o'
was now attracting, and make them pay the bulk of the town tax, the
better for the land that working men wanted to get a living on. In
helping the Northwick girls to keep all they could out of the clutches
of their father's creditors, he held that he was only defending their
rights; and any fight against a corporation was a kind of holy war. He
professed to be getting on very comfortably with his conscience, and he
promised that he would not let it worry other people. To Mr. Gerrish he
made excuses for taking charge of the affairs of two friendless women,
when he ought to have joined Gerrish in punishing them for their
father's sins, as any respectable man would. He asked Gerrish to
consider the sort of fellow he had always been, drinking up his own
substance, while Gerrish was thriftily devouring other people's houses,
and begged him to make allowance for him.

The anomalous relation he held to the Northwicks afforded him so much
excitement and enjoyment, that he passed his devil's dividend, as he
called his quarterly spree. He kept straight longer than his fellow
citizens had known him to do for many years. But Putney was one of those
men who could not be credited by people generally with the highest
motives. He too often made a mock of what people generally regarded as
the highest motives; he puzzled and affronted them; and as none of his
most intimate friends could claim that he was respectable in the
ordinary sense of the word, people generally attributed interested
motives, or at least cynical motives, to him. Adeline Northwick profited
by a call she made upon Dr. Morrell for advice about her dyspepsia, to
sound him in regard to Putney's management of her affairs; and if the
doctor's powders had not so distinctly done her good, she might not have
been able to rely upon the assurance he gave her, that Putney was acting
wisely and most disinterestedly toward her and her sister.

"He has such a strange way of talking, sometimes," she said.

But she clung to Putney, and relied upon him in everything, not so much
because she implicitly trusted him, as because she knew no one else to
trust. The kindness that Mr. Hilary had shown for them in the first of
their trouble, had, of course, become impossible to both the sisters. He
had, in fact, necessarily ceased to offer it directly, and Sue had
steadily rejected all the overtures Louise made her since they last met.
Louise wanted to come again to see her; but Sue evade