“Well, I guess I was wrong,” admitted Tutt.  “Of course, that is unwritten law.  People don’t like to punish a man for resenting a slur upon his wife’s reputation.”

“But you see where that leads you?” remarked his partner.  “The so-called unwritten law is based on our inherited idea of chivalry.  A lady’s honor and reputation were sacred, and her knight was prepared instantly to defend it with the last drop of his blood.  A reflection on her honesty was almost as unbearable as one upon her virtue.  Logically, the unwritten law ought to permit women to break their contracts and do practically anything they see fit.”

“They do, don’t they—­the dear things!” sighed Bonnie.

“I remember,” interjected Tutt brightly, “when it was the unwritten law of Cook County, Illinois—­that’s Chicago, you know—­that any woman could kill her husband for the life-insurance money.  Seriously!”

“There’s no point of chivalry that I can see involved in that—­it’s merely good business,” remarked Mr. Doon, lighting another cigarette.  “All the same it’s obvious that the unwritten law might be stretched a long way.  It’s a great convenience, though, on occasion!”

“We should be in an awful stew if nowadays we substituted ideas of chivalry for those of justice,” declared Mr. Tutt.  “Fortunately the danger is past.  As someone has said, ’The women, once our superiors, have become our equals!’”

“We don’t even give ’em our seats in the Subway,” commented Tutt complacently.  “No, we needn’t worry about the return of chivalry—­in New York at any rate.”

“I should say not!” exclaimed Miss Wiggin, entering at that moment with a pile of papers, as nobody rose.

“But,” insisted Bonnie, “all the same there are certainly plenty of cases where if he had to choose between them any man would obey his conscience rather than the law.”

“Of course, there are such cases,” admitted Mr. Tutt.  “But we ought to discourage the idea as much as possible.”

“Discourage a sense of honor?” exclaimed Miss Wiggin.  “Why, Mr. Tutt!”

“It depends on what you mean by honor,” he retorted.  “I don’t take much stock in the kind of honor that makes an heir apparent ’perjure himself like a gentleman’ about a card game at a country house.”

“Neither do I,” she returned, “any more than I do in the kind of honor that compels a man to pay a gambling debt before he pays his tailor, but I do believe that there may be situations where, though it would not be permissible to perjure oneself, honor would require one to refuse to obey the law.”

“That’s a pretty dangerous doctrine,” reflected Mr. Tutt.  “For everybody would be free to make himself the judge of when he ought to respect the law and when he oughtn’t.  We can easily imagine that the law would come out at the small end of the horn.”

“In matters of conscience—­which, I take it, is the same thing as one’s sense of honor—­one has got to be one’s own judge,” declared Miss Wiggin firmly.