I came away from my friend's with the heroic determination to prevent Miss Leigh's life from being ruined and to accomplish this by the satisfactory method of capturing her myself. My resolve was a little dampened by reading in a newspaper next day the headlines announcing an "Important Engagement," which though no names were used pointed clearly at Miss Leigh and the hopeful heir and partner of Mr. James Canter, Sr. Reading carefully the article, I found that the engagement was only believed to exist. I felt like a reprieved criminal. He who has not felt the pangs of a consuming passion has no conception of the true significance of life. The dull, cold, indifferent lover knows nothing of the half-ecstatic anguish of the true lover or the wholly divine joy of reconciliation even in anticipation. As well may the frozen pole dream of the sun-bathed tropic. It was this joy that I hugged in my heart even in face of the declaration of her expected engagement. Next day I was talking to two or three young fellows when Canter and some episode in which he had figured as rather more defiant than usual of public opinion, came up, and one of them said to another, a friend of his and an acquaintance of mine, "What is Jim going to do when he gets married? He'll have to give up his 'friends' then. He can't be running two establishments." "Oh! Jim ain't going to get married. He's just fooling around." "Bet you--the old man's wild for it." "Bet you--not now. He can't. Why, that woman--" "Oh! he can pension her off." "Her?--which her?" "Well, all of 'em. If he don't get married soon, he won't be fit to marry." It was here that I entered the conversation. They had not mentioned any name--they had been too gentlemanly to do so. But I knew whom they had in mind, and I was inwardly burning. "He isn't fit to marry now," I said suddenly. "What!" They both turned to me in surprise. "No man who professes to be in love with any good woman," I said, "and lives as he lives is fit for any woman to marry. I am speaking generally," I added, to guard against the suspicion that I knew whom they referred to. "I know Mr. Canter but slightly; but what I say applies to him too." "Oh! you'd cut out a good many," laughed one of the young men with a glance at his friend. "No, gentlemen, I stand on my proposition. The man who is making love to a pure woman with a harlot's kisses on his lips is not worthy of either. He ought to be shot." "There'd be a pretty big exodus if your views were carried out," said one of them. "Well, I don't want to pose as any saint. I am no better than some other men; but, at least, I have some claim to decency, and that is fundamental. Your two-establishment gentry are no more nor less than a lot of thorough-paced blackguards." They appeared to be somewhat impressed by my earnestness, even though they laughed at it. "There are a good many of them," they said. "Your friends, the Socialists----"