Yet Tutt was no more of a Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde than most of us.  Merely, his daily transition was a little more abrupt.  And when all is said and done most of the devices invented by his fertile little brain to further the interests of his clients were no more worthy of condemnation than those put forward by far higher-priced and much more celebrated attorneys.

Not that Mrs. Tutt was blind to the dangers to which her husband by virtue of his occupation was exposed.  Far from it.  Indeed she made it her business to pay periodical visits to the office, ostensibly to see whether or not it was properly cleaned and the windows washed, but in reality—­or at least so Tutt suspected—­to find out whether the personnel was entirely suitable for a firm of their standing and particularly for a junior partner of his susceptibilities.

But she never discovered anything to give her the slightest cause for alarm.  The dramatis personae of the offices of Tutt & Tutt were characteristic of the firm, none of their employees—­except Miss Sondheim, the tumultous-haired lady stenographer—­and Willie, the office boy, being under forty years of age.

When not engaged in running errands or fussing over his postage-stamp album, Willie spent most of his time teasing old Scraggs, the scrivener, an unsuccessful teetotaler.  A faint odor of alcohol emanated from the cage in which he performed his labors and lent an atmosphere of cheerfulness to what might otherwise have seemed to Broadway clients an unsympathetic environment, though there were long annual periods during which he was as sober as a Kansas judge.  The winds of March were apt, however, to take hold of him.  Perhaps it was the spring in his case also.

The backbone of the establishment was Miss Minerva Wiggin.  In every law office there is usually some one person who keeps the shop going.  Sometimes it is a man.  If so, he is probably a sublimated stenographer or law clerk who, having worked for years to get himself admitted to the bar, finds, after achieving that ambition, that he has neither the ability nor the inclination to brave the struggle for a livelihood by himself.  Perchance as a youth he has had visions of himself arguing test cases before the Court of Appeals while the leaders of the bar hung upon his every word, of an office crowded with millionaire clients and servile employees, even as he is servile to the man for whom he labors for a miserly ten dollars a week.

His ambition takes him by the hand and leads him to high places, from which he gazes down into the land of his future prosperity and greatness.  The law seems a mysterious, alluring, fascinating profession, combining the romance of the drama with the gratifications of the intellect.  He springs to answer his master’s bell; he sits up until all hours running down citations and making extracts from opinions; he rushes to court and answers the calendar and sometimes carries the