them come to us, no matter _what_ happened?"

"Louise and I both tried to do that," said her son, "when we were there
together; and when I reported to them after Wellwater, I told them again
and again what our wish was."

"Well," said Mrs. Hilary, "I am glad we have done everything we could.
At first I doubted the wisdom of your taking Louise to see them; but now
I'm satisfied that it was right. And I'm satisfied that your father did
right in getting that wretched creature the chance he abused."

"Oh, yes," said Matt. "That was right. And I'm thoroughly glad he's out
of it. If he's still alive, I'm glad he's out of it."

Hilary had kept silent, miserably involved in his various remorses and
misgivings, but now he broke out. "And I think you're talking abominable
nonsense, Matt. I didn't get Northwick given that chance to enable him
to escape the consequences of his rascality. Why shouldn't he be
punished for it?"

"Because it wouldn't do the least good, to him or to any one else. It
wouldn't reform him, it wouldn't reform anything. Northwick isn't the
disease; he's merely the symptom. You can suppress him; but that won't
cure the disease. It's the whole social body that's sick, as this
article in the _Abstract_ implies."

"I don't see any such implication in it," his father angrily retorted.
"Your theory would form an excuse for the scoundrelism of every
scoundrel unhung. Where is the cure of the social body to begin if it
doesn't begin at home, with every man in it? I tell you, it would be a
very good thing for Northwick, and every rogue like him, if he could be
made serve his term in State's prison."

The controversy raged a long time without departing from these lines of
argument on either side. Mrs. Hilary listened with the impatience women
feel at every absence from the personal ground, the only ground of
reality. When Matt had got so far from it as to be saying to his father,
"Then I understand you to maintain that if A is properly punished for
his sins, B will practice virtue in the same circumstances and under the
same temptations that were too much for A," his mother tried to break in
upon them. She did not know much about the metaphysical rights and
wrongs of the question; she only felt that Matt was getting his father,
who loved him so proudly and indulgently, into a corner, and she saw
that this was unseemly. Besides, when anything wrong happens, a woman
always wants some one punished; some woman, fir