The High Cost Of Conscience
BY BEATRICE RAVENEL
From Harper's Magazine
"Any woman who can accept money from a gentleman who is in no way related to her--"
Miss Fowler delivered judgment.
"My dear Aunt Maria, you mean a gentleman's disembodied spirit," Hugh's light, pleasant
tones intervened.
"A legacy, Maria, is not quite the same thing. Mr. Winthrop Fowler's perfect intonation
carried its usual implication that the subject was closed.
"---- is what I call an adventuress," Miss Fowler summed up. She had a way of ignoring
objections, of reappearing beyond them like a submarine with the ultimate and detonating
answer. "And now she wants to reopen the matter when the whole thing's over and done
with. After three years. Extraordinary taste." She hitched her black-velvet Voltaire arm-
chair a little away from the fire and spread a vast knitting-bag of Chinese brocade over
her knees. "I suppose she isn't satisfied; she wants more."
"Naturally. I cannot imagine what other reason she could have for insisting on a personal
interview," her brother agreed, dryly. He retired into the Transcript as a Trappist
withdraws into his vows. A chastened client of Mr. Fowler's once observed that a half-
hour's encounter with him resulted in a rueful of asphyxiated topics.
Miss Maria, however, preferred disemboweling hers, "I shouldn't have consented," she
snapped. "Hugh, if you would be so good as to sit down. You are obstructing the light.
And the curtain-cord. If you could refrain from twisting it for a few moments."
Hugh let his long, high-shouldered figure lapse into the window-seat. "And besides, we're
all dying to know what she looks like," he suggested.
"Speak for yourself, please," said Miss Fowler, with the vivacity of the lady who protests
too much.
"I do, I do! Good Lord! I'm just as bad as the rest of you. All my life I've been consumed
to know what Uncle Hugh could have seen in a perfectly obscure little person to make
him do what he did. There must have been something." His eyes travelled to a sketch in
pencil of a man's head which hung in the shadow of the chimneypiece, a sketch whose
uncanny suggestion might have come from the quality of the sitter or merely from a
smudging of the medium. "Everything he did always seemed to me perfectly natural," he
went on, as though conscious of new discovery. "Even those years when he was knocking
about the world, hiding his address. Even when he had that fancy that people were
persecuting him. Most people did worry him horribly."
