After this, Mrs. Tarbell resolved that her next effort at public speaking should be made before an American jury, or not at all.  Indeed, she went so far as to think it a great mistake to suppose that woman’s cause could not be advanced without calling meetings and haranguing them till eleven o’clock at night.  Very likely her ideals were still of the highest order, and certainly she still hoped that when women were allowed to practise law the law would be so changed that you would hardly recognize it; but she wanted to carry on her part of the work occultly and quietly.  She had got over a good many of her own illusions, and she was taking a more practical view of life.  She smiled when she thought of the prophecies which had been made about her, and she no longer read the paragraphs about herself in the newspapers.  She kept her brother’s dockets and drew his papers.  Alexander frowned a good deal, and said it wasn’t necessary, but she insisted that she must pay him in some way for her education.  She put his desk in order and gave him new papers every other day, which practices he never could get her to forego.  In short, she settled down into a routine of study, office-work, and regularly recurring attempts to get in.  And when she finally did get in, she had become a cynic.  Everybody remembers, of course, how at the end of his last term Judge Oldwigg announced his intention to retire into private life and decline a reelection, and how the managers of the party in power chose Judge Measy as their candidate for the vacant place.  The prospective judge was waited on privately by a deputation of Mrs. Tarbell’s friends, headed by Mrs. Pegley, and asked to define his position on the Tarbell question.  The deputation did not contain many voters, and no bargain which Mr. Measy, as he then was, could have made with it would have increased his majority very largely:  as he was pretty sure of a majority, he must be cleared of all suspicion of making a bargain.  But he did deliver to Mrs. Pegley an oracular answer, which was in course of time interpreted in Mrs. Tarbell’s favor.  She came up before him; Mr. Juddson made the motion which he had so often made before, and made it, I regret to say, in rather hurried tones, when, to everybody’s surprise, Judge Measy produced a manuscript and read it out, and proved that a lawyer was a person who practiced law, and that therefore, as a woman was a person, she could be a lawyer, interspersing his remarks with graceful historical allusions and several profound reflections upon the design of Nature in creating the female sex.  Then, acting as man, not judge, he descended to the side-bar, beckoned to Mrs. Tarbell, grasped her by the hand, and made her a speech.  “Madam,” said the courtly judge, “Mrs. Tarbell, I congratulate you,”—­which was one for himself as well,—­“and let me add that it gives me the sincerest satisfaction to be able to testify in this manner to the veneration which I have always entertained for woman; and I am