As the door of his private office opened to admit an important client he happened to glance up.  And between the edge of the door frame and his client’s automobile-fattened and carefully dressed body, he caught a glimpse of the “poor little forlornness” who chanced to be crossing the outer office.  A glint of sunlight on her hair changed it from lifelessness to golden vital vividness; the same chance sunbeam touched her pale skin with a soft yellow radiation—­and her profile was delicately fine and regular.  Thus Norman, who observed everything, saw a head of finely wrought gold—­a startling cameo against the dead white of office wall.  It was only with the second thought that he recognized her.  The episode of the night before came back and Josephine’s penitent yet persistent note.

He glanced at the clock.  Said the client in the amusing tone of one who would like to take offense if he only dared, “I’ll not detain you long, Mr. Norman.  And really the matter is extremely important.”

There are not many lawyers, even of the first rank, with whom their big clients reverse the attitude of servant and master.  Norman might well have been flattered.  In that restrained tone from one used to servility and fond of it and easily miffed by lack of it was the whole story of Norman’s long battle and splendid victory.  But he was not in the mood to be flattered; he was thinking of other things.  And it presently annoyed him that his usually docile mind refused to obey his will’s order to concentrate on the client and the business—­said business being one of those huge schemes through which a big monster of a corporation is constructed by lawyers out of materials supplied by great capitalists and controllers of capital, is set to eating in enormous meals the substance of the people; at some obscure point in all the principal veins small but leechlike parasite corporations are attached, industriously to suck away the surplus blood so that the owners of the beast may say, “It is eating almost nothing.  See how lean it is, poor thing!  Why, the bones fairly poke through its meager hide.”

An interesting and highly complicated enterprise is such a construction.  It was of the kind in which Norman’s mind especially delighted; Hercules is himself only in presence of an herculean labor.  But on that day he could not concentrate, and because of a trifle!  He felt like a giant disabled by a grain of dust in the eye—­yes, a mere grain of dust!  “I must love Josephine even more than I realize, to be fretted by such a paltry thing,” thought he.  And after patiently enduring the client for half an hour without being able to grasp the outlines of the project, he rose abruptly and said:  “I must get into my mind the points you’ve given me before we can go further.  So I’ll not waste your time.”

This sounded very like “Clear out—­you’ve bored me to my limit of endurance.”  But the motions of a mind such as he knew Norman had were beyond and high above the client’s mere cunning at dollar-trapping.  He felt that it was the part of wisdom—­also soothing to vanity—­to assume that Norman meant only what his words conveyed.  When Norman was alone he rang for an office boy and said: