Who was this Mr. Rennard? this young and unknown Mr. Rennard who had a way of warming the air of a court-room to his own purposes? The question was asked: the questioners answered it. They gave him respect before he had clients: they gave him the beginnings of repute at a time when he had nothing else. Hating and fearing each other, they wanted Rennard on their side. Tom’s advance in the social world was synchronous. The ladies who give teas are the sort who care for unattached young men. They are unhappily married, or at least unsatisfyingly so: if they have children they wish to get free of loving them too much. Grown sons can be admired safely in a surrogate: grown daughters can be restrained from mastery in a fierce competition. The smart young man may be a weapon and a drug for the woman nearing forty with social honors to defend. He serves to protect her from life and to supply her with it. The relation has its hazards. It must run the course of the golden mean. The man must not really love, not really win his lady. For her sake, as for his. If she gives herself consciously to him, she will begin at once to bully him like a son or to use him up like a husband. He will become both son and husband instead of the escape from them. She will simply repeat her family failures concentratedly upon him. He will no longer provide a cure for her life. He will stand on the brink of disaster or dismissal. Through no prescience and no conscious cunning; rather by the balance of his nature, Tom was made for such a rôle. And Laura Duffield needed him. Meantime had come the climax of her troubles, Mrs. Duffield was getting a divorce. It was being borne in on her that her husband was nearly bankrupt and that her alimony would be in ironic contrast to the demands of her position. Her way of living was no small part of her “morality.” It was menaced.