had looked up and stared at the small, black-eyed new pupil with the bobbed hair and slim legs in black silk stockings, one of which she was cleverly twisting about the other. She was shy and monosyllabic, utterly unused to children of her own age; and yet even then she had shown a certain capacity for comradeship, for under the elbows of the two tall teachers she had directed a slow, shy smile at the girls as much as to say, "Wait till we get together! We'll fix them!"
She was very well turned out, for Miss Bennett had just taken charge, but not so well equipped mentally, the long succession of her governesses having each spent more time in destroying the teachings of her predecessors than in making progress on her own account. Much to Lydia's chagrin, she was put in a class of children younger than she.
This was shortly before Christmas. Before the second term she had managed to get herself transferred into a class of her contemporaries. She had never studied before, because in old times it had seemed to her the highest achievement lay in thwarting her governesses. But the instant it became desirable to attain knowledge she found no difficulty in attaining it. It had amused her studying late into the night when Miss Bennett thought she was asleep.