"It's no use, Penny. Our women have seen the light and beaten us to it; we've got to go with them or with Noonan and his—Mike the Goat!"
Recollection of his wife's plight cut him like a knife. "The Brewster-Smith women have got to choose for themselves!" He felt about for his hat like a man blind with purpose.
The street sweeper was taking up the fragments of the shattered windows half an hour later, when Martin Jaffry found himself going rather aimlessly along Main Street with a feeling that the bottom had recently dropped out of things—a sensation which, if the truth must be told, was greatly augmented by the fact that he hadn't yet breakfasted. He had remained behind the two younger men to get into communication with Betty Sheridan and ask her to stay close to the telephone in case Miss Eliot should again attempt to get into touch with her. He lingered still, dreading to go into any of the places where he was known lest he should somehow be led to commit himself embarrassingly on the subject of his nephew's candidacy.
His middle-aged jauntiness considerably awry, he moved slowly down the heedless street, subject to the most gloomy reflections. Like most men, Martin Jaffry had always been dimly aware that the fabric of society is held together by a system of mutual weaknesses and condonings, but he had always thought of himself and his own family as moving freely in the interstices, peculiarly exempt, under Providence, from strain. Now here they were, in such a position that the first stumbling foot might tighten them all into inextricable scandal.
It is true that Penny, at the last moment, had prevailed on George to put off the relief of his feelings by public repudiation of his political connections, at least until after a conference with the police. And to George's fear that the newspapers would get the news from the police before he had had a chance to repudiate, he had countered with a suggestion, drawn from an item in the private history of the chief—known to him through his father's business—which he felt certain would quicken the chief's sense of the propriety of keeping George's predicament from the press.
"My God!" said George in amazement, and Martin Jaffry had responded fervently with "O Lord!"
Not because it shocked him to think that there might be indiscretions known to the lawyer of a chief of police which the chief might not wish known to the world, but because, with the addition of this new coil to his nephew's affairs, he was suddenly struck with the possibility of still other coils in any one of which the saving element of indiscretion might be wanting.
Suppose they should come upon one, just one impregnable honesty, one soul whom the fear of exposure left unshaken. On such a possibility rested the exemption of the Jaffry-Remingtons. It was the reference to E. Eliot in his instructions to Betty which had awakened in Jaffry's mind the disquieting reflection that just here might prove such an impregnability. They probably wouldn't be able to "do anything" with E. Eliot simply because she herself had never done anything she was afraid to go to the public about. To do him justice, it never occurred to him that in the case of a lady it was easily possible to invent something which would be made to answer in place of an indiscretion.
Probably that was Martin Jaffry's own impregnability—that he wouldn't have lied about a lady to save himself. What he did conclude was that it was just this unbending quality of women, this failure to provide the saving weakness, which unfitted them for political life.
He shuddered, seeing the whole fabric of politics fall in ruins around an electorate composed largely of E. Eliots, feeling himself stripped of everything that had so far distinguished him from the Noonans and the Doolittles.