aside as unworthy. His warm, sympathetic heart ached for her; he knew
she needed him as women like her must ever need the kind of man he
wanted to be, the kind he had always striven to be. Had he been
egotist enough to set a value upon himself, he would have told himself
she was worthy of him; yet a damnable set of damnable man-made
circumstances over which he had no control hedged them about and kept
them apart. It was terrible, so he reflected, to know that, even if
Nan should live the life of a saint from the hour of her child's birth
until the hour of her death, a half-century hence, yet would she fail
to atone for her single lapse while there still lived one who
knew--and remembered. He, Donald McKaye, might live down a natural
son, but Nan Brent could not. The contemplation of this social
phenomenon struck him with peculiar force, for he had not hitherto
considered the amazing inequalities of a double standard of morals.

For the first time in his life, he could understand the abject
deference that must be shown to public opinion. He, who considered
himself, and not without reason, a gentleman, must defer to the
inchoate, unreasoning, unrelenting, and barbaric point of view of men
and women who hadn't sense enough to pound sand in a rat-hole or
breeding enough to display a reasonable amount of skill in the
manipulation of a knife and fork. Public opinion! Bah! Deference to a
fetish, a shibboleth, to the ancient, unwritten law that one must not
do that which hypocrites condemn and cowards fear to do, unless,
indeed, one can "get away with it."

Ah, yes! The eleventh commandment: "Thou shalt not be discovered." It
had smashed Nan Brent, who had violated it, desolated her, ruined
her--she who had but followed the instinct that God Almighty had given
her at birth--the instinct of sex, the natural yearning of a trustful,
loving heart for love, motherhood, and masculine protection from a
brutal world. More. Not satisfied with smashing her, public opinion
insisted that she should remain in a perennial state of smash. It was
abominable!

Nan had told him she had never been married, and a sense of delicacy
had indicated to him that this was a subject upon which he must not
appear to be curious. To question her for the details would have been
repugnant to his nicely balanced sense of the fitness of things.
Nevertheless, he reflected, if her love had been illicit, was it more
illicit than that of the woman who enters in