e to be
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 the Bar,