He had a case of his own in his pocket, he said, and got one out now and lighted it.

“Why,” she went on, “Portia hasn’t time to talk about it much.  You see, she’s a business woman.  She’s a house decorator.  I don’t mean painting and paper-hanging.  She tells you what kind of furniture to buy, and then sells it to you.  Portia’s terribly clever and awfully independent.”

“All right,” he said.  “That brings us down to you.  What are you?”

She sighed.  “I’m sort of a black sheep, I guess.  I’m just in the university.  But I’m to be a lawyer.”

Whereupon he cried out “Good lord!” so explosively that she fairly jumped.

Then he apologized, said he didn’t know why her announcement should have taken him like that, except that the notion of her in court trying a case—­he was a lawyer himself—­seemed rather startling.

She sighed.  “And now I suppose,” she said, “you’ll advise me not to be.  Portia won’t hear of my being a decorator.  She says there’s nothing in it any more; and my two brothers—­one’s a professor of history and the other’s a high-school principal—­say, ‘Let her do anything but teach.’  One of mother’s great friends is a doctor, and she says, ’Anything but medicine,’ so I suppose you’ll say, ‘Anything but law.’”

“Not a bit,” he said.  “It’s the finest profession in the world.”

But he said it off the top of his mind.  Down below, it was still engaged with the picture of her in a dismal court room, blazing up at a jury the way she had blazed up at that street-car conductor.  It was a queer notion.  He didn’t know whether he liked it or not.

“I suppose,” she hazarded, “that it’s awfully dull and tiresome, though, until you get way up to the top.”

That roused him.  “It’s awfully dull when you do get to the top, or what’s called the top—­being a client caretaker with the routine law business of a few big corporations and rich estates going through your office like grist through a mill.  I can’t imagine anything duller than that.  That’s supposed to be the big reward, of course.  That’s the bundle of hay they dangle in front of your nose to keep you trotting straight along without trying to see around your blinders.”

He was out of his chair now, tramping up and down the room.  “You’re not supposed to discover that it’s interesting.  You’re pretty well spoiled for their purposes if you do.  The thing to bear in mind, if you’re going to travel their road, is that a case is worth while in a precise and unalterable ratio to the amount of money involved in it.  If you question that axiom at all seriously, you’re lost.  That’s what happened to me.”

He pulled up with a jerk, looked at her and laughed.  “If my sister Frederica were here,” he explained, “she would warn you, out of a long knowledge of my conversational habits, that now was the time for you to ask me,—­firmly, you know,—­if I’d been to see Maude Adams in this new thing of hers, or something like that.  In Frederica’s absence, I suppose it’s only fair to warn you myself.  Have you been to see it?  I haven’t.”