Her story was quickly told.  A couple of hours ago the acting-manager of Mr. van Tuiver’s office had telephoned to ask if he might call upon a matter of importance.  He had come.  Naturally, he had the most extreme reluctance to say anything which might seem to criticise the activities of Mr. van Tuiver’s wife, but there was something in the account in the newspapers which should be brought to her husband’s attention.  The articles gave the names and locations of a number of firms in whose factories it was alleged that Mrs. van Tuiver had found unsatisfactory conditions, and it happened that two of these firms were located in premises which belonged to the van Tuiver estates!

A story coming very close to melodrama, I perceived.  I sat dismayed at what I had done.  “Of course, dear girl,” I said, at last, “you understand that I had no idea who owned these buildings.”

“Oh, don’t say that!” exclaimed Sylvia.  “I am the one who should have known!”

Then for a long time I sat still and let her suffer.  “Tenement sweat-shops!  Little children in factories!” I heard her whisper.

At last I put my hand on hers.  “I tried to put it off for a while,” I said.  “But I knew it would have to come.”

“Think of me!” she exclaimed, “going about scolding other people for the way they make their money!  When I thought of my own, I had visions of palatial hotels and office-buildings—­everything splendid and clean!”

“Well, my dear, you’ve learned now, and you will be able to do something—­”

She turned upon me suddenly, and for the first time I saw in her face the passions of tragedy.  “Do you believe I will be able to do anything?  No!  Don’t have any such idea!”

I was struck dumb.  She got up and began to pace the room.  “Oh, don’t make any mistake, I’ve paid for my great marriage in the last hour or two.  To think that he cares about nothing save the possibility of being found out and made ridiculous!  All his friends have been ‘muckraked,’ as he calls it, and he has sat aloft and smiled over their plight; he was the landed gentleman, the true aristrocrat, whom the worries of traders and money-changers didn’t concern.  Now perhaps he’s caught, and his name is to be dragged in the mire, and it’s my flightiness, my lack of commonsense that has done it!”

“I shouldn’t let that trouble me,” I said.  “You could not know—­”

“Oh, it’s not that!  It’s that I hadn’t a single courageous word to say to him—­not a hint that he ought to refuse to wring blood-money from sweat-shops!  I came away without having done it, because I couldn’t face his anger, because it would have meant a quarrel!”

“My dear,” I said gently, “it is possible to survive a quarrel.”

“No, you don’t understand!  We should never make it up again, I know—­I saw it in his words, in his face.  He will never change to please me, no, not even a simple thing like the business-methods of the van Tuiver estates.”