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atan's ways into our peaceful midst," and against Charley Braddock with his "ante-room to Sheol"--the Reverend Sweetser had just learned the distinction between Sheol and Hades. The Presbyterian preacher wrestled spiritually with Will Cauldwell and so wrought upon his depression that he gave out a solemn statement of confession, remorse and reform. In painting himself in dark colors he painted Jack Dumont jet black. Pauline had known that Dumont was "lively"--he was far too proud of his wild oats wholly to conceal them from her. And she had all the tolerance and fascinated admiration of feminine youth for the friskiness of masculine freedom. Thus, though she did not precisely approve what he and his friends had done, she took no such serious view of it as did her parents and his. The most she could do with her father was to persuade him to suspend sentence pending the conclusion of an investigation into Jack's doings at the University of Michigan and in Detroit. Colonel Gardiner was not so narrow or so severe as Jack said or as Pauline thought. He loved his daughter; so he inquired thoroughly. He knew that his daughter loved Dumont; so he judged liberally. When he had done he ordered the engagement broken and forbade Dumont the house. "He is not wild merely; he is--worse than you can imagine," said the colonel to his wife, in concluding his account of his discoveries and of Dumont's evasive and reluctant admissions--an account so carefully expurgated that it completely misled her. "Tell Pauline as much as you can--enough to convince her." This, when Mrs. Gardiner was not herself convinced. She regarded the colonel as too high-minded to be a fit judge of human frailty; and his over-caution in explanation had given her the feeling that he had a standard for a husband for their daughter which only another such rare man as himself could live up to. Further, she had always been extremely reserved in mother-and-daughter talk with Pauline, and thus could not now give her a clear idea of what little she had been able to gather from Colonel Gardiner's half-truths. This typical enacting of a familiar domestic comedy-tragedy had the usual result: the girl was confirmed in her original opinion and stand. "Jack's been a little too lively," was her unexpressed conclusion from her mother's dilution of her father's dilution of the ugly truth. "He's sorry and won't do it again, and--well, I'd hate a milksop. Father
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