Mrs. Balfame by Gertrude Atherton

Rush slept until two o'clock the next day, after a night passed at the Paradise City Hotel in consultation with two of his future partners; they had spent Saturday in the courtroom at Dobton. He had also discovered that the jury enjoyed themselves in the winter garden after dinner, and by no means in close formation. Although nominally under guard, it would have been a simple matter to pass a note to any one of them. Two, he further discovered, had been allowed to telephone and to enter the booth alone. He had been told nothing further of the intention of Cummack and other friends of his client to "fix" the jury -- had, indeed, discouraged such confidences promptly; but he saw that if the enemy desired to employ the methods of corruption they need be no more intricate than those of the men that had so much more to lose if detected.

The night had been devoted to discussion of the case; he even enjoyed a friendly hour with the district attorney, who notably relaxed on Saturdays after five o'clock; and when Rush awoke on the following afternoon he immediately resolved to dismiss the whole affair from his own mind until Monday morning. He would go into the woods and think his own thoughts. They would be dreary thoughts and imbued no doubt with cynicism, himself the target; and they had passed that problematical stage in which the mind, no matter how harrowed, sips lingeringly at the varied banquet of the ego; in fact, Rush's personal problems were almost invariably settled in his subconsciousness, and rose automatically to confront the reasoning faculties without an instant's warning. He was too impatient for self-analysis; and he was the sum of his acts and of the clear mental processes of his conscious life.