egun to consider the circumstances
that had brought him to choose the law as a profession; for his vague
intelligence "where nothing was and all things seemed," lay mirrored
in his mild eyes like a landscape in a pool. Over such a partial and
meditative a mind as L'Estrange's, the Temple may exercise a
destructive fascination; and since the first day, when a boy he had
walked through the closes gathering round the church, and had heard
of the knights, had seen the old dining-hall with its many
inscriptions, he had never ceased to dream of the Temple--that relic
of the past, saved with all its traditions out of the ruin of time;
and the memory of his cousin's chambers, and the association and
mutuality of the life of the Temple, the picturesqueness of the wigs
and gowns passing, and the uncommonness of it all had taken root and
grown, overshadowing other ideals, and when the time came for him to
choose a profession, no choice was open to him but the law, for the
law resided in the Temple.

Soon after his father died, the family property was sold and the
family scattered; some went to Australia, some to Canada; but
L'Estrange had inherited a hundred a year from a grand-aunt, and he
lived on that, and what he made by writing in the newspapers, for of
course no one had thought of intrusting him with a brief; and what he
made by journalism varied from a hundred and fifty to two hundred and
fifty a year. Whenever a new scare arose he was busy among blue-books
in the library.

L'Estrange loved to dine at the Cock tavern with a party of men from
the inn, and to invite them to his chambers to take coffee
afterwards. And when they had retired, and only one remained, he
would say, "What a nice fellow so-and-so is; you do meet a nice lot
of fellows in the Temple, don't you?" It seemed almost sufficient
that a man should belong to the Temple for L'Estrange to find him
admirable. The dinners in hall were especially delightful. Between
the courses he looked in admiration on the portraits and old oak
carvings, and the armorial bearings, and would tell how one bencher
had been debarred from election as treasurer because he had, on three
occasions, attended dinner without partaking of any food. Such an
insult to the kitchen could not be forgiven. L'Estrange was full of
such stories, and he relished their historical flavour as a gourmet
an unusually successful piece of cooking. He regarded the Temple and
its associations with love.