The Law-Breakers and Other Stories | Page 2

called the latest piece of disregard for public
decency on the part of the free-born voter.
"Just think of it. The fellow impersonated one of his heelers, took the
civil-service examination in the heeler's name, and got the position for
him. He was spotted, tried before a jury who found him guilty, and was
sentenced to six months in jail. The day he was discharged, an admiring
crowd of his constituents escorted him from prison with a brass band
and tendered him a banquet. Yesterday he was chosen an alderman by
the ballots of the people of this city. A self-convicted falsifier and cheat!
A man who snaps his fingers in the face of the laws of the country! Isn't
that a commentary on the workings of universal suffrage?" This was a
caustic summing up on George's part of the story he had already told
Miss Wellington piecemeal, and he looked at her as much as to ask if
his dejection were not amply justified.
"It's a humiliating performance certainly," she said. "I don't wonder you
are exercised about it. Are there no extenuating circumstances?" Miss
Wellington appeared duly shocked; yet, being a woman of an alert and
cheery disposition, she reached out instinctively for some palliative
before accepting the affair in all its stark offensiveness.
"None which count--none which should weigh for a moment with any
one with patriotic impulses," he answered. "The plea is that the people
down there--Jim Daly's constituents--have no sympathy with the
civil-service examination for public office, and so they think it was
rather smart of him than otherwise to get the better of the law. In other
words, that it's all right to break a law if one doesn't happen to fancy it.
A nation which nurses that point of view is certain to come to grief."

Mary nodded gravely. "It's a dangerous creed--dangerous, and a little
specious, too. And can nothing be done about it? About Daly, I mean?"
"No. He's an alderman-elect, and the hero of his district. A wide-awake,
square-dealing young man with no vices, as I heard one of his admirers
declare. By the time I return from my trip to the Mediterranean I expect
they will be booming him for Congress."
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 without him perfectly well

for the next sixty days, and that the voyage would do him good. Were
she to become his wife, it would be necessary to give up the Settlement
work in which she had become deeply interested as the result of her
activities as a bachelor-girl. She must be certain that he was all she
believed him to be before she admitted that she loved him and burned
her philanthropical bridges.
Returning to her quarters in the heart of the city, Mary Wellington
became so absorbed in her work of bringing cheer and relief to the
ignorant and needy that she almost forgot George Colfax. Yet