human
Dear little Benny, said Andrews.
gpt
She's like a nice brown-eyed animal with gray fur, isn't she?
human
Tim always talks as if he were in love with Benny.
gpt
She's so gentle, Lydia, and you are so ruthless with her,
human
I have to be, Bobby, answered Lydia, and perhaps to no one else would she have stooped to offer an explanation.
gpt
She's gentle, but marvelously persistent. She gets her own way by slow infiltration. I wish you'd all tell me what to do. Benny is a person on whom what you say in a critical way makes no impression until you say it so as to hurt her feelings, and then it makes no impression because she's so taken up with her feelings being hurt. That's my problem with her.
human
It's everybody's problem with everybody,
gpt
She likes to ask her dull friends to the house when I'm there to entertain them.
human
Entertain them with a blackjack,
gpt
She had two prison reformers there to-day--old women with pear-shaped faces, and I had a perfectly horrid morning in town trying to get some rags to put on my back, and--Nell, will you tell me why you recommended Lurline to me? I never saw such atrocious clothes.
human
I didn't recommend her, answered Nellie, unstampeded by the attack.
gpt
I told you that pale, pearl-like chorus girl dressed there, and your latent desire to dress like a chorus girl----
human
Oh, Lydia doesn't want to dress like a chorus girl!
gpt
Thank you, Bobby.
human
She wants to dress like the savages in Aïda.
gpt
In mauve _maillots_ and chains?
human
In tiger skins and beads, and crouch through the jungle.
gpt
I was so sulky I didn't give a cent to prison reform. Do you think prisons ought to be made too comfortable? I don't want to be cruel, but----
human
Well, it's something, my dear, that you don't want to be.
gpt
You mean I am? That's what Benny says. But I'm not. Is this ten cents a point?