“A thousand dollars!” cried the grocer.  “What right have these people to let their children play on the streets?  It’s an outrage.”

“Where else have the children to play?” Mr. Watling touched his arm.  “Weill,” he said gently, “suppose it had been your little girl?” The grocer pulled out his handkerchief and mopped his bald forehead.  But he rallied a little.

“You fight these damage cases for the street railroads all through the courts.”

“Yes,” Mr. Watling agreed, “but there a principle is involved.  If the railroads once got into the way of paying damages for every careless employee, they would soon be bankrupt through blackmail.  But here you have a child whose father is a poor janitor and can’t afford sickness.  And your coachman, I imagine, will be more particular in the future.”

In the end Mr. Weill made out a cheque and departed in a good humour, convinced that he was well out of the matter.  Here was one of many instances I could cite of Mr. Watling’s tenderness of heart.  I felt, moreover, as if he had done me a personal favour, since it was I who had recommended the compromise.  For I had been to the hospital and had seen the child on the cot,—­a dark little thing, lying still in her pain, with the bewildered look of a wounded animal....

Not long after this incident of Mr. Weill’s damage suit I obtained a more or less definite promotion by the departure of Larry Weed.  He had suddenly developed a weakness of the lungs.  Mr. Watling got him a place in Denver, and paid his expenses west.

The first six or seven years I spent in the office of Wading, Fowndes and Ripon were of importance to my future career, but there is little to relate of them.  I was absorbed not only in learning law, but in acquiring that esoteric knowledge at which I have hinted—­not to be had from my seniors and which I was convinced was indispensable to a successful and lucrative practice.  My former comparison of the organization of our city to a picture puzzle wherein the dominating figures become visible only after long study is rather inadequate.  A better analogy would be the human anatomy:  we lawyers, of course, were the brains; the financial and industrial interests the body, helpless without us; the City Hall politicians, the stomach that must continually be fed.  All three, law, politics and business, were interdependent, united by a nervous system too complex to be developed here.  In these years, though I worked hard and often late, I still found time for convivialities, for social gaieties, yet little by little without realizing the fact, I was losing zest for the companionship of my former intimates.  My mind was becoming polarized by the contemplation of one object, success, and to it human ties were unconsciously being sacrificed.

Tom Peters began to feel this, even at a time when I believed myself still to be genuinely fond of him.  Considering our respective temperaments in youth, it is curious that he should have been the first to fall in love and marry.  One day he astonished me by announcing his engagement to Susan Blackwood.