I could not help smiling.  “My dear Sylvia!  A simple thing!”

She came and sat beside me.  “That’s what I want to talk about.  It is time I was growing up.  It it time that I knew about these things.  Tell me about them.”

“What, my dear?”

“About the methods of the van Tuiver estates, that can’t be changed to please me.  I made out one thing, we had recently paid a fine for some infraction of the law in one of those buildings, and my husband said it was because we had refused to pay more money to a tenement-house inspector.  I asked him:  ’Why should we pay any money at all to a tenement-house inspector?  Isn’t it bribery?’ He answered:  ’It’s a custom—­the same as you give a tip to a hotel waiter.’  Is that true?”

I could not help smiling.  “Your husband ought to know, my dear,” I said.

I saw her compress her lips.  “What is the tip for?”

“I suppose it is to keep out of trouble with him.”

“But why can’t we keep out of trouble by obeying the law?”

“My dear, sometimes the law is inconvenient, and sometimes it is complicated and obscure.  It might be that you are violating it without knowing the fact.  It might be uncertain whether you are violating it or not, so that to settle the question would mean a lot of expense and publicity.  It might even be that the law is impossible to obey—­that it was not intended to be obeyed.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean, maybe it was passed to put you at the mercy of the politicians.”

“But,” she protested, “that would be blackmail.”

“The phrase,” I replied, “is ‘strike-legislation.’”

“But at least, that wouldn’t be our fault!”

“No, not unless you had begun it.  It generally happens that the landlord discovers it’s a good thing to have politicians who will work with him.  Maybe he wants his assessments lowered; maybe he wants to know where new car lines are to go, so that he can buy intelligently; maybe he wants the city to improve his neighbourhood; maybe he wants influence at court when he has some heavy damage suit.”

“So we bribe everyone!”

“Not necessarily.  You may simply wait until campaign-time, and then make your contribution to the machine.  That is the basis of the ’System.’.”

“The ’System ’?”

“A semi-criminal police-force, and everything that pays tribute to it; the saloon and the dive, the gambling hell the white-slave market, and the Arson trust.”

I saw a wild look in her eyes.  “Tell me, do you know that all these things are true?  Or are you only guessing about them?”

“My dear Sylvia,” I answered, “you said it was time you grew up.  For the present I will tell you this:  Several months before I met you, I made a speech in which I named some of the organised forces of evil in the city.  One was Tammany Hall, and another was the Traction Trust, and another was the Trinity Church Corporation, and yet another was the van Tuiver estates.”