probably a dozen Bradys. The name was common enough, and the only decent
thing to do was to get rid of the suspicion and to apologise to Connie
in his thoughts. To impute a low motive to a simple action had always
seemed to him the vulgarity of littleness, and littleness in a man he
had come to look upon as a kind of passive vice. So until the event
proved the necessity of action, he was determined that there should be
no "black bats" among his thoughts. Had he loved Connie there might have
been perhaps more passion and less conscience in his treatment of the
situation, but the humour of the philosopher had for many years replaced
in his nature the ardour of the lover. What he gave to her was the
inflexible code of honour which he observed in his association with his
own sex.

At Fortieth Street he was about to turn back again when he was arrested
by the sound of his own name called by a passing voice, and looking up
he saw Perry Bridewell spring from a cab which had hastily driven up to
the sidewalk.

"Wait a bit, will you, Adams?" said Perry, waving one heavily gloved
hand while he reached up with the other to pay the driver. "You're the
very man I'm after," he added an instant later as he turned from the
curbing, "so if you don't mind I'll walk a couple of blocks in your
direction. I'd just got into my dinner clothes," he explained, fastening
his fur-lined overcoat more snugly across his chest, "when I found that
Miss Wilde was going down alone to Gramercy Park. That's where I've come
from, and now I'm rushing back to keep an engagement Gerty has made for
dinner. I'll be hanged if I know where she's taking me--it's all one to
me, half the time I forget to ask whose house we're going to until I
bolt into the drawing-room. Beastly life, this everlasting eating in
other people's houses."