Looking at the matter soberly, Mary Wellington perceived that Jim
Daly's performance was a disreputable piece of business, which merited
the censure of all decent citizens. Having reached this conclusion,
she dismissed George Colfax on his travels with a sense of
satisfaction that he viewed the affair with such abhorrence. For, much
as she liked George, her hesitation to become his wife and renounce
the bachelor-girl career to which, since her last birthday--her
twenty-fifth--she had felt herself committed, was a sort of
indefinable suspicion as to the real integrity of his standards. He
was an excellent talker, of course; his ideals of public life and
private ethics, as expressed in drawing-rooms, or during pleasant
dialogues when they were alone together, were exemplary. But every now
and then, while he discoursed picturesquely of the evils of the age
and the obligations of citizenship, it would occur to her to wonder
how consistent he would be in case his principles should happen to
clash with his predilections. How would he behave in a tight place? He
was a fashionable young man with the tastes of his class, and she
thought she had detected in him once or twice a touch of that
complacent egotism which is liable to make fish of one foible and
flesh of another, as the saying is, to suit convention. In short, were
his moral perceptions genuinely delicate?

However, she liked him so well that she was anxious to believe her
questionings groundless. Accordingly, his protestations of repugnance
at Jim Daly's conduct were reassuring. For though they were merely
words, his denunciation appeared heartfelt and to savor of clean and
nice appreciation of the distinction between truth and falsehood.
Indeed, she was half-inclined to call him back to tell him that she
had changed her mind and was ready to take him for better or for
worse. But she let him go, saying to herself that she could live