out
two dozen ramping great daughters, and they won't let their father have
anything to do with Sabre. No, he's shut right out, everywhere.

"And Sabre, mind you--this is Sabre's extraordinary point of view: he's
not a bit furious with all these people. He's feeling his position most
frightfully; it's eating the very heart out of him, but he's working up
not the least trace of bitterness over it. He says they're all
supporting an absolutely right and just convention, and that it's not
their fault if the convention is so hideously cruel in its application.
He says the absolute justice and the frightful cruelty of conventions
has always interested him, and that he remembers once putting up to a
great friend of his as an example this very instance of society's
attitude towards an unmarried girl who gets into trouble,--never
dreaming that one day he was going to find himself up against the full
force of it. He said, 'If this poor girl, if any girl, didn't find the
world against her and every door closed to her, just look where you'd
be, Hapgood. You'd have morality absolutely gone by the hoard. No, all
these people are right, absolutely right--and all conventions are
absolutely right--in their principle; it's their practice that's
sometimes so terrible. And when it is, how can you turn round and rage?
I can't.'

"Well, I said to him what I say to you, old man. I said, 'Yes, that's
all right, Sabre. That's true, though there're precious few would take
it as moderately as you; but look here, where's this going to end?
Where's it going to land you? It's landed you pretty fiercely as it is.
Have you thought what it may develop into? What are you doing about it?'

"He said he was writing round, writing to advertisers and to societies
and places, to find a place where the girl would be taken in to work and
allowed to have her baby with her. He said there must be hundreds of
kind-hearted people about the place who would do it; it was only a
question of finding them. Well, as to that, kind hearts are more than
coronets and all that kind of thing, but it strikes me they're a jolly
side harder than coronets to find when it comes to a question of an
unmarried mother _and_ her baby, _and_ when the kind hearts, being
found, come to make inquiries and find that the person making
application on the girl's behalf is the man she's apparently living
with, _and_ the man with Sabre's extraordinary record in regard to the
girl. I didn't say