ush principle _too_ far; or, once you
plunge into affairs, you cease to be quite so high-souled. At any
rate nothing in David's middle-class mind was so horrible as penury
and the impotence that comes with it. How many months or years would
lie ahead of him before fees could be gained and a professional
income be earned? Besides he wanted to take Bertie Adams into his
service as a Clerk. A barrister must have a clerk, and David in his
peculiar circumstances could only engage one acquainted more or
less with his secret.

So Bertie Adams fulfilled the ambition he had cherished for three
years--he felt all along it was coming true. And when David was
called to the Bar--which he was with all the stately ceremonial of a
Call night at the Inner Temple in the Easter term of 1905, more
elbow room was acquired at Fig Tree Court, and Bertie Adams was
installed there as clerk to Mr. David Vavasour Williams, who had
residential chambers on the third floor, and a fair-sized Office and
small private room on the second floor. Bertie's mother had "washed"
for both Honoria and Vivie in their respective dwellings for years,
and for David after he came to live at Fig Tree Court. A substantial
douceur to the "housekeeper" had facilitated this, for in the part
of the Temple where lies Fig Tree Court the residents do not call
their ministrants "laundresses," but "housekeepers." Curiously
enough the accounts were always tendered to the absent Vivie Warren,
but Mrs. Adams noted no discrepancy in their being paid by her son
or in an unmarried lady living in the Temple under the name of David
Williams.

Installed as clerk and advised by his employer to court one of the
fair daughters of the housekeeper (Mrs. Laidly) with a view to
marriage and settling down in premises hard-by, Bertie Adams (who
like David had spent his time well between 1901 and 1905 and was now
an accomplished and serviceable barrister's clerk) soon set to work
to chum up with other clerks in this clerical hive and get for his
master small briefs, small chances for defending undefended cases in
which hapless women were concerned.

But before we deal with the career of David at the Bar, which of
course did not properly commence--even as a brilliant junior--till
the early months of 1906, let us glance at the way in which he had
passed the intervening space of time between his return from Wales
in May, 1902, and the spending of his Long Vacation of 1905 as an
Esquire by the