regarded as "difficult" by his friends--by those of them who happened to
get into the path of his ambition, in front of instead of behind him,
and by those who fell into the not unnatural error of misunderstanding
his good nature and presuming upon it. His clients regarded him as
insolent. The big businesses, seeking the rich spoils of commerce,
frequent highly perilous waters. They need skillful pilots. Usually
these lawyer-pilots "know their place" and put on no airs upon the
quarter-deck while they are temporarily in command. Not so Norman. He
took the full rank, authority--and emoluments--of commander. And as his
power, fame, and income were swiftly growing, it is fair to assume that
he knew what he was about.

He was admired--extravagantly admired--by young men with not too broad a
vein of envy. He was no woman hater--anything but that. Indeed, those
who wished him ill had from time to time hoped to see him tumble down,
through miscalculation in some of his audacities with women. No--he did
not hate women. But there were several women who hated him--or tried to;
and if wounded vanity and baffled machination be admitted as just causes
for hatred, they had cause. He liked--but he did not wholly trust. When
he went to sleep, it was not where Delilah could wield the shears. A
most irritating prudence--irritating to friends and intimates of all
degrees and kinds, in a race of beings with a mania for being trusted
implicitly but with no balancing mania for deserving trust of the
implicit variety.

And he ate hugely--and whatever he pleased. He could drink beyond
belief, all sorts of things, with no apparent ill effect upon either
body or brain. He had all the appetites developed abnormally, and
abnormal capacity for gratifying them. Where there was one man who
envied him his eminence, there were a dozen who envied him his physical