fice
who was not new to the practices she encouraged, and he was fairly
launched. He lent himself at first to the great folly of pretending to
love truly; but this was taken by one and another intelligent young
woman with a grain of salt. The entertainment and preferment he could
provide were accepted as sufficient reward. One girl, however,
actually seduced, had to be compensated by five thousand dollars--and
that after such terrors and heartaches (his wife, her family, and his
own looming up horribly in the background) as should have cured him
forever of a penchant for stenographers and employees generally.
Thereafter for a long time he confined himself strictly to such
acquaintances as he could make through agents, brokers, and
manufacturers who did business with him, and who occasionally invited
him to one form of bacchanalian feast or another.

As time went on he became wiser, if, alas, a little more eager. By
association with merchants and some superior politicians whom he
chanced to encounter, and because the ward in which he lived happened
to be a pivotal one, he began to speak publicly on occasion and to
gather dimly the import of that logic which sees life as a pagan wild,
and religion and convention as the forms man puts on or off to suit his
fancy, mood, and whims during the onward drift of the ages. Not for
Chaffee Thayer Sluss to grasp the true meaning of it all. His brain
was not big enough. Men led dual lives, it was true; but say what you
would, and in the face of his own erring conduct, this was very bad.
On Sunday, when he went to church with his wife, he felt that religion
was essential and purifying. In his own business he found himself
frequently confronted by various little flaws of logic relating to
undue profits, misrepresentations, and the like; but say what you
would, nevertheless and notwithstanding, God was God, morality was
superior, the church was important. It was wrong to yield to one's
impulses, as he found it so fascinating to do. One should be better
than his neighbor, or pretend to be.

What is to be done with such a rag-bag, moralistic ass as this? In
spite of all his philanderings, and the resultant qualms due to his
fear of being found out, he prospered in business and rose to some
eminence in his own community. As he had grown more lax he had become
somewhat more genial and tolerant, more generally acceptable. He was a
good Republican, a follower in the wake of Norrie