“Then she has been a sound thinker.”

“The result is she has wandered away after some one else.  I know the man; and I know that he is after some one else.  Why do people desire the impossible person?  If I had been a Greek sculptor and had been commissioned to design as my masterwork the world’s Frieze of Love, it should have been one long array of marble shapes, each in pursuit of some one fleeing.  But some day Marguerite will be found sitting pensive on a stone—­pursuing no longer; and when I appear upon the scene, having overtaken her at last, she will sigh, but she will give me her hand and go with me:  and I’ll have to stand it.  That is the worst of it.  I shall have to stand it—­that she preferred the other man.”

The Judge did not care to hear Barbee on American themes with Greek imagery.  He yawned and struggled to his feet with difficulty.  “I’ll take a stroll,” he said; “it is all I can take.”

Barbee sprang forward and picked up for him his hat and cane.  The dog, by what seemed the slow action of a mental jackscrew, elevated his cylinder to the tops of his legs; and presently the two stiff old bodies turned the corner of the street, one slanting, one prone:  one dotting the bricks with his three legs, the other with his four.

Formerly the man and the brute had gone each his own way, meeting only at meal time and at irregular hours of the night in the Judge’s chambers.  The Judge had his stories regarding the origin of their intimacy.  He varied these somewhat according to the sensibilities of the persons to whom they were related—­and there were not many habitues of the sidewalks who did not hear them sooner or later.  “No one could disentangle fact and fiction and affection in them.

“Some years ago,” he said one day to Professor Hardage, “I was a good deal gayer than I am now and so was he.  We cemented a friendship in a certain way, no matter what:  that is a story I’m not going to tell.  And he came to live with me on that footing of friendship.  Of course he was greatly interested in the life of his own species at that time; he loved part of it, he hated part; but he was no friend to either.  By and by he grew older.  Age removed a good deal of his vanity, and I suppose it forced him to part with some portion of his self-esteem.  But I was growing older myself and no doubt getting physically a little helpless.  I suppose I made senile noises when I dressed and undressed, expressive of my decorative labors.  This may have been the reason; possibly not; but at any rate about this time he conceived it his duty to give up his friendship as an equal and to enter my employ as a servant.  He became my valet—­without wages—­and I changed his name to ‘Brown.’