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.
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