In a sense, of course, it was true that he had, as Frederica would have put it, forgotten she was there—­had forgotten, at least, who she was.  Because, if he had remembered that she was just a young girl in the university, he would hardly, as he tramped about the room expounding the practise of criminal law in the state’s attorney’s office, have characterized the state’s attorney himself as a “damned gallery-playing mountebank,” nor have described the professions and the misdeeds of some of the persons he prosecuted in blunt Anglo-Saxon terms she had never heard used except in the Bible.

The girl knew he had forgotten, and her only discomfort came from the fear that the spell might be broken and he remember suddenly and be embarrassed and stop.

In the deeper sense—­and she was breathlessly conscious of this too—­he hadn’t forgotten she was there.  He was telling it all because she was there—­because she was herself and nobody else.  She knew, though how she couldn’t have explained,—­with that intuitive certainty that is the only real certainty there is,—­that the story couldn’t have been evoked from him in just that way, by any one else in the world.

At the end of two years in the state’s attorney’s office, he told her, he figured he had had his training and was ready to begin.

“I made just one resolution when I hung out my shingle,” he said, “and that was that no matter how few cases I got, I wouldn’t take any that weren’t interesting—­that didn’t give me something to bite on.  A lot of my friends thought I was crazy, of course—­the ones who came around because they liked me, or had liked my father, to offer me nice plummy little sinecures, and got told I didn’t want them.  Just for the sake of looking successful and accumulating a lot of junk I didn’t want, I wasn’t going to asphyxiate myself, have strings tied to my arms and legs like a damned marionette.  I wasn’t willing to be bored for any reward they had to offer me.  It’s cynical to be bored.  It’s the worst immorality there is.  Well, and I never have been.”

It wasn’t all autobiographical and narrative.  There was a lot of his deep-breathing, spacious philosophy of life mixed up in it.  And this the girl, consciously, and deliberately, provoked.  It didn’t need much.  She said something about discipline and he snatched the word away from her.

“What is discipline?  Why, it’s standing the gaff—­standing it, not submitting to it.  It’s accepting the facts of life—­of your own life, as they happen to be.  It isn’t being conquered by them.  It’s not making masters of them, but servants to the underlying things you want.”

She tried to make a reservation there—­suppose the things you wanted weren’t good things.

But he wouldn’t allow it.

“Whatever they are,” he insisted, “your desires are the only motive forces you’ve got.  No matter how fine your intelligence is, it can’t ride anywhere except on the backs of your own passions.  There’s no good lamenting that they’re not different, and it’s silly to beat them to death and make a merit of not having ridden anywhere because they might have carried you into trouble.  Learn to ride them—­control them—­spur them.  But don’t forget that they’re you just as essentially as the rider is.”