Mr. Garry seated himself.  He had pronounced his last words with sharp emphasis.  Mr. Samuelson, Lilienfeld’s counsel, turned pale and arose instantly.  The reporters moved up closer and leaned forward, cocking their ears to catch every word of the famous lawyer.  He began in a very faint voice.  Frederick as a physician saw he was suffering from chronic laryngitis, probably having exchanged his sound larynx for his millions.  Samuelson’s delivery, his way of pleading were well known.  At first he would spare himself, in order later to take his auditors by storm in a violent outburst of passion.

When the violent outburst of passion came, it did not fulfill the expectations either of Lilienfeld, his client, or the reporters, or Frederick.  It was very noticeable that his indignation was forced, that it did not flow from a natural source, but from a bottle standing long uncorked.  His iron will compelled him to simulate a feeling that he owed it to his client to display.  In fact, the tired, harassed man, with his small, pointed beard and his worn, dirty-looking skin, was remarkable merely as a victim of his profession.  Even in that capacity he was not so imposing as pitiable.  Unfortunately, he was most pitiable when he gave the whip and spurs to that jaded little charger, the Rosinante of his eloquence, to ride down his opponent.

Mr. Garry and Mr. Ilroy, the Mayor, looked at each other significantly.  They seemed to wish to return good for evil and come to the help of this knight of the sorry figure on his hack all skin and bone, which at the end of the attack fell and broke his legs.

Lilienfeld could not restrain himself.  He turned crimson.  The veins of his forehead swelled.  The time for remaining silent had ended and the time to speak had come.  Since the man with the hundred typewriters and the millions was unequal to the task, Lilienfeld had to take the reins in his own hands.  From the mouth of the dumpy, bull-necked impresario, the words came pouring with irresistible momentum, with elemental force, as from the crater of a volcano.

Now it was Mr. Garry’s turn to suffer in silence the thrusts and blows that rained down on him from his opponent.  The old gentleman was not spared.  He had to swallow many disagreeable statements about the exploitation of children in certain factories in Brooklyn, about Puritan hypocrisy, about drinking water in public and wine in secret.  He was told he was a member of that narrow-minded caste hating art, culture, and life itself, and seeing devils with cloven hoofs and long tails in authors like Shakespeare, Byron, and Goethe.

“Such people,” Lilienfeld said, “are always trying to turn back the hands on the clock, a most revolting sight in this so-called land of freedom.  There is very little hope of success in trying to turn back the hands on the clock.  The days of Puritan prudery, the bothersome Puritan conscience, Puritan orthodoxy, and Puritan intolerance have passed, never to return.  There is no stemming the tide of time, or the tide of progress, or the tide of culture.  But the forces of reaction, threatened in their mediaeval management of things, have begun a cowardly guerilla warfare, a series of petty, cowardly, miserable, meddlesome tricks.”