“I asked her that very question. She replied that the proceedings interested her.”
“Heavens!” Mr. Randall paced the room. “‘Interested’ her! A girl with an income she can’t possibly spend, a girl who might have anything, do anything, go anywhere, marry any man—”
He broke off suddenly. “Lucy,” he demanded, “is there any man Mary might care for? That good looking young curate, for instance?”
Mrs. Randall shook her head emphatically. “No, Luke,” she said. “If you were to ask me to name the two things Mary never gives a thought to I’d say men and matrimony. And that’s another thing about her I cannot fathom.”
Further confidences were cut short by the entrance of the butler announcing the Rev. Thomas Brattle, a clergyman of sixty with an old fashioned flowing white beard, small white hands and shiny gold-bowed spectacles, and Marvin Lattimer, a business man with a turn for religious activities. Desultory conversation followed broken by the entrance of Mrs. Sumnet-Ives, a well preserved woman of forty and a social power, and Miss Emma Laforth, slender, dark, intelligent looking and gifted with a political acumen that had given her an unassailable position in women’s club circles. They were escorted by Grove Evans, plump, wealthy, well born, mildly interested in reform because reform was the proper thing, and Wyat Carp, a lawyer with literary tendencies.
Greetings and small talk; then Lucas Randall led the way to the library. There the Rev. Mr. Brattle, clearing his throat in an official manner, established himself before a priceless seventeenth century table of carved mahogany.
“The meeting will come to order,” he announced.
A circle of chairs had been drawn up before the table. The committee members occupied them with a subdued rustle of garments. The Rev. Mr. Brattle watched the circle benignly, waiting for a moment of total silence. When he spoke his voice was smooth, finely modulated, pitched in the right key. His manner, in fact, was perfect. Indeed, in the spacious luxury of Lucas Randall’s fine library no one could have appeared to better advantage.
“Dear friends,” he said, beaming about him, “we are gathered here, as you know, to formulate the report of our investigation into vice conditions. You have labored long and faithfully. Now the time has come to put forth the fruit of your labors in a form at once concrete and illuminating.”
He paused, then continued: