and there was my little cousin, Hetty, who had never seen even a man the worse for his liquor, standing there and taking it all in.  Of course, every one hushed the thing up or else said the poor girl was sick; but Hetty knew, and what effect do you suppose it had upon a little girl like that, who had always been told what nice, irreproachable people went to the Cotillons?  Hetty will never be the same little girl now that she was before.  Oh, it makes me damned tired.”

“Well, I don’t see,” said Geary, “why the girls should make such a fuss about the men keeping straight.  I daresay now that this Stannard girl would cut us all dead if she knew how drunk we were that night about four months ago—­that night that you fellows got thrown out of the Luxembourg.”

“No, I don’t believe she would at all,” said young Haight.

“She’d think better of you for it,” put in Vandover.  “Look here,” he went on, “all this talk of women demanding the same moral standard for men as men do for women is fine on paper, but how does it work in real life?  The women don’t demand it at all.  Take the average society girl in a big city like this.  The girls that we meet at teas and receptions and functions—­don’t you suppose they know the life we men lead?  Of course they do.  They may not know it in detail, but they know in a general way that we get drunk a good deal and go to disreputable houses and that sort of thing, and do they ever cut us for that?  No, sir; not much.  Why, I tell you, they even have a little more respect for us.  They like a man to know things, to be experienced.  A man that keeps himself straight and clean and never goes around with fast women, they think is ridiculous.  Of course, a girl don’t want to know the particulars of a man’s vice; what they want is that a man should have the knowledge of good and evil, yes, and lots of evil.  To a large extent I really believe it’s the women’s fault that the men are what they are.  If they demanded a higher moral standard the men would come up to it; they encourage a man to go to the devil and then—­and then when he’s rotten with disease and ruins his wife and has children—­what is it—­’spotted toads’—­then there’s a great cry raised against the men, and women write books and all, when half the time the woman has only encouraged him to be what he is.”

“Oh, well now,” retorted young Haight, “you know that all the girls are not like that.”

“Most of them that you meet in society are.”

“But they are the best people, aren’t they?” demanded Geary.

“No,” answered Vandover and young Haight in a breath, and young Haight continued: 

“No; I believe that very few of what you would call the ‘best people’ go out in society—­people like the Ravises, who have good principles, and keep up old-fashioned virtues and all that.  You know,” he added, “they have family prayers down there every morning after breakfast.”