Which naturally made me cross. I drew from my quiver an arrow that I thought would penetrate his skin. “Mr. van Tuiver,” I said, “a man in your position must always be an object of gossip and scandal. Suppose some enemy were to send your wife an anonymous letter? Or suppose there were some woman who thought that you had wronged her?” I stopped. He gave me one keen look--and then again the impenetrable mask! “My wife will have to do as other women in her position do--pay no attention to scandal-mongers of any sort.” I paused, and then went on: “I believe in marriage. I consider it a sacred thing; I would do anything in my power to protect and preserve a marriage. But I hold that it must be an equal partnership. I would fight to make it that; and wherever I found that it could not be that, I would say it was not marriage, but slavery, and I would fight just as hard to break it. Can you not understand that attitude upon a woman’s part?” He gave no sign that he could understand. But still I would not give up my battle. “Mr. van Tuiver,” I pleaded, “I am a much older person than you. I have seen a great deal of life--I have seen suffering even worse than yours. And I am trying most earnestly to help you. Can you not bring yourself to talk to me frankly? Perhaps you have never talked with a woman about such matters--I mean, with a good woman. But I assure you that other men have found it possible, and never regretted the confidence they placed in me.” I went on to tell him about my own sons, and what I had done for them; I told him of a score of other boys in their class who had come to me, making me a sort of mother-confessor. I do not think that I was entirely deceived by my own eloquence--there was, I am sure, a minute or two when he actually wavered. But then the habits of a precocious life-time reasserted themselves, and he set his lips and told himself that he was Douglas van Tuiver. Such things might happen in raw Western colleges, but they were not according to the Harvard manner, nor the tradition of life in Fifth Avenue clubs. He could not be a boy! He had never had any boyhood, any childhood--he had been a state personage ever since he had known that he was anything. I found myself thinking suddenly of the thin-lipped old family lawyer, who had had much to do with shaping his character, and whom Sylvia described to me, sitting at her dinner-table and bewailing the folly of people who “admitted things.” That was what made trouble for family lawyers--not what people did, but what they admitted. How easy it was to ignore impertinent questions! And how few people had the wit to do it!-it seemed as if the shade of the thin-lipped old family lawyer were standing by Douglas van Tuiver’s side.