You are hereby summoned to appear before the ------ District
Magistrate’s Court, Borough of Manhattan, City of New York, on the
eighth day of May, 1920, at ten o’clock in the forenoon, to answer
the charge made against you by Edna Pumpelly for violation of
Section Two, Article Two of the Traffic Regulations providing that a
vehicle waiting at the curb shall promptly give way to a vehicle
arriving to take up or set down passengers, and upon your failure to
appear at the time and place herein mentioned you are liable to a
fine of not exceeding fifty dollars or to imprisonment of not
exceeding ten days or both.

    Dated 6th day of May, 1920.

    JAMES CUDDAHEY, Police Officer,

Police Precinct ------, New York City.

    Attest:  JOHN J. JONES, Chief City Magistrate.

“Heavens!” cried Mrs. Wells as she read this formidable document.  “What a horrible woman!  What shall I do?”

Mr. John De Puyster Hepplewhite, one of the nicest men in New York, who had himself once had a somewhat interesting experience in the criminal courts in connection with the arrest of a tramp who had gone to sleep in a pink silk bed in the Hepplewhite mansion on Fifth Avenue, smiled deprecatingly, set down his Dresden-china cup and dabbed his mustache decorously with a filigree napkin.

“Dear lady,” he remarked with conviction, “in such distressing circumstances I have no hesitation whatever in advising you to consult Mr. Ephraim Tutt.”

* * * * *

“I have been thinking over what you said the other day regarding the relationship of crime to progress, Mr. Tutt, and I’m rather of the opinion that it’s rot,” announced Tutt as he strolled across from his own office to that of his senior partner for a cup of tea at practically the very moment when Mr. Hepplewhite was advising Mrs. Wells.  “In the vernacular—­bunk.”

“What did he say?” asked Miss Wiggin, rinsing out with hot water Tutt’s special blue-china cup, in the bottom of which had accumulated some reddish-brown dust from Mason & Welsby’s Admiralty and Divorce Reports upon the adjacent shelf.

“He made the point,” answered Tutt, helping himself to a piece of toast, “that crime was—­if I may be permitted to use the figure—­part of the onward urge of humanity toward a new and perhaps better social order; a natural impulse to rebel against existing abuses; and he made the claim that though an unsuccessful revolutionary was of course regarded as a criminal, on the other hand, if successful he at once became a patriot, a hero, a statesman or a saint.”

“A very dangerous general doctrine, I should say,” remarked Miss Wiggin.  “I should think it all depended on what sort of laws he was rebelling against.  I don’t see how a murderer could ever be regarded as assisting in the onward urge toward sweetness and light, exactly.”

“Wouldn’t it depend somewhat on whom you were murdering?” inquired Mr. Tutt, finally succeeding in his attempt to make a damp stogy continue in a state of combustion.  “If you murdered a tyrant wouldn’t you be contributing toward progress?”