observed Miss
Lucretia. "What I wish you to tell me, Mrs. Merrill, is this: how much
of that article is true, and how much of it is false?"

"Really, Miss Penniman," replied Mrs. Merrill, with spirit, "I don't see
why you should expect me to know."

"A woman should take an intelligent interest in her husband's affairs,
Mrs. Merrill. I have long advocated it as an entering wedge."

"An entering wedge!" exclaimed Mrs. Merrill, who had never read a page
of the Woman's Hour.

"Yes. Your husband is the president of a railroad, I believe, which is
largely in that state. I should like to ask him whether these statements
are true in the main. Whether this Jethro Bass is the kind of man they
declare him to be."

Mrs. Merrill was in a worse quandary than ever. Her own spirits were
none too good, and Miss Lucretia's eye, in its search for truth, seemed
to pierce into her very soul. There was no evading that eye. But Mrs.
Merrill did what few people would have had the courage or good sense to
do.

"That is a political article, Miss Penniman," she said, "inspired by
a bitter enemy of Jethro Bass, Mr. Worthington, who has bought the
newspaper from which it was copied. For that reason, I was right in
saying that it is partly true. You nor I, Miss Penniman, must not be
the judges of any man or woman, for we know nothing of their problems or
temptations. God will judge them. We can only say that they have acted
rightly or wrongly according to the light that is in us. You will find
it difficult to get a judgment of Jethro Bass that is not a partisan
judgment, and yet I believe that that article is in the main a history
of the life of Jethro Bass. A partisan history, but still a history. He
has unquestionably committed many of the acts of which he is accused."

Here was talk to make the author of the "Hymn to Coniston" sit up, if
she hadn't been sitting up already.

"And don't you condemn him for those acts?" she gasped.

"Ah," said Mrs. Merrill, thinking of her own husband. Yesterday she
would certainly have condemned. Jethro Bass. But now! "I do not condemn
anybody, Miss Penniman."

Miss Lucretia thought this extraordinary, to say the least.

"I will put the question in another way, Mrs. Merrill," said she. "Do
you think this Jethro Bass a proper guardian for Cynthia Wetherell?"

To her amazement Mrs. Merrill did not give her an instantaneous answer
to this question. Mrs. Merrill was thinking of Jethro's love for the
gir