Who is he to challenge the future? The old job is fairly easy; they
can't get on without him, they say; here is where he belongs; he knows
his business--give him his thirty-five hundred a year and let him stay!

That is Binks, or Calkins, or Shivers, or any one of those worried
gray-haired men who sit in the outer office behind a desk strewn with
papers and make sure that no mistakes have been made. To them every
doubtful question of practise is referred and they answer
instantly--sometimes wrongly, but always instantly. They know the last
day for serving the demurrer in Bilbank against Terwilliger and whether
or not you can tax a referee's fee as a disbursement in a bill of costs;
they are experts on the precise form for orders in matrimonial actions
and the rule in regard to filing a summons and complaint in Oneida
County; they stand between the members of the firm and disagreeable
clients; they hire and discharge the office boys; they do everything
from writing a brief for the Supreme Court of the United States down to
making the contract with the window cleaners; they are the only lawyers
who really know anything and they were once promising young men, who
have found out at last that life and the Sunday-school books are very
far apart; but they run the works and make the law a gentleman's
profession for the rest of us. They are always there. Others come, grow
older, go away, but they remain. Many of them drink. All of which would
be irrelevant, incompetent and immaterial if this were not a legal
story.

Scraggs had been one of these, but he had also been one of those who
drank, and now he was merely a bookkeeper. Miss Wiggin reigned in his
stead.

A woman and not a man kept Tutt & Tutt on the map. When this sort of