"Yes, I soon found that out. Nobody cared a pin whether I was married or not, or whether I was more to be pitied than scorned, provided I wore the proper clothes and told the proper lies."
"Nobody?"
"Nobody, except Hutchins Burley."
"Ah, there's sure to be a Nemesis!"
"Yes. But why Hutchins Burley? What am I to Burley, or Burley to me? Why should that horrible wretch be commissioned to persecute me? Why was he destined to snap the bond of comradeship between Henriette and me? He isn't exactly one's notion of a social censor, is he?"
"A scavenger isn't a popular notion of a sweet and clean man. Yet he serves a public purpose."
"What an extraordinary analogy!"
"Not at all. You see, Janet, we moderns are too squeamish or too lazy to do our necessary dirty work ourselves, dirty work like punishment, for instance. The result is that when some one rashly assails the majesty of one of our institutions, we punish him by proxy. We kill by the hand of the public executioner. We get revenge by the hand of the judge. We dispense poetic justice by the hand of a Hutchins Burley."
"Well, Hutchins Burley as society's Nemesis is a brand new idea to me. I shall need time to let it sink in. But what have I done to deserve so mighty a thing as poetic justice? I haven't even stolen another woman's husband. Haven't I been my own worst enemy, as Laura Jean Libby used to say? Isn't that vice its own reward?"
"Janet, your question is fair. But your voice and your eyes are not. Now I come to think of it, there may after all be a teeny weeny bit to say—no, not on Hutchins Burley's side—but on Monsieur Anton St. Hilaire's side."