I are great believers in innocence . . . and purity. It's a fine protection."
A month ago, Clarence would have agreed. Now he murmured, "Yes," politely, but in his heart he felt stirring a faint desire to protest, to deny this assertion. Lately there had come into his mind a certainty that the greatest of all protections lay in knowledge. One could not know too much. Each bit of knowledge was a link in the armor.
"It's true . . . what Jimmy said."
And again there was a silence in which Clarence flushed slowly a deep red.
"We can speak of such things . . . man to man," continued the torturer and slowly there swept over Clarence a terrible sense of becoming involved. Life in the Babylon Arms in the midst of a great and teeming city was simple compared to the complications of these last few days.
"But it doesn't seem to make any difference," he said presently. "All the Town has gone to the ball. . . . I saw the carriages going there . . . a whole stream of them, and it's Lily Shane who is giving it."
For an instant, Harvey Seton remained silent, turning the worn cigar round and round in his thin lips, as if it might be the very thought he was turning over in much the same fashion in his own devious mind. "Yes," he replied, after a long time. "That's true. But it's because nobody really knows."
At this speech Clarence, moved perhaps by the memory of Lily leaning from the window of the cab as she drove off through the storm, asked, "But do you know?"
Slowly his host eyed him with suspicion. It was as if the veiled accusations contained in their depths had suddenly become defined, specific; as if he accused this model young man opposite him of being the father of the vague and suppositious child.
"I have no proofs . . . to be sure," he said. "But a woman, like that. . . . Well, to look at her is enough. To look at her in her fine Paris clothes. A woman has no right to make herself a
