ed
and embarrassing hand-shakings. Ransome met it with his head in the air,
clear-eyed, defiant of their sympathy.

"I think," his mother said, "we'd better come upstairs if we don't want
to be interrupted." For on Sundays the back parlor was assigned to the
young chemist, Mercier's successor, who assisted Mr. Ransome.

Upstairs, the ordered room, polished to perfection, steadfast in its
shining Sunday state, appeared as the irremovable seat of middle-class
tradition, of family virtue, of fidelity and cleanliness, of sacred
immutable propriety. And into the bosom of these safe and comfortable
sanctities Ranny had brought horror and defilement and destruction.

His Uncle Randall, try as he would, could not disguise from him that
this was what he had done. Because of Ranny's wife, Respectability, the
enduring soul of the Randalls and the Ransomes, could never lift up its
head superbly any more. All infamies and all abominations that could
defile a family were summed up for John Randall in the one word,
adultery. It was worse than robbery or forgery or bankruptcy; it struck
more home; it did more deadly havoc among the generations. It excited
more interest; it caused more talk; and therefore it marked you more and
was not so easily forgotten. It reverberated. The more respectable you
were the worse it was for you. If, among the Randalls and the Ransomes,
such a plunge as Violet's was unheard of, it made the more terrific
splash, a splash that covered the whole family. The Ransomes, to be
sure, stood more in the center, they were more deplorably bespattered,
and more, much more intimately tainted. But, by the very closeness of
their family attachment, the mud of Violet's plungings would adhere
largely to the Randalls, too. The taint would hang for years around him,
John Randall, in his shop. He had hardly entered his sister's room
before he had calculated about how long it would be before the scandal
spread through Wandsworth High Street. It wasn't as if he hadn't been
well known. As a member of the Borough Council he stuck in the public
eye where other men would have slipped through into obscurity. It was
really worse for him than any of them.

All this was present in the back of John Randall's mind as he prepared
to deal efficiently with the catastrophe. Having unbuttoned his coat and
taken off his gloves with exasperating, slow, and measured movements, he
fairly sat down to it at the table, preserving his very finest