“Good-night, boy! See you to-morrow,” exclaimed Fenton hurriedly. Then he walked onward alone.
“I went there,” he was saying to himself, “to get a line on the youngster’s affair. But the cold, hard fact is that I forgot all about him.”...
At that same moment Percy-Bartlett and Buchanan Budd were smoking their good-night cigars together at the club.
“It is really too bad,” Budd was saying, “that the newspapers have been able to print so much scandal about our set. But I suppose there is no way to prevent it.”
“But there is a way,” returned Percy-Bartlett almost sternly. “What we need in the inner circle is more heroism and less heroics. If noblesse oblige means anything at all in these days, it demands of those who live up to its behests that they be self-contained, not hysterical. There is no necessity for a domestic tragedy getting into print if the man or woman who is wronged is fundamentally worthy of a place in the most select coterie on earth.”
“You would rather wink at crime than have the public gossip about you, then?” asked Budd.
“I would—a thousand times!” answered Percy-Bartlett, throwing away his cigar and saying “good-night” cheerily.
CHAPTER X.
“I am not in the mood for listening to the confessions of a frivolous boy,” remarked John Fenton, looking up from his desk in the city room of the Trumpet at Richard Stoughton on the afternoon following Mrs. Percy-Bartlett’s musicale.