"No, I threw off my clothes in such disgust that night that I vowed I would never get into them again. I gave the suit to my valet."
"Your valet," she gravely returned; "he may become one of us."
"Fancy, when I reached the house—I went up in a hansom, for I was bareheaded—my mother was giving the biggest kind of a ball. I had no end of trouble trying to sneak in unobserved."
She regarded him steadily. "Isn't it strange," she went on, "how the bull-dog police of this town persecute us—and they should be sympathetic. They had to leave their own island because of tyranny. Yet as soon as they step on this soil they feel themselves self-constituted tyrants. Something of the sort happened with your own ancestors—" she looked at him archly—"the Pilgrim Fathers were not very tolerant to the Quakers, the Jews, Catholics, or any sect not their own. Now you do not seem to have inherited that ear-slicing temperament—"
"Oh, stop, Yetta! Don't make any more fun of me. I confess I am cowardly—I hate rows and scandals—"
"'What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his liberty?'"
"Yes, I know. But this was such a nasty little affair. The newspapers would have driven me crazy."
"But suppose, for the sake of argument," she said, "that the row would not have appeared in the newspapers—what then?"
"What do you mean? By Jove, there was nothing in the papers, now that I come to think of it. I went the next morning out to Tuxedo and forgot—what do you mean by this mystery, Yetta?"
"I mean this—suppose, for the sake of further argument, I should tell you that there was no row, no police, no arrests!" He gasped.