injure me. I've
had experience. And--I must not lose my place."

One of the scrub women thrust her mussy head and ragged, shapeless body
in at the door. With a start Norman awoke to the absurdity of his
situation--and to the fact that he was placing the girl in a
compromising position. He shrugged his shoulders, went in and locked the
cabinet, departed.

"What a queer little insignificance she is!" thought he, and dismissed
her from mind.

II

Many and fantastic are the illusions the human animal, in its ignorance
and its optimism, devises to change life from a pleasant journey along a
plain road into a fumbling and stumbling and struggling about in a fog.
Of these hallucinations the most grotesque is that the weak can come
together, can pass a law to curb the strong, can set one of their number
to enforce it, may then disperse with no occasion further to trouble
about the strong. Every line of every page of history tells how the
strong--the nimble-witted, the farsighted, the ambitious--have worked
their will upon their feebler and less purposeful fellow men, regardless
of any and all precautions to the contrary. Conditions have improved
only because the number of the strong has increased. With so many lions
at war with each other not a few rabbits contrive to avoid perishing in
the nest.

Norman's genius lay in ability to take away from an adversary the legal
weapons implicitly relied upon and to arm his client with them. No man
understood better than he the abysmal distinction between law and
justice; no man knew better than he how to compel--or to assist--courts
to apply the law, so just in the general, to promoting injustice in the
particular. And whenever he permitted conscience a voice in his internal
debates--it was not often--he heard from it its usual servile
approbation: How can the reign of justice be more speedily brought about
than by making the reign of law--lawyer law--intolerable?

About a fortnight after the trifling incident related in the previous
chapter, Norman had to devise a secret agreement among several of the
most eminent of his clients. They wished to band together, to do a thing
expressly forbidden by the law; they wished to conspire to lower wages
and raise prices in several railway systems under their control. But
none would trust the others; so there must be something in writing, laid
away in a secret safety deposit box along with sundry bundles of
securities put up as for