as.

"Amory!" an anxious whisper.

"What's the trouble?"

"It's house detectives. My God, Amory--they're just looking for a
test-case--"

"Well, better let them in."

"You don't understand. They can get me under the Mann Act."

The girl followed him slowly, a rather miserable, pathetic figure in the
darkness.

Amory tried to plan quickly.

"You make a racket and let them in your room," he suggested anxiously,
"and I'll get her out by this door."

"They're here too, though. They'll watch this door."

"Can't you give a wrong name?"

"No chance. I registered under my own name; besides, they'd trail the
auto license number."

"Say you're married."

"Jill says one of the house detectives knows her."

The girl had stolen to the bed and tumbled upon it; lay there listening
wretchedly to the knocking which had grown gradually to a pounding. Then
came a man's voice, angry and imperative:

"Open up or we'll break the door in!"

In the silence when this voice ceased Amory realized that there were
other things in the room besides people... over and around the figure
crouched on the bed there hung an aura, gossamer as a moonbeam, tainted
as stale, weak wine, yet a horror, diffusively brooding already over
the three of them... and over by the window among the stirring curtains
stood something else, featureless and indistinguishable, yet strangely
familiar.... Simultaneously two great cases presented themselves side by
side to Amory; all that took place in his mind, then, occupied in actual
time less than ten seconds.

The first fact that flashed radiantly on his comprehension was the great
impersonality of sacrifice--he perceived that what we call love and
hate, reward and punishment, had no more to do with it than the date
of the month. He quickly recapitulated the story of a sacrifice he had
heard of in college: a man had cheated in an examination; his roommate
in a gust of sentiment had taken the entire blame--due to the shame
of it the innocent one's entire future seemed shrouded in regret and
failure, capped by the ingratitude of the real culprit. He had finally
taken his own life--years afterward the facts had come out. At the time
the story had both puzzled and worried Amory. Now he realized the truth;
that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective
office, it was like an inheritance of power--to certain people at
certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee