Under the Law

by Edwina Stanton Babcock

Sard was silent for a moment, then, "He is quite terrible," she said quietly; "it would make things worse in every way to go to Dad now—besides you know as well as I do that he could officially do nothing, but," Sard, looking at them all, spoke low, "I have an idea, I've been thinking."

They always listened respectfully to Sard. She was the stuff of which leaders are made. Indifferent to popularity, caring only for the enterprise in which she was engaged, cool, controlled, just as she was in card games or swimming and tennis, now she took charge of the group as she had done a hundred times before.

"There's that famous lawyer who is spending the summer in the organ builder's house on the mountain; you know about him."

"Don't I," spoke up Minga, eagerly. "He's a great friend of my Cousin Eleanor Ledyard and her little Pudge; he writes Pudge the funniest letters.... My!" sighed Minga. "He's frightfully important; he's been counsel for all the millionaires and magnates, he has eyes like X-rays, they look you through and through. Wow! I'm afraid of him."

The other girl hesitated. "He's famous and all that," she said slowly. "Father knows him well, but I've read things he has written in the magazines and—and—he isn't—well, you know how things are done?" The group, curiously enough, in spite of no reading at all, did know how things are done. How fatally the lies, the subsidizing, the political trickery and chicanery persist in spite of the smug assumptions of virtues; the falsity of the effort to push the world back to an age where just the title of "Christian" would suffice instead of the more recent challenge which insists that the Christian be like Christ. They knew, these little sated, over-indulged, inexperienced sprouts of materialism, somehow or other, they knew.

"The loss of innocence" which their elders so much deplored has given them a cool fatal knowledge of the rottenness hitherto hidden from them; they know the failures and compromises upon which that æsthetic dream of "innocence" has been dreamed. They will have none of it.

Minga chasséd to the terrace steps; she pinned a scarf around her head turban-fashion and her eyes shone with adventurous gleam. "Say, listen," she said in the vernacular—"Say—listen—let's all pile in the machines and go up there on the mountain and stand in a row before Watts Shipman. Let's ask him to take Terence's case; let's ask him if he could get Terry off from a life's sentence. All of us—Yes. What? Serve Judgie right," added Minga, indignantly, "for not being willing to talk to me about it."

"Whew!" breathed a young chap in white flannels. The youth, in large horn-rimmed spectacles, went solemnly over to Sard and held out his hand, "I'm with you. It will make a sensation, anyway; maybe we couldn't get much out of Shipman but I'm with you, only what will Papa say?"

Sard had been thinking about that; a curious look in her eyes, she faced the boy. "Father's law is one thing," the girl said it without a trace of disrespect or rebellion, "but mine is another and I want to be true to mine! I don't know how you feel," she looked soberly at the owlish one, "but I can't be happy and know that there is so much tragedy in the world. I can't live under that law."

It was the old sad cry of youth, "Must my happiness, then, be bought at the expense of so much human frustration and misery?" But the owlish-eyed one repudiated this notion.