The Noise of the World by Adriana Spadoni

"Well, what do you propose? Come down to facts. It's all very interesting and ethical, this harangue of yours; I wouldn't ask any better if I were the defendants' counsel, but, as the opposition, it is not in line. Are you seriously suggesting that this firm refuse the case?"

"Exactly. I thought I made that plain at the beginning of my 'harangue."

John Lowell drew in his upper lip, frowned and swayed slowly back and forth, as was his habit when thinking out some intricate point of law. But, by the nervous tapping of the fingers upon the desk, Roger Barton knew that the other was not analyzing a point of law. He was angry and would continue to sway thoughtfully and tap with long, slim fingers until he had fashioned a verbal sword with which to slash Roger's repression to bits; then, smiling, would watch Roger flounder from abstraction to personality, and drown in the sea of his own anger. Roger Barton's wide mouth closed in a firm line.

At her stenographer's desk by the window, Anne Mitchell leaned across her machine, her eyes on the younger man. In the year of her secretaryship she had seen few men defy John Lowell and none emerge with dignity from the interval of his silent tapping.

"Well?"

Still Roger did not speak. Neither did he knit his brows nor make any outward sign of searching for a more cogent argument than the one he had already advanced. His blue eyes summed up the man in the chair and held his deduction quietly for the other to read. Against that look John Lowell's pretense of calmness finally splintered.

"If we don't, some one else will; and it's eight thousand a year for whoever gets the Morgan work."

Anne Mitchell rose and came round her desk. There she stopped, as Lowell reached the end of his sentence, and stood leaning against the edge. Standing so, she was slighter even than one would expect, almost frail but for a kind of compactness, a perfection of bodily finish that allowed no such waste of material as physical weakness. If Anne had been a few inches taller, or twenty pounds heavier; if she had been more sharply defined instead of being a small portion of space cased in a body for the convenience of physical motion; if she had obstructed attention instead of being almost fluid in the unobtrusiveness of her movements, she would long ago have doubled her twenty dollars a week. As it was, on the few occasions when John Lowell lent her to other members of the firm, they always looked puzzled for a moment: "Mitchell? Oh, sure, send her along. Good. " And gave Anne twice the amount of work they had intended.

"Well? " John Lowell drew out his watch, murmured "four twenty-seven! " as if he were noting the amount to be charged later, and slipped his watch back. "You don't seem to have anything very constructive to offer, do you, Barton? Our not taking the case won't save your friends on the hill."

"No. Neither did your refusing that railroad franchise case save the public."

The older man smiled at the reference. "Too sticky. That would have smelled to high Heaven."

"Not a bit stickier or smellier than this. " Roger now took a step forward, as if to insure the aim of his words through the unexpected aperture of the other's momentary honesty. "The only difference is, that you can put this over without publicity. The smell would never get beyond the office. No one would whiff the rotten legal juggling that's going to take away those poor beggars' homes. The Morgan Gravel Company has literally blasted away dozens of laborers' homes, of foreigners mostly, in the last ten years, and now that they've come up against a few fighting Irish, the last stand on the Hill, they're going to daub over their proceedings with a coat of white-wash."

"Goldwash," Lowell corrected with a grin. "You seem to forget that these people are going to be paid for their property -- whatever the judge decides is fair."

"His imagination may reach to one hundred. McLaughlin may prod him to one hundred and fifty."

"They'll take it."

"Of course they will, because Morgan will take the land out from under them whether they accept the money or not."

"They can appeal. There's always more law."

Roger Barton's shoulders hunched. His thick, dry, blond hair seemed to rise like an angry dog's. Without his moving, Anne felt that he had crossed the space between himself and the other. Her small hands clenched, and she nibbled her lower lip as she always did in moments of forced repression.

"Yes," Roger said quietly, "there is always the law, more law, for the rich, the crooked, the morally rotten. There is always the perversion of justice, the farce of an appeal, the hypocrisy of a judge, the pitiful sight of the 'twelve good men and true. ' There is always more law to quibble and distort the truth."

"No doubt. " The smile deepened at Roger's vehemence. "Only we lawyers don't usually express it so frankly."