was anything but conventionally proper. He was not. He only yearned to
be, well knowing that he was deficient in courage if not in everything
else.

But habit or no habit, likely or unlikely, Mrs. Tutt had no intention of
taking any chances so far as Tutt was concerned. If he did not reach
home precisely at six explanations were in order, and if he came in half
an hour later he had to demonstrate his integrity beyond a reasonable
doubt according to the established rules of evidence.

Perhaps Mrs. Tutt did wisely to hold Tutt thus in leash considering the
character of many of the firm's clients. For it was quite impossible to
conceal the nature of the practise of Tutt & Tutt; much of which figured
flamboyantly in the newspapers. Some women would have taken it for
granted under like circumstances that their husbands had acquired a
touch at least of the wisdom of the serpent even if they remained quite
harmless. Abigail countenanced no thought of any demoralization in her
spouse. To her he was like the artist who smears himself and his smock
with paint while in his studio, but appears at dinner in spotless linen
without even a whiff of benzine about him to suggest his occupation. So
Tutt, though hand and glove in his office with the most notorious of the
elite of Longacre Square, came home to supper with the naiveté and
innocence of a theological student for whom an evening at a picture show
is the height of dissipation.

Yet Tutt was no more of a Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde than most of us.
Merely, his daily transition was a little more abrupt. And when all is
said and done most of the devices invented by his fertile little brain
to further the interests of his clients were no more worthy of
condemnation than those put forward by far higher-priced and much more