“So you’re not married to him, either!” sneered Miss Woodcock.

“Well, I’m as much married to him as you are!” retorted Miss Startup with her nose in the air.

Then instinctively they both turned and with one accord looked malevolently at Caput, who, seeing in their glance something which he did not like, slipped stealthily from his chair and out of the room, leaving ignominiously behind him upon the floor his precious volume entitled “How to Try a Case”!

“That Sort of Woman”

    “Judge not according to the appearance.”—­John VII:  24.

“Tutt,” said Mr. Tutt, entering the offices of Tutt & Tutt and hanging his antediluvian stovepipe on the hat-tree in the corner, “I see by the morning paper that Payson Clifford has departed this life.”

“You don’t say!” replied the junior Tutt, glancing up from the letter he was writing.  “Which one,—­Payson, Senior, or Payson, Junior?”

“Payson, Senior,” answered Mr. Tutt as he snipped off the end of a stogy with the pair of nail scissors which he always carried in his vest pocket.

“In that case, it’s too bad,” remarked Tutt regretfully.

“Why ’in that case’?” queried his partner.

“Oh, the son isn’t so much of a much!” replied the smaller Tutt.  “I don’t say the father was so much of a much, either.  Payson Clifford was a good fellow—­even if he wasn’t our First Citizen—­or likely to be a candidate for that position in the Hereafter.  But that boy—­”

“Shh!” reproved Mr. Tutt, slowly shaking his head so that the smoke from his rat-tailed cigar wove a gray scroll in the air before his face.  “Remember that there’s one thing worse than to speak ill of the dead, and that’s to speak ill of a client!”

Mr. Payson Clifford, the client in question, was a commonplace young man who had been carefully prepared for the changes and chances of this mortal life first at a Fifth Avenue day school in New York City, afterwards at a select boarding school among the rock-ribbed hills of the Granite State, and finally at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the cultured atmosphere of Harvard College, through whose precincts, in the dim, almost forgotten past, we are urged to believe that the good and the great trod musingly in their beautiful prime.  He emerged with a perhaps almost prudish distaste for the ugly, the vulgar, and the unclean,—­and with distinct delusions of grandeur.  He was still in that state not badly described by the old saw—­“You can always tell a Harvard man,—­but you can’t tell him much.”

His mother had died when he was still a child and he preserved her memory as the most sacred treasure of his inner shrine.  He could just recall her as a gentle and dignified presence, in contrast with whom his burly, loud-voiced father had always seemed crass and ordinary.  And although it was that same father who had, for as long as he could remember, supplied him with a substantial check upon the first day of every month and thus enabled him to achieve that exalted state of intellectual and spiritual superiority which he had in fact attained, nevertheless, putting it frankly in the vernacular, Payson rather looked down on the old man, who palpably suffered from lack of the advantages which he had furnished to his son.