ry now?"

"In her room."

"She'll come down to the committee meeting, I suppose?"

"I asked her and she replied that of course she would come."

"Has she been out today, Lucy?"

"Nearly all day."

"Calls, I suppose."

"No, she's been attending the hearings of the vice commission."

"In God's name, why?" Mr. Randall was really disturbed.

"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.

"Dea