Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/327

Rh Pharaohs the Morning Papyrus used to serve up this kind of thing”—and then, as the nervous tension of his hearer expressed itself in an abrupt movement, he added, handing back the clipping with a smile: “What do you propose to do? Kill the editor, and forbid Blanche and Bowfort the house?”

“I mean to do something,” Amherst began, suddenly chilled by the realization that his wrath had not yet shaped itself into a deﬁnite plan of action.

“Well, it must be that or nothing,” said Mr. Langhope, drawing his stick meditatively across his knee. “And, of course, if it’s that, you’ll land Bessy in a devil of a mess.”

Without giving his son-in-law time to protest, he touched rapidly but vividly on the inutility and embarrassment of libel suits, and on the devices whereby the legal means of vindication from such attacks may be turned against those who have recourse to them; and Amherst listened with a sickened sense of the incompatibility between abstract standards of honour and their practical application.

“What should you do, then?” he murmured, as Mr. Langhope ended with his light shrug and a “See Tredegar, if you don’t believe me”—; and his father-in-law replied with an evasive gesture: “Why, leave the responsibility where it belongs!”

“Where it belongs?” [ 311 ]