In the deeper sense--and she was breathlessly conscious of this too--he
hadn't forgotten she was there. He was telling it all because she was
there--because she was herself and nobody else. She knew, though how she
couldn't have explained,--with that intuitive certainty that is the only
real certainty there is,--that the story couldn't have been evoked from
him in just that way, by any one else in the world.

At the end of two years in the state's attorney's office, he told her,
he figured he had had his training and was ready to begin.

"I made just one resolution when I hung out my shingle," he said, "and
that was that no matter how few cases I got, I wouldn't take any that
weren't interesting--that didn't give me something to bite on. A lot of
my friends thought I was crazy, of course--the ones who came around
because they liked me, or had liked my father, to offer me nice plummy
little sinecures, and got told I didn't want them. Just for the sake of
looking successful and accumulating a lot of junk I didn't want, I
wasn't going to asphyxiate myself, have strings tied to my arms and legs
like a damned marionette. I wasn't willing to be bored for any reward
they had to offer me. It's cynical to be bored. It's the worst
immorality there is. Well, and I never have been."

It wasn't all autobiographical and narrative. There was a lot of his
deep-breathing, spacious philosophy of life mixed up in it. And this the
girl, consciously, and deliberately, provoked. It didn't need much. She
said something about discipline and he snatched the word away from her.

"What is discipline? Why, it's standing the gaff--_standing_ it, not
submitting to it. It's accepting the facts of life--of your own life, as
they happen to be. It isn't being conquered by them. It's not making