Alan’s face was red as fire.  “She will not marry me when she gets to Italy,” he answered decisively.  “And I don’t want you to do anything to provide for either of us.”

The father looked at him with the face he was wont to assume in scanning the appearance of a confirmed monomaniac.  “She will not marry you,” he answered slowly; “and you intend to go on living with her in open concubinage!  A lady of birth and position!  Is that your meaning?”

“Father,” Alan cried despairingly, “Herminia would not consent to live with me on any other terms.  To her it would be disgraceful, shameful, a sin, a reproach, a dereliction of principle.  She couldn’t go back upon her whole past life.  She lives for nothing else but the emancipation of women.”

“And you will aid and abet her in her folly?” the father asked, looking up sharply at him.  “You will persist in this evil course?  You will face the world and openly defy morality?”

“I will not counsel the woman I most love and admire to purchase her own ease by proving false to her convictions,” Alan answered stoutly.

Dr. Merrick gazed at the watch on his table once more.  Then he rose and rang the bell.  “Patient here?” he asked curtly.  “Show him in then at once.  And, Napper, if Mr. Alan Merrick ever calls again, will you tell him I’m out?—­and your mistress as well, and all the young ladies.”  He turned coldly to Alan.  “I must guard your mother and sisters at least,” he said in a chilly voice, “from the contamination of this woman’s opinions.”

Alan bowed without a word, and left the room.  He never again saw the face of his father.

IX.

Alan Merrick strode from his father’s door that day stung with a burning sense of wrong and injustice.  More than ever before in his life he realized to himself the abject hollowness of that conventional code which masquerades in our midst as a system of morals.  If he had continued to “live single” as we hypocritically phrase it, and so helped by one unit to spread the festering social canker of prostitution, on which as basis, like some mediaeval castle on its foul dungeon vaults, the entire superstructure of our outwardly decent modern society is reared, his father no doubt would have shrugged his shoulders and blinked his cold eyes, and commended the wise young man for abstaining from marriage till his means could permit him to keep a wife of his own class in the way she was accustomed to.  The wretched victims of that vile system might die unseen and unpitied in some hideous back slum, without touching one chord of remorse or regret in Dr. Merrick’s nature.  He was steeled against their suffering.  Or again, if Alan had sold his virility for gold to some rich heiress of his set, like Ethel Waterton—­had bartered his freedom to be her wedded paramour in a loveless marriage, his father would not only have gladly acquiesced,