olice has for you all, you moralists! Ive proved to you that
you were utterly wrong on the moral point: now I'm going to shew you
that youre utterly wrong on the legal point; and I hope it will be a
lesson to you not to be so jolly cocksure next time.

WALPOLE. Rot! You were married already when you married her; and that
settles it.

LOUIS. Does it! Why cant you think? How do you know she wasnt married
already too?

B.B. { [all } Walpole! Ridgeon! RIDGEON { crying } This is beyond
everything! WALPOLE { out } Well, damn me! SIR PATRICK { together] } You
young rascal.

LOUIS [ignoring their outcry] She was married to the steward of a liner.
He cleared out and left her; and she thought, poor girl, that it was the
law that if you hadnt heard of your husband for three years you might
marry again. So as she was a thoroughly respectable girl and refused
to have anything to say to me unless we were married I went through the
ceremony to please her and to preserve her self-respect.

RIDGEON. Did you tell her you were already married?

LOUIS. Of course not. Dont you see that if she had known, she wouldnt
have considered herself my wife? You dont seem to understand, somehow.

SIR PATRICK. You let her risk imprisonment in her ignorance of the law?

LOUIS. Well, _I_ risked imprisonment for her sake. I could have been had
up for it just as much as she. But when a man makes a sacrifice of that
sort for a woman, he doesnt go and brag about it to her; at least, not
if he's a gentleman.

WALPOLE. What are we to do with this daisy?

LOUIS. [impatiently] Oh, go and do whatever the devil you please. Put
Minnie in prison. Put me in prison. Kill Jennifer with the disgrace of
it all. And then, when youve done all the mischief you can, go to church
and feel good about it. [He sits down pettishly on the old chair at the
easel, and takes up a sketching block, on which he begins to draw]

WALPOLE. He's got us.

SIR PATRICK [grimly] He has.

B. B. But is he to be allowed to defy the criminal law of the land?

SIR PATRICK. The criminal law is no use to decent people. It only helps
blackguards to blackmail their families. What are we family doctors
doing half our time but conspiring with the family solicitor to keep
some rascal out of jail and some family out of disgrace?

B. B. But at least it will punish him.

SIR PATRICK. Oh, yes: Itll punish him. Itll punish not only him but
everybody connected with him, innocent and guilty ali