ealized that as a judge's wife her life and her duties--and
she was eager always to acquire new duties--would be different from her
life and her duties as a lawyer's wife or a doctor's wife or a
merchant's wife, for example. For Laura Van Dorn was in the wife
business with a consuming ardor, and the whole universe was related to
her wifehood. To her marriage was the development of a two-phase soul
with but one will. As the young couple entered their home, the wife was
saying:

"Tom, isn't it fine to think of the good you can do--these poor folk in
the Valley don't really get justice. And they're your friends. They
always help you and father in the election, and now you can see that
they have their rights. Oh, I'm so glad--so glad father did it. That was
his way to show them how he really loves them."

The husband smiled, a husbandly and superior smile, and said absently,
"Oh, well, I presume they don't get much out of the courts, but they
should learn to keep away from litigation. It's a rich man's game
anyway!" He was thinking of the steps before him which might lead him to
a higher court and still higher. His ambition vaulted as he spoke.
"Laura, Father Jim wouldn't mind having a son-in-law on the United
States Supreme Court, and I believe we can work together and make it in
twenty years more!"

As the young wife saw the glow of ambition in his fine, mobile face she
stifled the altruistic yearnings, which she had come to feel made her
husband uncomfortable, and joined him as he gazed into the crystal ball
of the future and saw its glistening chimera.

Perhaps the preceding dialogue wherein Dr. James Nesbit, his wife, his
daughter and his son-in-law have spoken may indicate that politics as
the Doctor played it was an exceedingly personal chess game. We see him
here blithely taking from the people of his state, their rights to
justice and trading those rights cheerfully for his personal happiness
as it was represented in the possible reformation of his daughter's
husband. He thought it would work--this curious bartering of public
rights for private ends. He could not see that a man who could accept a
judgeship as it had come to Tom Van Dorn, in the nature of things could
not take out an essential self-respect which he had forfeited when he
took the place. The Doctor was as blind as Tom Van Dorn, as blind as his
times. Government was a personal matter in that day; public place was a
personal perquisite.

As for th