"Oh, judge, we are dreadfully worried."
"You mean about the Underwood case?"
Alicia nodded.
"Yes, Mr. Jeffries is terribly upset. As if the coming trial and all the rest of the scandal were not enough. But now we have to face something even worse, something that affects me even more than my husband. Really, I'm frantic about it."
"What's happened now?" asked the lawyer calmly.
"That woman is going on the stage, that's all!" she snapped.
"H'm," said the lawyer calmly.
"Just think!" she cried, "the name, 'Mrs. Howard Jeffries'—my name—paraded before the public! At a time when everything should be done to keep it out of the papers this woman is going to flaunt herself on the stage!"
She fanned herself indignantly, while the lawyer rapped his desk absent-mindedly with a paper cutter. Alicia went on:
"You know I have never met the woman. What is she like? I understand she's been bothering you to take the case of that worthless husband of hers. Do you know she had the impertinence to come to our house and ask Mr. Jeffries to help them? I asked my husband to describe her, but all I could get from him was that she was impertinent and impossible." She hesitated a moment, then she added: "Is she as pretty as her pictures in the paper? You've seen her, of course?"