"I'm going to see Clarendon. If it's true I don't want you to see him again. Authorize me to break the engagement for you."
They talked it over for a few minutes. Beatrice slipped the engagement ring from her finger and gave it to her father with a sigh.
"You can't do wrong without paying for it, Dad."
"I'm not thinking of Clarendon. I'm thinking about me. I feel as if I had been dragged in the dust," she said wearily.
The question at issue was not whether Beatrice would break with her fiancé, but in what way it should be done. If her father found him guilty of what Durand had said, he was to dismiss him brusquely; if not, Beatrice wanted to disengage herself gently and with contrition.
Whitford summoned Bromfield to his office where the personal equation would be less pronounced. He put to him plainly the charge made by Jerry and demanded an answer.
The younger man was between the devil and the deep sea. He would have lied cheerfully if that would have availed. But a denial of the truth of Durand's allegations would be a challenge for him to prove his story. He would take it to the papers and spread it broadcast. From that hour Clarendon Bromfield would be an outcast in the city. Society would repudiate him. His clubs would cast him out. All the prestige that he had built up by a lifetime of effort would be swept away.
No lie could save him. The only thing he could do was to sugarcoat the truth. He set about making out a case for himself as skillfully as he could.
"I'm a man of the world, Mr. Whitford," he explained. "When I meet an ugly fact I look it in the face. This man Lindsay was making a great impression on you and Bee. Neither of you seemed able quite to realize his--his deficiencies, let us say. I felt myself at a disadvantage with him because he's such a remarkably virile young man and he constantly reminded you both of the West you love. It seemed fair to all of us to try him out--to find out whether at bottom he was a decent fellow or not. So I laid a little trap to find out."
Bromfield was sailing easily into his version of the affair. It was the suavest interpretation of his conduct that he had been able to prepare, one that put him in the rôle of a fair-minded man looking to the best interests of all.