The scrubby matches of the socially unelect or unfit always
interested, though they did not always amuse, him. Mrs. Stener had no
affection for Cowperwood, of course, looking on him, as she did, as the
unscrupulous cause of her husband's downfall. They were now quite poor
again, about to move from their big house into cheaper quarters; and
this was not pleasing for her to contemplate.

Judge Payderson came in after a time, accompanied by his undersized but
stout court attendant, who looked more like a pouter-pigeon than a human
being; and as they came, Bailiff Sparkheaver rapped on the judge's desk,
beside which he had been slumbering, and mumbled, "Please rise!" The
audience arose, as is the rule of all courts. Judge Payderson stirred
among a number of briefs that were lying on his desk, and asked,
briskly, "What's the first case, Mr. Protus?" He was speaking to his
clerk.

During the long and tedious arrangement of the day's docket and while
the various minor motions of lawyers were being considered, this
courtroom scene still retained interest for Cowperwood. He was so eager
to win, so incensed at the outcome of untoward events which had brought
him here. He was always intensely irritated, though he did not show
it, by the whole process of footing delays and queries and quibbles, by
which legally the affairs of men were too often hampered. Law, if you
had asked him, and he had accurately expressed himself, was a mist
formed out of the moods and the mistakes of men, which befogged the sea
of life and prevented plain sailing for the little commercial and social
barques of men; it was a miasma of misinterpretation where the ills
of life festered, and also a place where the accidentally wounded were
ground between the upper and the nether millstones of force or chance;
it was a strange, weird, interesting, and yet futile battle of wits
where the ignorant and the incompetent and the shrewd and the angry and
the weak were made pawns and shuttlecocks for men--lawyers, who were
playing upon their moods, their vanities, their desires, and their
necessities. It was an unholy and unsatisfactory disrupting and delaying
spectacle, a painful commentary on the frailties of life, and men, a
trick, a snare, a pit and gin. In the hands of the strong, like himself
when he was at his best, the law was a sword and a shield, a trap to
place before the feet of the unwary; a pit to dig in the path of those
who might pursue. It was anythin