e disentangled--work
profoundly interesting, as a rule, to his clear intellect, trained to
almost instinctive rejection of all but the essential, to selection of
what was legally vital out of the mass of confused tactical and human
detail presented to his scrutiny; yet sometimes tedious and wearing. As
for instance to-day, when he had suspected his client of perjury, and was
almost convinced that he must throw up his brief. He had disliked the
weak-looking, white-faced fellow from the first, and his nervous, shifty
answers, his prominent startled eyes--a type too common in these days of
canting tolerations and weak humanitarianism; no good, no good!

Of the three books he had taken down, a Volume of Voltaire--curious
fascination that Frenchman had, for all his destructive irony!--a volume
of Burton's travels, and Stevenson's "New Arabian Nights," he had pitched
upon the last. He felt, that evening, the want of something sedative, a
desire to rest from thought of any kind. The court had been crowded,
stuffy; the air, as he walked home, soft, sou'-westerly, charged with
coming moisture, no quality of vigour in it; he felt relaxed, tired, even
nervy, and for once the loneliness of his house seemed strange and
comfortless.

Lowering the lamp, he turned his face towards the fire. Perhaps he would
get a sleep before that boring dinner at the Tellasson's. He wished it
were vacation, and Maisie back from school. A widower for many years, he
had lost the habit of a woman about him; yet to-night he had a positive
yearning for the society of his young daughter, with her quick ways, and
bright, dark eyes. Curious what perpetual need of a woman some men had!
His brother Laurence--wasted--all through women--atrophy of willpower! A
man on the edge of things; living from hand to mouth; his gifts all down
at heel! One would have thought the Scottish strain might have saved
him; and yet, when a Scotsman did begin to go downhill, who could go
faster? Curious that their mother's blood should have worked so
differently in her two sons. He himself had always felt he owed all his
success to it.

His thoughts went off at a tangent to a certain issue troubling his legal
conscience. He had not wavered in the usual assumption of omniscience,
but he was by no means sure that he had given right advice. Well!
Without that power to decide and hold to decision in spite of misgiving,
one would never have been fit for one's position at t