She smiled in a sort of contented amusement and let that do for an answer to his question about Maude Adams.  Then the smile transmuted itself into a look of thoughtful gravity and there was a long silence which, though it puzzled him, he made no move to break.

At last she pulled in a long breath, turned straight to him and said, “I wish you’d tell me what did happen to you.”

And under the compelling sincerity of her, for the next two hours and a half, or thereabouts, he did—­told it as he had never told it before—­talked as Frederica, who thought she knew him, had never heard him talk.

He told her how he had started at the foot of the ladder in one of the big successful firms of what he called “client caretakers,” drawing up bills and writs, rounding up witnesses in personal injury suits, trying little justice-shop cases—­the worst of them, of course, because there was a youngster just ahead of him who got the better ones.  And then, dramatically, he told of his discovery amid this chaff, of a real legal problem—­a problem that for its nice intricacies and intellectual suggestiveness, would have brought an appreciative gleam to the eye of Mr. Justice Holmes, or Lord Mansfield, or the great Coke himself.  He told of the passionate enthusiasm with which he had attacked it, the thrilling weeks of labor he had put on it.  And then he told her the outcome of it all; how the head of the firm, an old friend of his father, had called him in and complimented him on the work that he had done; said it was very remarkable, but, unfortunately, not profitable to the firm, the whole amount involved in the case having been some twenty dollars.  They were only paying him forty dollars a month, to be sure, but they figured that forty dollars practically a total loss and they thought he might better go to practising law for himself.  In other words, he was fired.

But the thing that rang through the girl’s mind like the clang of a bell—­the thing that made her catch her breath, was the quality of the big laugh with which he concluded it.  He didn’t ask her to be sorry for him.  He wasn’t sorry for himself one bit,—­nor bitter—­nor cynical.  He didn’t even seem trying to make a merit of his refusal to acquiesce in that sordid point of view.  He just dismissed the thing with a cymbal-like clash of laughter and plunged ahead with his story.

He told her how he’d got in with an altruistic bunch—­the City Homes Association; how, finding him keen for work that they had little time for, the senior legal counselors had drawn out and let him do it.  And from the way he told of his labors in drafting a new city building ordinance, she felt that it must have been one of the most fascinating occupations in the world, until he told her how it had drawn him into politics—­municipal, city council politics, which was even more thrilling, and then how, after an election, a new state’s attorney had offered him a position on his staff of assistants.