"Burdon Woodward has a specially designed new car which is attracting much attention."
The clipping had been pasted upon a sheet of paper, and underneath it, the following two questions were typewritten:
"How can a man buy $8,000 cars on a $10,000 salary?
"Why don't you audit his books and see who paid for that car?"
Mary's cheeks stung with the brutality of it.
"What a horrible thing to do!" she thought. "If any one paid attention to things like this—why, no one would be safe!"
She was on the point of tearing it to shreds when another thought struck her.
"Perhaps I ought to show it to him," she uneasily thought. "If a thing like this is being whispered around, I think he ought to get to the bottom of it, and stop it…. I know I don't like him for some things," she continued, more undecided than ever, "but that's all the more reason why I should be fair to him—in things like this, for instance."
She compromised by tucking the letter in her pocket, and when Judge Cutler dropped in that afternoon, she first made him promise secrecy, and then she showed it to him.
"I feel like you," he said at last. "An anonymous attack like this is usually beneath contempt. And I feel all the more like ignoring it because it raises a question which I have been asking myself lately: How can a man on a ten thousand dollar salary afford to buy an eight thousand dollar car?"