“How do you do?” said Atherton, after allowing him to sit for a certain time in the silence, which expressed better than words the familiarity that existed between them in spite of the lawyer's six or seven years of seniority. Halleck leaned forward and tapped the floor with his stick; then he fell back again, and laid his cane across the arms of his chair, and drew a long breath. “Atherton,” he said, “if you had found a blackguard of your acquaintance drunk on your doorstep early one morning, and had taken him home to his wife, how would you have expected her to treat you the next time you saw her?” The lawyer was too much used to the statement, direct and hypothetical, of all sorts of cases, to be startled at this. He smiled slightly, and said, “That would depend a good deal upon the lady.” “Oh, but generalize! From what you know of women as Woman, what should you expect? Shouldn't you expect her to make you pay somehow for your privity to her disgrace, to revenge her misery upon you? Isn't there a theory that women forgive injuries, but never ignominies?” “That's what the novelists teach, and we bachelors get most of our doctrine about women from them.” He closed his novel on the paper-cutter, and, laying the book upon the table, clasped his hands together at the back of his head. “We don't go to nature for our impressions; but neither do the novelists, for that matter. Now and then, however, in the way of business, I get a glimpse of realities that make me doubt my prophets. Who had this experience?” “I did.” “I'm sorry for that,” said Atherton. “Yes,” returned Halleck, with whimsical melancholy; “I'm not particularly adapted for it. But I don't know that it would be a very pleasant experience for anybody.” He paused drearily, and Atherton said, “And how did she actually treat you?” “I hardly know. I hadn't been at the pains to look them up since the thing happened, and I had been carrying their squalid secret round for a fortnight, and suffering from it as if it were all my own.” Atherton smiled at the touch of self-characterization. “When I met her and her husband and her baby to-day,--a family party,--well, she made me ashamed of the melodramatic compassion I had been feeling for her. It seemed that I had been going about unnecessarily, not to say impertinently, haggard with the recollection of her face as I saw it when she opened the door for her blackguard and me that morning. She looked as if nothing unusual had happened at our last meeting. I couldn't brace up all at once: I behaved like a sneak, in view of her serenity.” “Perhaps nothing unusual _had_ happened,” suggested Atherton.