You know, perhaps,
the type of man or woman who, raised in an atmosphere of comparative
comfort and some small social pretension, and being short of those gray
convolutions in the human brain-pan which permit an individual to see
life in all its fortuitousness and uncertainty, proceed because of an
absence of necessity and the consequent lack of human experience to
take themselves and all that they do in the most reverential and
Providence-protected spirit. The Hon. Chaffee Thayer Sluss reasoned
that, because of the splendid ancestry on which he prided himself, he
was an essentially honest man. His father had amassed a small fortune
in the wholesale harness business. The wife whom at the age of
twenty-eight he had married--a pretty but inconsequential type of
woman--was the daughter of a pickle manufacturer, whose wares were in
some demand and whose children had been considered good "catches" in
the neighborhood from which the Hon. Chaffee Sluss emanated. There had
been a highly conservative wedding feast, and a honeymoon trip to the
Garden of the Gods and the Grand Canon. Then the sleek Chaffee, much
in the grace of both families because of his smug determination to rise
in the world, had returned to his business, which was that of a
paper-broker, and had begun with the greatest care to amass a
competence on his own account.

The Honorable Chaffee, be it admitted, had no particular faults, unless
those of smugness and a certain over-carefulness as to his own
prospects and opportunities can be counted as such. But he had one
weakness, which, in view of his young wife's stern and somewhat
Puritanic ideas and the religious propensities of his father and
father-in-law, was exceedingly disturbing to him. He had an eye for
the beauty of women in general, and particularly for plump, blonde
women with corn-colored hair. Now and then, in spite of the fact that
he had an ideal wife and two lovely children, he would cast a
meditative and speculative eye after those alluring forms that cross
the path of all men and that seem to beckon slyly by implication if not
by actual, open suggestion.

However, it was not until several years after Mr. Sluss had married,
and when he might have been considered settled in the ways of
righteousness, that he actually essayed to any extent the role of a gay
Lothario. An experience or two with the less vigorous and vicious
girls of the streets, a tentative love affair with a girl in his of