ed
fervently with "O Lord!"

Not because it shocked him to think that there might be indiscretions
known to the lawyer of a chief of police which the chief might not wish
known to the world, but because, with the addition of this new coil to
his nephew's affairs, he was suddenly struck with the possibility of
still other coils in any one of which the saving element of indiscretion
might be wanting.

Suppose they should come upon one, just one impregnable honesty, one
soul whom the fear of exposure left unshaken. On such a possibility
rested the exemption of the Jaffry-Remingtons. It was the reference to
E. Eliot in his instructions to Betty which had awakened in Jaffry's
mind the disquieting reflection that just here might prove such an
impregnability. They probably wouldn't be able to "do anything" with E.
Eliot simply because she herself had never done anything she was afraid
to go to the public about. To do him justice, it never occurred to him
that in the case of a lady it was easily possible to invent something
which would be made to answer in place of an indiscretion.

Probably that was Martin Jaffry's own impregnability--that he wouldn't
have lied about a lady to save himself. What he did conclude was that
it was just this unbending quality of women, this failure to provide the
saving weakness, which unfitted them for political life.

He shuddered, seeing the whole fabric of politics fall in ruins around
an electorate composed largely of E. Eliots, feeling himself stripped
of everything that had so far distinguished him from the Noonans and the
Doolittles.

Out of his sudden need for reinstatement with himself, he raised in his
mind the vision of woman as the men of Martin Jaffry's world conceived
her--a tender, enveloping medium in which male complacency, unchecked
by any breath of criticism, reaches its perfect flower--the flower whose
fruit, eaten in secret and afar from the soil which nourishes it, is
graft, corruption and civic incompetence.

Instinctively his need directed him toward the Remington place.

Mrs. Brewster-Smith was glad to see him. Between George's hurried
departure and Jaffry's return several of the specters that haunt such
women's lives looked boldly in at the window.

There was the specter of scandal, as it touched the Remingtons, touching
that dearest purchase of femininity, social standing; there was the
specter of poverty, which threatened from the exposure of the source of
her