.

He did his yearning, however, entirely on the side and within those
hours consecrated to the law. In his wife's society he yearned not at
all. In her company he carefully kept his thoughts and his language
inside the innermost circle of decorum. At home his talk was entirely
"Yea, yea," and "Nay, nay," and dealt principally with politics and the
feminist movement, in which Abigail was deeply interested.

And by this we do not mean to suggest that at other times or places Tutt
was anything but conventionally proper. He was not. He only yearned to
be, well knowing that he was deficient in courage if not in everything
else.

But habit or no habit, likely or unlikely, Mrs. Tutt had no intention of
taking any chances so far as Tutt was concerned. If he did not reach
home precisely at six explanations were in order, and if he came in half
an hour later he had to demonstrate his integrity beyond a reasonable
doubt according to the established rules of evidence.

Perhaps Mrs. Tutt did wisely to hold Tutt thus in leash considering the
character of many of the firm's clients. For it was quite impossible to
conceal the nature of the practise of Tutt & Tutt; much of which figured
flamboyantly in the newspapers. Some women would have taken it for
granted under like circumstances that their husbands had acquired a
touch at least of the wisdom of the serpent even if they remained quite
harmless. Abigail countenanced no thought of any demoralization in her
spouse. To her he was like the artist who smears himself and his smock
with paint while in his studio, but appears at dinner in spotless linen
without even a whiff of benzine about him to suggest his occupation. So
Tutt, though hand and glove in his office with the most notorious of the
elite of Longacre Square, came home to supper with the naivete and
innocence of a theological student for whom an evening at a picture show
is the height of dissipation.

Yet Tutt was no more of a Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde than most of us.
Merely, his daily transition was a little more abrupt. And when all is
said and done most of the devices invented by his fertile little brain
to further the interests of his clients were no more worthy of
condemnation than those put forward by far higher-priced and much more
celebrated attorneys.

Not that Mrs. Tutt was blind to the dangers to which her husband by
virtue of his occupation was exposed. Far from it. Indeed she made it
her business to pay pe