big laugh with which he concluded it. He didn't ask her to be sorry for
him. He wasn't sorry for himself one bit,--nor bitter--nor cynical. He
didn't even seem trying to make a merit of his refusal to acquiesce in
that sordid point of view. He just dismissed the thing with a
cymbal-like clash of laughter and plunged ahead with his story.

He told her how he'd got in with an altruistic bunch--the City Homes
Association; how, finding him keen for work that they had little time
for, the senior legal counselors had drawn out and let him do it. And
from the way he told of his labors in drafting a new city building
ordinance, she felt that it must have been one of the most fascinating
occupations in the world, until he told her how it had drawn him into
politics--municipal, city council politics, which was even more
thrilling, and then how, after an election, a new state's attorney had
offered him a position on his staff of assistants.

In a sense, of course, it was true that he had, as Frederica would have
put it, forgotten she was there--had forgotten, at least, who she was.
Because, if he had remembered that she was just a young girl in the
university, he would hardly, as he tramped about the room expounding the
practise of criminal law in the state's attorney's office, have
characterized the state's attorney himself as a "damned gallery-playing
mountebank," nor have described the professions and the misdeeds of
some of the persons he prosecuted in blunt Anglo-Saxon terms she had
never heard used except in the Bible.

The girl knew he had forgotten, and her only discomfort came from the
fear that the spell might be broken and he remember suddenly and be
embarrassed and stop.