David took the cigar from his lips. He felt annoyed and irritated that an affair concerning Margaret had been brought forward for discussion. In his heart he also feared McGregor. “Let it alone,” he said sharply. “She is a woman grown and has more judgment and good sense than any other woman I know.” He got up and threw the cigar over the veranda into the grass. “Women are not understandable,” he half shouted. “They do inexplicable things, have inexplicable fancies. Why do they not go forward along straight lines like a sane man? I years ago gave up understanding you and now I am being compelled to give up understanding Margaret.”
At Mrs. Ormsby's reception McGregor appeared arrayed in the black suit he had purchased for his mother's funeral. His flaming red hair and rude countenance arrested the attention of all. About him on all sides crackled talk and laughter. As Margaret had been alarmed and ill at ease in the crowded court room where a fight for life went on, so he among these people who went about uttering little broken sentences and laughing foolishly at nothing, felt depressed and uncertain. In the midst of the company he occupied much the same position as a new and ferocious animal safely caught and now on caged exhibition. They thought it clever of Mrs. Ormsby to have him and he was, in not quite the accepted sense, the lion of the evening. The rumour that he would be there had induced more than one woman to cut other engagements and come to where she could take the hand of and talk with this hero of the newspapers, and the men shaking his hand, looked at him sharply and wondered what power and what cunning lay in him.
In the newspapers after the murder trial a cry had sprung up about the person of McGregor. Fearing to print in full the substance of his speech on vice, its ownership and its significance, they had filled their columns with talk of the man. The huge Scotch lawyer of the Tenderloin was proclaimed as something new and startling in the grey mass of the city's population. Then as in the brave days that followed the man caught irresistibly the imagination of writing men, himself dumb in written or spoken words except in the heat of an inspired outburst when he expressed perfectly that pure brute force, the lust for which sleeps in the souls of artists.
