you tried to think it out; so Gregg had bothered himself about the subject very little, even when he heard that Mr. Hale was one of those who had his own way of living. Gregg had wished, vaguely, that Marjorie's father were different; at least, Gregg would have preferred to have known nothing about it, but he had not considered it an alarming matter. For a man like Mr. Hale, of course, would be discreet. Yet, sometimes, even such a man lost control of the situation and the explosive outflare of the thing concealed swept a sensation over the country. Gregg bent forward a little, to better view the street he was passing; and suddenly he was sick with the fear which gripped him as he imagined Marjorie's father exposed in a public scandal, for all the world to peer into, and Marjorie learning—learning.
His car sped into a quieter section of homes of men recently successful and, on this north shore of the city, imitating the older dwellings of the Drive; then a few more miles of more modest houses and apartments brought them to the first of the suburban towns, almost as old as Chicago and, in spite of the great inflow of recent arrivals, still recognized as staid, intellectual and idealistic, a small, well-kept city of fine homes and prosperous churches, of schools and a university.
As the car passed large, good-looking houses, far back from the street and each set on a wide lawn and surrounded by trees, Billy Whittaker felt the sort of satisfaction with this beautiful suburb which he believed he ought to combat in himself; for to him Evanston, however pleasant, meant an abandonment of the road from East Pearson Street to the Drive. He thought of men living here as lacking the ambition or as conscious within themselves of want of ability to
