“Perhaps they’re selling _you_ out,” she instantly suggested. “Why, of course they are doing that very thing!--while _you_ are driveling about honesty like a backwoods hypocrite of a church deacon.” “No, they’re not selling me out,” said I. “How do you know?” cried she. “I caught them at that trick in a former deal and in the early stages of this one. And I fixed things so that, while they have to trust me, I don’t trust them.” She laughed mockingly. “Godfrey, I think your mind must be going. You talking about sacrificing your fortune and your wife and your child for men who’ve tried to ruin you--men who are even now thinking out some scheme for doing it.... Suppose you saved yourself and let them go--what then? Wouldn’t you be rich? And when you were secure again couldn’t you pay them back what they lost if you were still foolish enough to think it necessary?” It was not the first time she had astonished me with the depth of her practical insight--and her skill at logic--when she cared to use her mind. “I had thought of saving myself and paying back afterwards,” said I. “But I’m not sure I’d save myself. It’s simply my one chance.” “Then you’ve got to take that chance,” said she. “I didn’t expect you to talk like this,” said I. “The only reason I haven’t spoken of my troubles before was that I feared you’d forbid me to do what I was being tempted to do.” And that was the truth about my feeling. I had always heard--and had firmly believed--that woman was somehow the exemplar of ideal morality, that it was she who kept men from being worse than they were, that the evil being done by men pursuing success was done without the knowledge of their pure, idealist wives and mothers and daughters. I can’t account for my stupidity in this respect. Had I not on every side the spectacle that gave the lie to the shallow pretense of feminine moral superiority? Was it not the women, with their insatiable appetite for luxury and splurge; was it not the women, with their incessant demands for money and ever more money; was it not the women, with their profound immorality of any and every class that earns nothing and simply spends; was it not the women, the _ladies_, who were edging on the men to get money, no matter how? For whom were the grand houses, the expensive hotels, the exorbitant flimsy clothing, the costly jewelry, the equipages, the opera boxes, the senseless, spendthrift squandering upon the degrading vanities of social position? I laughed somewhat cynically. “No wonder you’ve always refused to learn anything about business,” said I. “It’s a habit among big business men to refuse to know anything as to the details of a large transaction that can be carried through only by dirty work. If we don’t know, we can pretend that the dirty work isn’t being done by or for us--isn’t being done at all.”