thing of hers, or something like that. In Frederica's absence, I suppose
it's only fair to warn you myself. Have you been to see it? I haven't."

She smiled in a sort of contented amusement and let that do for an
answer to his question about Maude Adams. Then the smile transmuted
itself into a look of thoughtful gravity and there was a long silence
which, though it puzzled him, he made no move to break.

At last she pulled in a long breath, turned straight to him and said, "I
wish you'd tell me what _did_ happen to you."

And under the compelling sincerity of her, for the next two hours and a
half, or thereabouts, he did--told it as he had never told it
before--talked as Frederica, who thought she knew him, had never heard
him talk.

He told her how he had started at the foot of the ladder in one of the
big successful firms of what he called "client caretakers," drawing up
bills and writs, rounding up witnesses in personal injury suits, trying
little justice-shop cases--the worst of them, of course, because there
was a youngster just ahead of him who got the better ones. And then,
dramatically, he told of his discovery amid this chaff, of a real legal
problem--a problem that for its nice intricacies and intellectual
suggestiveness, would have brought an appreciative gleam to the eye of
Mr. Justice Holmes, or Lord Mansfield, or the great Coke himself. He
told of the passionate enthusiasm with which he had attacked it, the
thrilling weeks of labor he had put on it. And then he told her the
outcome of it all; how the head of the firm, an old friend of his
father, had called him in and complimented him on the work that he had
done; said it was very remarkable, but, unfortunately, not profitable to
the firm, the whole amount involved in the case having been some twenty
dollars. They were only paying him forty dollars a month, to be sure,
but they figured that forty dollars practically a total loss and they
thought he might better go to practising law for himself. In other
words, he was fired.

But the thing that rang through the girl's mind like the clang of a
bell--the thing that made her catch her breath, was the quality of the
big laugh with which he concluded it. He didn't ask her to be sorry for
him. He wasn't sorry for himself one bit,--nor bitter--nor cynical. He
didn't even seem trying to make a merit of his refusal to acquiesce in
that sordid point of view. He just dismissed the thing with a
cymbal-like clash