Jane looked up from her plate.

"I hope you sent that shameless Brent girl away, too," she announced, with the calm att.i.tude of one whose own virtue is above reproach.

Donald glared at her.

"Of course I did not!" he retorted. "How thoroughly unkind and uncharitable of you, Jane, to hope I would be guilty of such a cruel and unmanly action!"

The Laird waved his carving-knife.

"Hear, hear!" he chuckled. "Spoken like a man, my son. Jane, my dear, if I were you, I wouldn't press this matter further. It's a delicate subject."

"I'm sure I do not see why Jane should not be free to express her opinion, Hector." Mrs. McKaye felt impelled to fly to the defense of her daughter. "You know as well as we do, Hector, that the Brent girl is quite outside the pale of respectable society."

"We shall never agree on what const.i.tutes 'respectable society,'

Nellie," The Laird answered whimsically. "There are a few in that Seattle set of yours I find it hard to include in that category."

"Oh, they're quite respectable, father," Donald protested.

"Indeed they are, Donald! Hector, you amaze me," Mrs. McKaye chided.

"They have too much money to be anything else," Donald added, and winked at his father.

"Tush, tush, lad!" the old man murmured. "We shall get nowhere with such arguments. The world has been at that line of conversation for two thousand years, and the issue's still in doubt. Nellie, will you have a piece of the well-done?"

"You and your father are never done joining forces against me," Mrs.

McKaye protested, and in her voice was the well-known note that presaged tears should she be opposed further. The Laird, all too familiar with this truly feminine type of tyranny, indicated to his son, by a lightning wink, that he desired the conversation diverted into other channels, whereupon Donald favored his mother with a disarming smile.

"I'm going to make a real start to-morrow morning, mother," he announced brightly. "I'm going up in the woods and be a lumberjack for a month. Going to grow warts on my hands and chew tobacco and develop into a brawny roughneck."

"Is that quite necessary?" Elizabeth queried, with a slight elevation of her eyebrows. "I understood you were going to manage the business."

"I am--after I've learned it thoroughly, Lizzie."

"Don't call me 'Lizzie,'" she warned him irritably.

"Very well, Elizabeth."

"In simple justice to those people from Darrow that you evicted from the Sawdust Pile, Don, you should finish your work before you go. If they were not fit to inhabit the Sawdust Pile, then neither is Nan Brent. You've got to play fair." Jane had returned to the attack.

"Look here, Jane," her brother answered seriously: "I wish you'd forget Nan Brent. She's an old and very dear friend of mine, and I do not like to hear my friends slandered."

"Oh, indeed!" Jane considered this humorous, and indulged herself in a cynical laugh.

"Friend of his?" Elizabeth, who was regarded in her set as a wit, a reputation acquired by reason of the fact that she possessed a certain knack for adapting slang humorously (for there was no originality to her alleged wit), now bent her head and looked at her brother incredulously. "My word! That's a rich dish."

"Why, Donald dear," his mother cried reproachfully, "surely you are jesting!"

"Not at all. Nan Brent isn't a bad girl, even if she is the mother of a child born out of wedlock. She stays at home and minds her own business, and lets others mind theirs."

"Donald's going to be tragic. See if he isn't," Elizabeth declared.

"Come now, old dear; if Nan Brent isn't a bad woman, just what is your idea of what const.i.tutes badness in a woman? It would be interesting to know your point of view."

"Nan Brent was young, unsophisticated, poor, and trusting when she met this fellow, whoever he may be. He wooed her, and she loved him--or thought she did, which amounts to the same thing until one discovers the difference between thinking and feeling. At first, she thought she was married to him. Later, she discovered she was not--and then it was too late."

"It wouldn't have been too late with some--er--good people," The Laird remarked meaningly.

"In other words," Donald went on, "Nan Brent found herself out on the end of a limb, and then the world proceeded to saw off the limb.

It is true that she is the mother of an illegitimate child, but if that child was not--at least in so far as its mother _is_ concerned--conceived in sin, I say it isn't illegitimate, and that its mother is not a bad woman."

"Granted--if it's true; but how do you know it to be true?" Jane demanded. She had a feeling that she was about to get the better of her brother in this argument.

"I do not _know_ it to be true, Jane."

"_Voila!"_

"But--I believe it to be true, Jane."

"Why?"

"Because Nan told her father it was true, and old Caleb told me when I was at his house this morning. So I believe it. And I knew Nan Brent when she was a young girl, and she was sweet and lovely and virtuous.

I talked with her this morning, and found no reason to change my previous estimate of her. I could only feel for her a profound pity."

"'Pity is akin to love,'" Elizabeth quoted gaily. "Mother, keep an eye on your little son. He'll be going in for settlement-work in Port Agnew first thing we know."

"Hush, Elizabeth!" her mother cried sharply. She was highly scandalized at such levity. The Laird salted and peppered his food and said nothing. "Your att.i.tude is very manly and sweet, dear," Mrs.

McKaye continued, turning to her son, for her woman's intuition warned her that, if the discussion waxed warmer, The Laird would take a hand in it, and her side would go down to inglorious defeat, their arguments flattened by the weight of Scriptural quotations. She had a feeling that old Hector was preparing to remind them of Mary Magdalen and the scene in the temple. "I would much rather hear you speak a good word for that unfortunate girl than have you condemn her."

"A moment ago," her son reminded her, with some asperity, for he was sorely provoked, "you were demanding the right of free speech for Jane, in order that she might condemn her. Mother, I fear me you're not quite consistent."

"We will not discuss it further, dearie. It is not a matter of such importance that we should differ to the point of becoming acrimonious.

Besides, it's a queer topic for dinner-table conversation."

"So say we all of us," Elizabeth struck in laconically. "Dad, will you please help me to some of the well-done?"

"Subjects," old Hector struck in, "which, twenty years ago, only the family doctor was supposed to be familiar with or permitted to discuss are now being agitated in women's clubs, books, newspapers, and the public schools. You can't smother sin or the facts of life unless they occur separately. In the case of Nan Brent they have developed coincidently; so we find it hard to regard her as normal and human."

"Do you condone her offense, Hector?" Mrs. McKaye demanded incredulously.

"I am a firm believer in the sacredness of marriage, I cannot conceive of a civilization worth while without it," The Laird declared earnestly. "Nevertheless, while I know naught of Nan Brent's case, except that which is founded on hearsay evidence, I can condone her offense because I can understand it. She might have developed into a far worse girl than it appears from Donald's account she is. At least, Nellie, she bore her child and cherishes it, and, under the rules of society as we play it, that required a kind of courage in which a great many girls are deficient. Give her credit for that."

"Apparently she has been frank," Elizabeth answered him coolly. "On the other hand, father McKaye, her so-called courage may have been ignorance or apathy or cowardice or indifference. It all depends on her point of view."

"I disagree with mother that it is not a matter of importance," Donald persisted. "It is a matter of supreme importance to me that my mother and sisters should not feel more charity toward an unfortunate member of their s.e.x; and I happen to know that it is a matter of terrible importance to Nan Brent that in Port Agnew people regard her as unclean and look at her askance. And because that vacillating old Daney didn't have the courage to fly in the face of Port Agnew's rotten public opinion, he subjected Nan Brent and her helpless old father to the daily and nightly a.s.sociation of depraved people. If _he_ should dare to say one word against"

"Oh, it wasn't because Andrew was afraid of public opinion, lad,"

Hector McKaye interrupted him dryly. "Have you no power o'deduction?

Twas his guid wife that stayed his hand, and well I know it."