, an old friend of her father,
playfully suggested that she come into his law office and be a Portia.

"Your black gown," he said, "makes me think you are a Justice of the
Court of Appeals."

He smiled, and she became very happy with this thought to carry home.
Even then I believe she had the good sense not to feel badly because he
had not praised her essay on "Constitutional Provisions Bearing Upon Our
Federal Control of Inter-State Commerce."

"Ten years from now, I'll tell you what I think about it," was all he
had to say.

John MacDonald was getting well along in years, but was at the height of
his active professional career when Gabrielle induced him to seriously
confirm his suggestion made a few months before. This persistence of
hers in the matter pleased him. He liked her self-confidence and that
quiet manner which told him she would win by taking the sure road of
steady, earnest endeavor to grasp the whole by taking each part, day by
day. She began, he saw, with scientific methods and abundant enthusiasm.
The plan was for her to master stenography and typewriting, become John
MacDonald's confidante in the office, and at the same time take a law
course at one of the down-town schools. The mechanical aids afforded by
stenographic note-taking and the typewriter's rapidity gave her the
short cuts to mastering the details and routine of the business--the
shop-work of a law office. Mr. MacDonald, a kind, mild-mannered man, but
an exact and careful lawyer, who demanded the utmost thoroughness from
his subordinates, had known this girl from childhood and took a fatherly
interest in her. She, in turn, admired him for his justice, and she felt
that the progress she was able to make in her work by keeping busy and
taking pains, might not have been so marked under his tutorship were he
not a man whose sympathy never ran to coddling and spoiling. He was in
sympathy with her, that she knew; but he never went out of his way to
tell her how well she was doing. He incorporated much of her original
work in his own, and let her infer his opinion of her from this. This
man was, I believe, the source of the girl's wisdom in the events which
drove her father and me into the most unusual forms of insane
conclusion. We assumed that we understood human nature. This girl
assumed nothing. She walked with sure feet after she had gone over the
case with some of the old-fashioned common sense that hovered around
John MacDonald's law off