“But, John——” The wife who never could decide whether she disapproved or admired her husband the more, remembered in the emergency to be guileful. “Would you crush the victim to cure the scourge? Shouldn’t chivalry protect the good name of that girl? At least, she is young.”
“And pure as a white violet. For once you are right. Excuse me a moment. I must find a telephone.”
He strode away.
“Mule and mad, at that—a mad mule!”
The finality of Catherine’s thought-tribute returned her to her own predicament. Her shrug redraped about her shoulders the satin-smooth mantle of her social superiority. There was a chance that she might escape inclusion in whatever notoriety should ensue. Did not a woman and a mother—the occasion evoked a thought of Jackie—owe her first duty to herself? Let John take the consequences of his mania for reform, even to being advertised as loitering alone at the lingerie show!
Directly upon the decision to detach herself from possibly unpleasant consequences, she skimmed the edge of the crowd and left the store.
When John Cabot returned to the stage he saw that Seff already was surrounded by the reporters. Mrs. Hutton stood at his elbow, a bottle from which she evidently had poured some sort of restorative in one hand, an emptied glass in the other.
The shopman looked distressed, either by the dose pressed upon him or by his recent experience—perhaps by both. He was speaking with something of the fluency of his recent “speech,” the while adjusting his delicately-toned tie and brushing from one sleeve a reminder of his fall.
“I am Vincent Seff, owner of this establishment. A slight misunderstanding occurred inside, yes. But I have a hope that you good people, also guests at my entertainment, will respect my hospitality enough to withhold its unfortunate finale from your papers.”
The press representatives, three women and a lone man, looked dubious at this hypothetical claim. A second man, tilted in a chair against the wall, who was in the act of finishing a creditable sketch of the manikin, lifted to Cabot a companionable grin.