ings us down to you. What are you?"

She sighed. "I'm sort of a black sheep, I guess. I'm just in the
university. But I'm to be a lawyer."

Whereupon he cried out "Good lord!" so explosively that she fairly
jumped.

Then he apologized, said he didn't know why her announcement should have
taken him like that, except that the notion of her in court trying a
case--he was a lawyer himself--seemed rather startling.

She sighed. "And now I suppose," she said, "you'll advise me not to be.
Portia won't hear of my being a decorator. She says there's nothing in
it any more; and my two brothers--one's a professor of history and the
other's a high-school principal--say, 'Let her do anything but teach.'
One of mother's great friends is a doctor, and she says, 'Anything but
medicine,' so I suppose you'll say, 'Anything but law.'"

"Not a bit," he said. "It's the finest profession in the world."

But he said it off the top of his mind. Down below, it was still engaged
with the picture of her in a dismal court room, blazing up at a jury the
way she had blazed up at that street-car conductor. It was a queer
notion. He didn't know whether he liked it or not.

"I suppose," she hazarded, "that it's awfully dull and tiresome, though,
until you get way up to the top."

That roused him. "It's awfully dull when you do get to the top, or
what's called the top--being a client caretaker with the routine law
business of a few big corporations and rich estates going through your
office like grist through a mill. I can't imagine anything duller than
that. That's supposed to be the big reward, of course. That's the
bundle of hay they dangle in front of your nose to keep you trotting
straight along without trying to see around your blinders."

He was out of his chair now, tramping up and down the room. "You're not
supposed to discover that it's interesting. You're pretty well spoiled
for their purposes if you do. The thing to bear in mind, if you're going
to travel their road, is that a case is worth while in a precise and
unalterable ratio to the amount of money involved in it. If you question
that axiom at all seriously, you're lost. That's what happened to me."

He pulled up with a jerk, looked at her and laughed. "If my sister
Frederica were here," he explained, "she would warn you, out of a long
knowledge of my conversational habits, that now was the time for you to
ask me,--firmly, you know,--if I'd been to see Maude Adams in this new