But here again the gate was barred against her. The clerk was burdened with a good name and a place of trust. He could risk neither the one nor the other. He was sorry, genuinely sorry—she saw that; but what could he do?
It was an evening or two later that she found her first pale ray of encouragement, and she found it in the person of Philip Beekman, that same young Beekman to whom Fritzie had casually referred.
Beekman described himself, with some accuracy, as a person of good family and bad morals. "We are getting so confounded poor," he used to say, "that I sometimes doubt the former; but I have constant visible evidence of the latter, and so I cling to that as the one sure thing in this uncertain life." Had he but seen the facts, he might well have considered his derelictions as the result of his parentage. At her divorce, his mother had been awarded the custody of her only child, and, now that she had remarried, Philip was forced to play that neither uncommon nor congenial rôle—the part of the young man with too little training to earn a living and too much ancestry to marry one.
"After all," he said, as he sat with Violet in the many-colored back parlor, a half-empty bottle between them, his usually pale face aglow, his gray eyes filmy, and his black hair tumbled by the constant passage through it of his long, nervous fingers—"after all, you see, you and I are in the same boat. You can't get out because, if you do, the sharks will eat you, and I daren't get out because I can't swim."
Always haunted by the fear that, in some manner, her true story might reach her own town and her own people, Violet had told him only as much as she dared, and what she had said had moved his impulsive generosity.
"But anyway," he insisted, "you can do one thing that I can't."
She clutched at the straw.
"What's that?" she asked.
"You can get help from shore."
"How do you mean?"