"I'll do it if you're sure it won't hurt Blan in any way," she said. "I'm positive it won't," Truggles lied. * * * * * The Social Standards Protective League was a small organization, composed largely of elderly women and a few men. Masefield Truggles had never meant for it to serve as anything more than a nucleus. Before he lit the flame, he spent a week building up his tinder pile. He announced, by word of mouth and through the columns of _The Clarion_, Marston Hill's small daily newspaper, that the Social Standards Protective League would hold a series of special meetings every afternoon for a week. The public would be welcome, he said, and there would be startling revelations of vice conditions in Marston Hill. Truggles rented the city's ancient, rickety auditorium for the meetings, and invited Mayor Ben Sands to speak at the first one. Lois Forsythe sat on the platform that first afternoon, but Truggles did not call on her. Sands made a routine talk, the kind any mayor of a small town might, on the conscientiousness of Marston Hill's three-man police force, the lack of crime in the town, the recreational facilities and educational methods being utilized to see that the young people did not stray on the wrong path. He received polite applause. When he had finished, Truggles arose and said: "Sometimes after talks of this kind, we throw our meetings open to questions from the audience. Instead, I would like to ask Mayor Sands one question. Does he recall that I complained to him not long ago about the activities of Blan Forsythe, and what the tenor of the conversation was?" "Why, yes," answered Sands, surprised. "You accused Blan of practicing polygamy. I told you that you'd been listening to too much gossip, and that Blan was doing biological research. I don't believe these good people would be interested in the nature of the research." "I do," answered Truggles, "and it will be the subject of tomorrow's meeting. I have investigated these experiments, and they are well worth hearing about. Thank you, Mr. Mayor." Truggles was a past master at building tension. The next day, he apologized for changing the program and gave a lecture on polygamy in human society. Backgrounded with considerable research at the Marston Hill public library, he described polygamy in Biblical times, in savage communities, in China and the Mohammedan world and among the early Mormons in the United States. He told of the social objections to polygamy and the progress made in eliminating it as a way of life. The following day, he described Forsythe's research with tetraploid plants--not too accurately, but that didn't matter with this audience--and skillfully translated chromosome doubling into human terms until his final revelation that Forsythe was a tetraploid man left them gasping. And, the fourth day, he told, with some embroidery, of Forsythe's polygamy.