ively. "And I don't want you to do
anything to provide for either of us."

The father looked at him with the face he was wont to assume in
scanning the appearance of a confirmed monomaniac. "She will not
marry you," he answered slowly; "and you intend to go on living
with her in open concubinage! A lady of birth and position! Is
that your meaning?"

"Father," Alan cried despairingly, "Herminia would not consent to
live with me on any other terms. To her it would be disgraceful,
shameful, a sin, a reproach, a dereliction of principle. She
COULDN'T go back upon her whole past life. She lives for nothing
else but the emancipation of women."

"And you will aid and abet her in her folly?" the father asked,
looking up sharply at him. "You will persist in this evil course?
You will face the world and openly defy morality?"

"I will not counsel the woman I most love and admire to purchase
her own ease by proving false to her convictions," Alan answered
stoutly.

Dr. Merrick gazed at the watch on his table once more. Then he
rose and rang the bell. "Patient here?" he asked curtly. "Show
him in then at once. And, Napper, if Mr. Alan Merrick ever calls
again, will you tell him I'm out?--and your mistress as well, and
all the young ladies." He turned coldly to Alan. "I must guard
your mother and sisters at least," he said in a chilly voice, "from
the contamination of this woman's opinions."

Alan bowed without a word, and left the room. He never again saw
the face of his father.

IX.

Alan Merrick strode from his father's door that day stung with a
burning sense of wrong and injustice. More than ever before in
his life he realized to himself the abject hollowness of that
conventional code which masquerades in our midst as a system of
morals. If he had continued to "live single" as we hypocritically
phrase it, and so helped by one unit to spread the festering social
canker of prostitution, on which as basis, like some mediaeval
castle on its foul dungeon vaults, the entire superstructure of our
outwardly decent modern society is reared, his father no doubt
would have shrugged his shoulders and blinked his cold eyes, and
commended the wise young man for abstaining from marriage till his
means could permit him to keep a wife of his own class in the way
she was accustomed to. The wretched victims of that vile system
might die unseen and unpitied in some hideous back slum, without
touching one chor