Charles! Her father won't let her name be mentioned!"

The employer eyed him gravely, pulling on his gloves. The story alluded to was not unknown to him: how one modern girl, claiming more Freedom than existed, had too rashly crossed the great gulf, and how, her enterprise proving fatally unsuccessful, she had lately come home again. He felt very sorry for Miss Trevenna.

"Fact!—her mother visits her in secret, in lodgings," said his secretary, dropping his eager voice further. "A sad case—sad, yes—but, my dear fellow, can we allow our girls to run off with other people's husbands? No! Morals," said Judge Blenso, sternly, "are the bulwark of the nation!—that's what I say! Am I right, Charles?"

"NO! MORALS ARE THE BULWARK OF THE NATION!"

Charles said that he was perfectly right. He then proposed that the Judge should knock off work for the night, forthwith. But the Judge looked rather shocked at the suggestion, and began to clack vigorously at Dionysius.

"There's really no hurry about this short stuff, you know. Why not go down and cheer Mrs. Herman up a bit? She always appreciates a call from you."

The relative's hand irresistibly rose to his mustache.

"A fine woman, a charmin' fine widow-woman," said he, in his rich voice. "But!—business before pleasure, Charles. That's my way, my boy."

However, the ringing motto seemed a little too good to live up to. Hardly had the front door shut on Charles when Judge Blenso—he rather insisted on the official title, now that he was secretary—hooded his old typewriter for the night, turned down the light in the green-domed lamp on the table, and descended to visit his landlady. That he had small reverence for his half-uncle's New Thinking now became clear. The Judge left the Studio (as he himself had christened it), chuckling silently to himself, and on the steps began to chant aloud a sort of gay recitative of his own composition. The chant went a beat to every step, thus: "Cracking—piffle—walnuts—piffle—in a—sort of—piffle—sadness!"

II

The Redmantle Club was more advanced than Charles, and he knew it. And when he told his relative that he was going to it for stimulus, he must have been secretly well aware that it was but a treacherous stimulus he was likely to get.

The Club had been founded by Mrs. 

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