It is true that Penny, at the last moment, had prevailed on George to put off the relief of his feelings by public repudiation of his political connections, at least until after a conference with the police. And to George's fear that the newspapers would get the news from the police before he had had a chance to repudiate, he had countered with a suggestion, drawn from an item in the private history of the chief--known to him through his father's business--which he felt certain would quicken the chief's sense of the propriety of keeping George's predicament from the press. "My God!" said George in amazement, and Martin Jaffry had responded fervently with "O Lord!" Not because it shocked him to think that there might be indiscretions known to the lawyer of a chief of police which the chief might not wish known to the world, but because, with the addition of this new coil to his nephew's affairs, he was suddenly struck with the possibility of still other coils in any one of which the saving element of indiscretion might be wanting. Suppose they should come upon one, just one impregnable honesty, one soul whom the fear of exposure left unshaken. On such a possibility rested the exemption of the Jaffry-Remingtons. It was the reference to E. Eliot in his instructions to Betty which had awakened in Jaffry's mind the disquieting reflection that just here might prove such an impregnability. They probably wouldn't be able to "do anything" with E. Eliot simply because she herself had never done anything she was afraid to go to the public about. To do him justice, it never occurred to him that in the case of a lady it was easily possible to invent something which would be made to answer in place of an indiscretion. Probably that was Martin Jaffry's own impregnability--that he wouldn't have lied about a lady to save himself. What he did conclude was that it was just this unbending quality of women, this failure to provide the saving weakness, which unfitted them for political life. He shuddered, seeing the whole fabric of politics fall in ruins around an electorate composed largely of E. Eliots, feeling himself stripped of everything that had so far distinguished him from the Noonans and the Doolittles. Out of his sudden need for reinstatement with himself, he raised in his mind the vision of woman as the men of Martin Jaffry's world conceived her--a tender, enveloping medium in which male complacency, unchecked by any breath of criticism, reaches its perfect flower--the flower whose fruit, eaten in secret and afar from the soil which nourishes it, is graft, corruption and civic incompetence. Instinctively his need directed him toward the Remington place. Mrs. Brewster-Smith was glad to see him. Between George's hurried departure and Jaffry's return several of the specters that haunt such women's lives looked boldly in at the window.