Chapter
4
DECENCY."THAT IS ALL," SAID the assistant State attorney with a wave toward the door. The girl stepped down from the witness-stand. As she passed him a sudden impulse prompted Ogden Secor to stop her. He could not have explained why he did so, but before he realized it he had asked the girl to wait in the witness-room without until he came.
A great and sudden pity for her had welled within him at her last words: "There are no good men." To have spoken to such a woman as she would have seemed an utter impossibility to Ogden Secor a brief half-hour before, and now he had asked her to wait for him, and in his mind was a determination to help her—to save her from the hideous life she had chosen.
Immediately after he had spoken the words he regretted them. It was as though he had
