It was a mockery that he should be the counsel for old Jessamine. What did he owe the dotard except hatred for bringing into the world so pretty a perjurer? The father had made Tuliptree Farm almost untenable by his whimpering stupidity and the daughter had driven him into exile by her ruthless frivolity. From his law office and his hotel RoBards would flee to a club. He had joined the fashionable Union Club just formed, but the members always asked him about his wife, and he had to speak of her with affection and respect. The affection was still in his heart, but the respect—he marveled at his ability to adore one whom he despised, to hang his whole life on the broken reed of a little woman’s wavering fancy. He frequented the theatre but he found discomfort there, since almost all the stories dealt with tragic or comic flirtations. He liked to go to the Bowery Theatre, but it was always burning down. Mary Taylor, “Our Mary” as they called her, puzzled him because she had a reputation for private morality and yet she was a convincing actress of spicy rôles. Patty was not an actress at all—she was positively imbecile in the drawing-room plays she had taken part in; yet her private life proved that her home was but a stage to her. Behind the private life of people there was so often another private life. And he had never been admitted until now to the green room of his own domestic theatre. Patty was a convincing actress of Innocence. Moods of retaliation were frequent. There were opportunities enough. It amazed him now that he was alone in the city to see how many chances were offered him to make some other husband a fool. Young girls of fifteen or sixteen, who had not yet been married, or were only betrothed, dazed him by the black wisdom in their eyes. They scampered and made pretenses of terror before him like kittens or puppies begging him to pursue them. Others were to be had of a more public character. It was estimated that there were ten thousand downright wicked women in the town. The streets at night were so crowded with them that innocent young girls, poor seamstresses or polite damsels whom some emergency forced to be abroad, were not only ogled and bespoken, but sometimes seized and kissed by the loiterers. The haunts of evil were well known, some of them foul dens, but others mansions. Yet the very sense that Patty had absolved him of obligation to her; that she herself had severed their contract, annulled the temptation. What excitement could he find it taking sneakingly what nobody could prevent his taking openly?