“You’re not going to charge her?”

“Aren’t I?” returned the policeman.

“Look here; constable, you ’re making a mistake.”

The policeman took out his note-book.

“Oh, I ’m making a mistake?  I ’ll take your name and address, please; we have to report these things.”

“By all means,” said Shelton, angrily giving it.  “I spoke to her first.”

“Perhaps you’ll come up to the court tomorrow morning, and repeat that,” replied the policeman, with incivility.

Shelton looked at him with all the force at his command.

“You had better be careful, constable,” he said; but in the act of uttering these words he thought how pitiable they sounded.

“We ’re not to be trifled with,” returned the policeman in a threatening voice.

Shelton could think of nothing but to repeat: 

“You had better be careful, constable.”

“You’re a gentleman,” replied the policeman.  “I’m only a policeman.  You’ve got the riches, I’ve got the power.”

Grasping the woman’s arm, he began to move along with her.

Shelton turned, and walked away.

He went to Grinnings’ Club, and flung himself down upon a sofa.  His feeling was not one of pity for the woman, nor of peculiar anger with the policeman, but rather of dissatisfaction with himself.

“What ought I to have done?” he thought, “the beggar was within his rights.”

He stared at the pictures on the wall, and a tide of disgust surged up in him.

“One or other of us,” he reflected, “we make these women what they are.  And when we’ve made them, we can’t do without them; we don’t want to; but we give them no proper homes, so that they’re reduced to prowl about the streets, and then we run them in.  Ha! that’s good—­that’s excellent!  We run them in!  And here we sit and carp.  But what do we do?  Nothing!  Our system is the most highly moral known.  We get the benefit without soiling even the hem of our phylacteries—­the women are the only ones that suffer.  And why should n’t they—­inferior things?”

He lit a cigarette, and ordered the waiter to bring a drink.

“I’ll go to the Court,” he thought; but suddenly it occurred to him that the case would get into the local papers.  The press would never miss so nice a little bit of scandal—­“Gentleman v.  Policeman!” And he had a vision of Antonia’s father, a neighbouring and conscientious magistrate, solemnly reading this.  Someone, at all events, was bound to see his name and make a point of mentioning it too good to be missed!  And suddenly he saw with horror that to help the woman he would have to assert again that he had spoken to her first.  “I must go to the Court!” he kept thinking, as if to assure himself that he was not a coward.

He lay awake half the night worrying over this dilemma.

“But I did n’t speak to her first,” he told himself; “I shall only be telling a lie, and they ’ll make me swear it, too!”