ed since Hazlitt had wept on the stairs as he left
Rachel's room. Dry-eyed now and clear-headed, he sat one winter
afternoon against his chosen background--the swarm and clutter of a law
court. His brief-cases were packed. His law books had been bundled back
to his office.

He was waiting beside a vivid-faced young woman who sat twisting a
tear-damp handkerchief in her hands. The jury that had listened for
three weeks to the tale of the young woman's murder of a hospital
interne who had seduced and subsequently refused to marry her, had
sauntered out of the jury-box to determine now whether the young woman
should be hanged, imprisoned, or liberated. The excitements attending
the trial had brought a reaction to Hazlitt. He seemed suddenly to have
lost interest in the business of his defense of the wronged young woman.
This despite that he had for three weeks maintained a high pitch of rage
against the scoundrel who had violated his client and subsequently
driven her insane by even more abominable cruelties.

Hazlitt's concluding remarks to the jury on the subject of dishonored
womanhood and the merciless bestiality of certain male types had been
more than a legal oration. He had expressed himself in it and had spent
two full days lost in admiration of the echoes of his bombast.... "Men
who follow the vile dictates of their lower natures, who sow the
whirlwind and expect to reap the roses thereby; cynical, soulless men
who take a woman as one takes a glove, to wear, admire, and discard;
depraved men who prowl like demons at the heels of virtue, fawning their
ways into the pure heart of innocence and glutting their beastly hungers
upon the finest fruits of life--the beauty and sacrifice of a maiden's
first love--are such creatures men or fiends, gentlemen of the jury?"
And then ... "spurned, taunted by the sneers of one of these vipers, her
pleadings answered with laughter and blows of a fist, the soul of
Pauline Pollard grew suddenly dark. Where had been sanity, innocence,
and love, now came insanity. Her girl's mind--like sweet bells jangled
out of tune--brought no longer the high message of reason into her
heart. We sitting here in this sunny courtroom, gentlemen, can think and
reason. But Pauline Pollard, struggling in the embrace of a leering
savage, listening to his fiendish mockeries of her virtue--the virtue he
had stolen from her--ah! the soul and brain of Pauline Pollard vanished
in a darkness. The law is the la