"Are you interested in criminology?" I asked my companion, as she took the chair by my side. "If you are, here is entertainment for you."
She stared at me vacantly, and when I turned one of the pages to her she caught at her throat as if choking.
"Oh, this is awful!" she gurgled. "How could you show a thing like that to me?"
"My darling," I protested, soothingly, "I did not know you would feel that way. This is a book that Eggert has just lent me and I thought it might interest you."
"It is horrible!" she said, going to the open door as if for air. "The one glance I took was quite enough. What good can it do to print the faces of those unhappy people? It seems like catching a rat in a trap and bringing it out for dogs to tear."
She shut her eyes and stood there, still panting. What a nervous organism she had, to be sure!
"I will put it back on the shelf," I said, "and you shall never think of it again. I seem fated to wound your tender feelings. Dear little girl, you know I do not mean to."
But it was she who would not drop the subject.
"It is shameful to print such a book," she repeated. "It is like a proposal made just before we left America, to publish the names on the pension roll."
I had an opinion on the latter suggestion, decidedly in its favor. So I explained that it was feared there were names on the list that ought not to be there and believed that a publication of the roll would result in weeding these out.