shot
them up breathless and dropped them gasping.

There were three law firms in the same suite with Sargent,--four
attorneys "on their own hook," a Seamless Mattress Company, an Electric
Drying Company and a Collection Agency. Typewriters clicked in every
room, messengers clattered up and down the long hallway, brass gates on
the railed-off spaces swung to and fro crashing with every swing, the
telephones sung a constant chorus, electric bells buzzed and tinkled,
doors banged, papers rustled, voices droned or struck the air in sharp
staccato, and yet in the midst of all this restless human energy there
were times when Sargent felt lonely. It was not merely that he missed
the atmosphere of quiet and study, but the very rush and scramble seemed
to generate ideas and actions foreign to the code of professional ethics
and dignity which governed the Ancients.

Sometimes the denizens of the Titan Building discussed the matter with
him.

"Theoretically your venerable friends are all right," a brilliant,
pushing young lawyer told him one day. "The man who lives by maxims in
this day and generation will have food for thought, but he'll never earn
his salt. We start with the same point of view, but----"

He shrugged his shoulders.

"But someone throws gold-dust in our eyes?" suggested Sargent.

"Bosh!" was the retort. "Don't talk the cant of the incompetent. The
Bar is of a higher average to-day than it ever was before."

But despite the "high average," Sargent often felt himself a solitary
outsider looking on at the mad clamour and pitiless pursuit and
wondering if it was worth all it seemed to cost. A defect in early
education--this pausing to think--for philosophers on lower Broadway are
apt to have but brief careers.

"There's nothing in the case," Fenton told his counsel, who sat gazing
out of the window at the tiny human ants crawling in and out of the
stone heaps in the street below.

Sargent looked narrowly at his client, but the side face told him
nothing, so he made no comment and Fenton continued,

"I don't know why she wants to drag us into court. I suppose some
long-whiskered tabby has been telling her I ought to stay home every
night. Say, Sargent, isn't there some way of bringing her to her
senses?"

The speaker turned from the window with a gesture of impatience, and
Sargent studied the handsome though somewhat boyish face. He knew Fenton
for an easy-going fellow, but no fool. He was a young man wh