"I think," his mother said, "we'd better come upstairs if we don't want to be interrupted." For on Sundays the back parlor was assigned to the young chemist, Mercier's successor, who assisted Mr. Ransome. Upstairs, the ordered room, polished to perfection, steadfast in its shining Sunday state, appeared as the irremovable seat of middle-class tradition, of family virtue, of fidelity and cleanliness, of sacred immutable propriety. And into the bosom of these safe and comfortable sanctities Ranny had brought horror and defilement and destruction. His Uncle Randall, try as he would, could not disguise from him that this was what he had done. Because of Ranny's wife, Respectability, the enduring soul of the Randalls and the Ransomes, could never lift up its head superbly any more. All infamies and all abominations that could defile a family were summed up for John Randall in the one word, adultery. It was worse than robbery or forgery or bankruptcy; it struck more home; it did more deadly havoc among the generations. It excited more interest; it caused more talk; and therefore it marked you more and was not so easily forgotten. It reverberated. The more respectable you were the worse it was for you. If, among the Randalls and the Ransomes, such a plunge as Violet's was unheard of, it made the more terrific splash, a splash that covered the whole family. The Ransomes, to be sure, stood more in the center, they were more deplorably bespattered, and more, much more intimately tainted. But, by the very closeness of their family attachment, the mud of Violet's plungings would adhere largely to the Randalls, too. The taint would hang for years around him, John Randall, in his shop. He had hardly entered his sister's room before he had calculated about how long it would be before the scandal spread through Wandsworth High Street. It wasn't as if he hadn't been well known. As a member of the Borough Council he stuck in the public eye where other men would have slipped through into obscurity. It was really worse for him than any of them.