she's a business woman. She's a house decorator. I don't mean painting
and paper-hanging. She tells you what kind of furniture to buy, and then
sells it to you. Portia's terribly clever and awfully independent."

"All right," he said. "That brings us down to you. What are you?"

She sighed. "I'm sort of a black sheep, I guess. I'm just in the
university. But I'm to be a lawyer."

Whereupon he cried out "Good lord!" so explosively that she fairly
jumped.

Then he apologized, said he didn't know why her announcement should have
taken him like that, except that the notion of her in court trying a
case--he was a lawyer himself--seemed rather startling.

She sighed. "And now I suppose," she said, "you'll advise me not to be.
Portia won't hear of my being a decorator. She says there's nothing in
it any more; and my two brothers--one's a professor of history and the
other's a high-school principal--say, 'Let her do anything but teach.'
One of mother's great friends is a doctor, and she says, 'Anything but
medicine,' so I suppose you'll say, 'Anything but law.'"

"Not a bit," he said. "It's the finest profession in the world."

But he said it off the top of his mind. Down below, it was still engaged
with the picture of her in a dismal court room, blazing up at a jury the
way she had blazed up at that street-car conductor. It was a queer
notion. He didn't know whether he liked it or not.