The Mayor entered by a high folding door a few feet behind his chair.  He was an Irishman, somewhere between forty and fifty, wearing a smile of mixed shrewdness and embarrassment.  Though he did not go through the formality of a greeting, there was a touch of courteous affability in the glance he cast about the room.

One of the reporters at the bottom of the table whispered to Frederick: 

“Miss Hahlstroem’s case is going to come out all right.  Everybody is of the firm opinion that the Mayor is going to give that old hypocrite a jolt.”  As a matter of fact, the Mayor’s manner toward his honourable neighbour on the right was too cordial to presage good.  Silence was ordered, and the session began.  The Mayor called upon Mr. Garry to speak.

The old gentleman arose in all his height, with a gravity and self-assurance seldom seen except in eminent statesmen.  Frederick was fascinated.  He could not remove his eyes from him and almost regretted that his speech, according to the reporter, was doomed to failure in advance.  As for Frederick’s feelings in regard to the real issue, when he listened to the voice of his passion, he did not desire Ingigerd’s appearance in public.  But for some time he had learned to silence that voice, and he had no objections if his cure were to be accomplished as the result of a severe operation.  He felt certain that for Ingigerd to receive permission to dance in public would mean a definite verdict in his own case.

Mr. Garry first set forth clearly and succinctly the aims of his society, citing a number of cases to show how children are maltreated, how their health is ruined in industry, commerce and on the stage.

Here a reporter whispered in Frederick’s ears: 

“He should sweep before his own door.  He’s a Wall Street man and employs a whole lot of children in his chemical works in Brooklyn.  He is a merciless exploiter.”

Mr. Garry went on to explain that these abuses had necessitated the organisation of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.  The society made it its duty to interfere only in cases in which the maltreatment could be actually proved.  Such a one was the case in hand.

“For several years,” he said, “New York has been overrun by a peculiar sort of freebooters.”  He laid emphasis on the word freebooters.  “There is a connection between this phenomenon and the increasing atheism in our country, the increasing irreligion, and the craving for pleasure and dissipation, which always goes hand in hand with irreligion.  This growing immorality, this festering corruption in our midst is the wind that fills the sails of those pirates.  The disease is not of American origin.  It has come to us from the dens of vice in the large European cities, London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna.  It is an epidemic the spread of which must be arrested, and to that end we must put a curb upon the freebooters who spread the infection and continue to bring it in from abroad.”