"Good heavens!" he said. "There's nothing to tell! I've got an argument
before the Court of Appeals to-morrow and there's a ruling decision
against me. It is against me, and it's bad law. But that isn't what I
want to tell them. I want some way of making a distinction so that I can
hold that the decision doesn't rule."

"And it wouldn't help," she ventured, "if you told me all about it? I
don't care about the dinner."

"I couldn't explain in a month," he said.

"Oh, I wish I were some good," she said forlornly.

He pulled out his watch again and began pacing up and down the room.

"I just can't stand it to see you like that," she broke out again. "If
you'll only sit down for five minutes and let me try to get that
strained look out of your eyes...."

"Good God, Rose!" he shouted. "Can't you take my word for it and let it
alone? I'm not ill, nor frightened, nor broken-hearted. I don't need to
be comforted nor encouraged. I'm in an intellectual quandary. For the
next three hours, or six, or however long it takes, I want my mind to
run cold and smooth. I've got to be tight and strained. That's the way
the job's done. You can't solve an intellectual problem by having your
hand held, or your eyes kissed, or anything like that. Now, for God's
sake, child, run along and let me forget you ever existed, for a while!"

And he ground his teeth over an impulse that all but got the better of
him, after she'd shut the door, to follow her out into the corridor and
pull her up in his arms and kiss her face all over, and to consign the
Law and the Prophets both, to the devil.

CHAPTER IV

LONG CIRCUITS AND SHORT

James Randolph was a native Chicagoan, but his father, an intelligent
and prosperous physician, with a general practise in one of the northern
suburbs, afterward annexed to the city, did not belong to the old
before-the-fire aristocracy that Rodney and Frederica, and Martin
Whitney, the Crawfords and Violet Williamson were born into. The medical
tradition carried itself along to the third generation, when James made
a profession of it, and in him, it flowered really into genius. From the
beginning his bent toward the psychological aspect of it was marked and
his father was sympathetic enough to give it free sway. After graduating
from one of the Chicago medical colleges he went to Johns Hopkins, and
after that to Vienna, where he worked mostly under Professor Freud.

It was in Vienna that he met Eleanor Bl