courts or to be settled discreetly in private. He was New York’s ablest representative of a type of lawyer that modern social conditions have produced: a specialist in domestic affairs—and one, when profitable dissension or threatening scandal did not exist, who knew how to create such. It was gossiped that he kept a careful record of all tangled relations among the rich, of the details of every delicate situation, and watched and bided his time until at length the affair threatened to explode into a scandal—and then he acted. In this study there was a huge “Scandal File,” so gossip had it; but Clifford, looking about, saw no such fabled article of furniture.

[26]

At that moment Loveman entered, his tonsured head and rope-girdled dressing-gown giving him the appearance of a somewhat jolly and rakish monk.

“Good-morning, Clifford,” he exclaimed, cordially holding out his hand. “Mightily like a Christian of you, looking an old tramp up.”

“They told me at your office that you were sick.”

Loveman waved Clifford into a chair, took one himself and crossed his small, exquisitely slippered feet. “That’s what I told the office, but I didn’t tell ’em what sort of sickness it was. My boy,”—with a frank, engaging grin, which was one of the many qualities that made this strange man so popular,—“do you perceive any adequate excuse for a man of[27] my supposedly sensible years starting in at 11.30 P.M. on a mixed-drink Marathon?”

[27]

P.M.

“I can’t say,” smiled Clifford, “without a knowledge of the prior—”

“Don’t be legally cautious with an incautious lawyer. There was no excuse.” Loveman shook his round head solemnly. “There was provocation, though. You bet there was provocation. Were you at the opening last night of ‘Orange Blossoms’?”

“No.”

“Congratulations. It’s a dam’ rotten show! And Nina Cordova—she’s all there off the stage, pretty, and clever, and one wise little girl, don’t you forget it!—but a dam’ rotten star and the voice of a guinea-hen that’s got the quinsy. And it cost sixty thousand dollars to get the curtain up last night, and I put up twenty thousand dollars of that boodle. Tell me, oh, why”—with a quaver of mock self-sympathy—“am I always going out of my own line and letting myself be played as a sucker by some manager or actress that wants 

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