Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/123

 whole body of society which thinks no more deeply than she did, it seemed the necessary, proper, and even indispensable thing to put Rheinhold—that was her husband's name—in jail (You should have heard her speak the name Rheinhold, with that delicious note in which she grasséyéd her r's.) There she sat, on the little chair by the window, with her stupidly staring boy and girl at her knees, but in her arms the brightest, prettiest, flaxen-haired baby in the world, a little elf who was always smiling, and picking at her mother's nose or cheeks with her fat little fingers, and when she smiled, her mother smiled, too; it was the only time she ever did.

Rheinhold of course drank; he "mistreated" his children—that is, he did not buy them food. And since the Humane Society was organized and maintained for the explicit purpose of forcing people to be humane, even though it had to be inhumane to accomplish its purpose, the duty of its attorney was clear.

Its attorney just then felt in himself a rising indignation, moral of course, yet very much like a vulgar anger. To look at those children, especially at that baby of which Maria was so fond, much fonder it was plain to be seen than of the other two, and to think of a man not providing for them, was to have a rage against him, the rage which society, so remorselessly moral in the mass, bears against all offenders—the rage a good prosecutor must keep alive and flaming in his breast if he would nerve himself to his task and earn his fees