in at the door. With a start Norman awoke to the absurdity of his
situation--and to the fact that he was placing the girl in a
compromising position. He shrugged his shoulders, went in and locked the
cabinet, departed.

"What a queer little insignificance she is!" thought he, and dismissed
her from mind.




II


Many and fantastic are the illusions the human animal, in its ignorance
and its optimism, devises to change life from a pleasant journey along a
plain road into a fumbling and stumbling and struggling about in a fog.
Of these hallucinations the most grotesque is that the weak can come
together, can pass a law to curb the strong, can set one of their number
to enforce it, may then disperse with no occasion further to trouble
about the strong. Every line of every page of history tells how the
strong--the nimble-witted, the farsighted, the ambitious--have worked
their will upon their feebler and less purposeful fellow men, regardless
of any and all precautions to the contrary. Conditions have improved
only because the number of the strong has increased. With so many lions
at war with each other not a few rabbits contrive to avoid perishing in
the nest.

Norman's genius lay in ability to take away from an adversary the legal
weapons implicitly relied upon and to arm his client with them. No man