However, Tutt got neither looks nor cold cream.  His welcome, in fact, was warm only if he stayed out too late, and then the later the warmer.  His relationship to his wife was prosaic, respectful.  In his heart of hearts he occasionally thought of her as exceedingly unattractive.  In a word Mrs. Tutt performed her wifely functions in a purely matter-of-fact way.  Anything else would have seemed to her unseemly.  She dressed in a manner that would have been regarded as conservative even on Beacon Hill.  She had no intention of making an old fool of herself or of letting him be one either.  When people had been married thirty years they could take some things for granted.  Few persons therefore had ever observed Mr. Tutt in the act of caressing Mrs. Tutt; and there were those who said that he never had.  Frankly, she was a trifle forbidding:  superficially not the sort of person to excite a great deal of sentiment; and occasionally, as we have hinted, in the spring Tutt yearned for a little sentiment.

He did his yearning, however, entirely on the side and within those hours consecrated to the law.  In his wife’s society he yearned not at all.  In her company he carefully kept his thoughts and his language inside the innermost circle of decorum.  At home his talk was entirely “Yea, yea,” and “Nay, nay,” and dealt principally with politics and the feminist movement, in which Abigail was deeply interested.

And by this we do not mean to suggest that at other times or places Tutt was anything but conventionally proper.  He was not.  He only yearned to be, well knowing that he was deficient in courage if not in everything else.

But habit or no habit, likely or unlikely, Mrs. Tutt had no intention of taking any chances so far as Tutt was concerned.  If he did not reach home precisely at six explanations were in order, and if he came in half an hour later he had to demonstrate his integrity beyond a reasonable doubt according to the established rules of evidence.

Perhaps Mrs. Tutt did wisely to hold Tutt thus in leash considering the character of many of the firm’s clients.  For it was quite impossible to conceal the nature of the practise of Tutt & Tutt; much of which figured flamboyantly in the newspapers.  Some women would have taken it for granted under like circumstances that their husbands had acquired a touch at least of the wisdom of the serpent even if they remained quite harmless.  Abigail countenanced no thought of any demoralization in her spouse.  To her he was like the artist who smears himself and his smock with paint while in his studio, but appears at dinner in spotless linen without even a whiff of benzine about him to suggest his occupation.  So Tutt, though hand and glove in his office with the most notorious of the elite of Longacre Square, came home to supper with the naivete and innocence of a theological student for whom an evening at a picture show is the height of dissipation.