e than to be an ignoramus."

Judge Carcasson nodded. "Ah, surely! Your Jean Jacques lacks a
balance-wheel. He has brains, but not enough. He has vision, but it is
not steady; he has argument, but it breaks down just where it should be
most cohesive. He interested me. I took note of every turn of his mind
as he gave evidence. He will go on for a time, pulling his strings,
doing this and doing that, and then, all at once, when he has got a
train of complications, his brain will not be big enough to see the
way out. Tell me, has he a balance-wheel in his home--a sensible wife,
perhaps?"

The Clerk of the Court shook his head mournfully and seemed to hesitate.
Then he said, "Comme ci, comme ca--but no, I will speak the truth about
it. She is a Spaniard--the Spanische she is called by the neighbours. I
will tell you all about that, and you will wonder that he has carried on
as well as he has, with his vanity and his philosophy."

"He'll have need of his philosophy before he's done, or I don't know
human nature; he'll get a bad fall one of these days," responded the
Judge. "'Moi-je suis M'sieu' Jean Jacques, philosophe'--that is what he
said. Bumptious little man, and yet--and yet there's something in him.
There's a sense of things which everyone doesn't have--a glimmer of life
beyond his own orbit, a catching at the biggest elements of being, a
hovering on the confines of deep understanding, as it were. Somehow
I feel almost sorry for him, though he annoyed me while he was in the
witness-box, in spite of myself. He was as the English say, so 'damn
sure.'"

"So damn sure always," agreed the Clerk of the Court, with a sense of
pleasure that his great man, this wonderful aged little judge, should
have shown himself so human as to use such a phrase.

"But, no doubt, the sureness has been a good servant in his business,"
returned the Judge. "Confidence in a weak world gets unearned profit
often. But tell me about his wife--the Spanische. Tell me the how and
why, and everything. I'd like to trace our little money-man wise to his
source."

Again M. Fille was sensibly agitated. "She is handsome, and she has
great, good gifts when she likes to use them," he answered. "She can do
as much in an hour as most women can do in two; but then she will not
keep at it. Her life is but fits and starts. Yet she has a good head for
business, yes, very good. She can see through things. Still, there it
is--she will not hold fast from day to