He had ventured to accept Ruth’s impulsive invitation to come to see her.  Not frequently, not so frequently as his inclinations urged, but more frequently than was, perhaps, wise in his position. ...  She represented a new experience.  She was utterly outside his world, and so wholly different from the girls of his world.  It was an attractive difference. ...  And her grin!  When it glowed for him he felt for the moment as if the world were really a pleasant place to spend one’s life.

He learned from her.  New ideas and comprehensions came to him as a result of her conversations with him.  Through her eyes he was seeing the other side.  Not all her theories, not even all her facts, could he accept, but no matter how radical, no matter how incendiary her words, he delighted to hear her voice uttering them.  In short, Bonbright Foote VII, prince of the Foote Dynasty, was in danger of falling in love with the beggar maid.

So, many diverse forces and individualities were at work upon the molding of Bonbright Foote.  One, and one only, he recognized, and that was the stern, ever-apparent, iron-handed wrenching of his father.  There were times, which grew more and more frequent, when he fancied he had surrendered utterly to it and had handed over his soul to Bonbright Foote, Incorporated.  He fancied he was sitting by apathetically watching the family tradition squeeze it into the desired form. ...

After a wretched day he had called on Ruth.  The next morning soft-footed Rangar had moved shadowlike into his father’s office, and presently his father summoned him to come in.

“I am informed,” said the gentleman who was devoting his literary talents to a philosophical biography of the Marquis Lafayette, Hero of Two Worlds, friend of Liberty and Equality, “that you have been going repeatedly to the house of that girl who formerly was your secretary—­whose mother runs a boarding house for anarchists.”

The suddenness, the unexpectedness of attack upon this angle, nonplussed Bonbright.  He could only stand silent, stamped with the guilty look of youth.

“Is it true?” snapped his father.

“I have called on Miss Frazer,” Bonbright said, unsteadily.

Mr. Foote stood up.  It was his habit to stand up in all crises, big or little.

“Have you no respect for your family name? ...  If you must have things like this in your life, for God’s sake keep them covered up.  Don’t be infernally blatant about them.  Do you want the whole city whispering like ghouls over the liaison of my son with—­with a female anarchist who is—­the daughter of a boarding-house keeper?”

Liaison! ...  Liaison! ...  The foreign term beat again and again against Bonbright’s consciousness before it gained admission.  Used in connection with Ruth Frazer, with his relations with Ruth Frazer, it was dead, devoid of meaning, conveyed no meaning to his brain.

“Liaison, sir! ...  Liaison?” he said, fumblingly.