sed two bits of ribbon
always protruded from its edge. But those who read these documents,
though they laughed at the outside, respected the inside, for "the
Ancients" had a large practice and knew how to keep it.

"They're harmless old birds," said Elmendorff, whose place Sargent was
taking, "but utterly impractical. I've been three years in a live office
and I tell you I couldn't stand this. You'll waste your time here. Why,
not a week ago I heard old man Peyton tell a client that he'd better
put everything on the altar of compromise and then offer to divide,
rather than get into litigation. They're dying of dry rot. You can't get
up a scrap here to save your eternal. Just think of this for instance.
Last month I began an action for the Staunton Manufacturing Company
against Mundel and it was dead open and shut, too. Well, in walks
Harding one morning madder than hops. 'How did this get in the office?'
says he, waiving the complaint. I told him I advised the plaintiffs that
they had a good case. 'Good case!' he roars. 'There's not the slightest
justice in the claim--not a scintilla of justice, Sir!' 'But we can
win,' I told him, and I showed the old fool where the defendant had
slipped up in the wording of his contract and how we had him cold. Well,
darn me, if he didn't get hotter under the collar than before, asking me
if I thought his firm were hired tricksters and bravos and I don't know
what. Finally he bundled all the papers back to the Staunton Company and
wrote them they oughtn't to sue. That settled me, and so I told them I'd
have to get out into the world again before the moss grew. It's a pity,
too, for they've really got a smooth lot of clients if they only knew
how to work them."

So Elmendorff departed, but no one ever heard that he took any of the
Ancients' practice with him.

It was this atmosphere which Sargent breathed for three years, and
perhaps, as has been said, that may account for some of his many
eccentricities and explain, in a measure, his treatment of Fenton.

Fenton had married the daughter of Brayton Garland, one of Mr. Harding's
clients, and when his wife sued him for divorce he brought the papers to
Sargent.

It was in offices very different from the Ancients' that Fenton found
his counsel. They were on the 17th floor of the Titan Building, on lower
Broadway, where the draught in the hall steadily sucked a stream of
people into elevators, which, with the regularity of trip-hammers,