Up to the very door, Roger had intended to accept the good opening Marsh had definitely offered him at the last visit, but, now, as he looked about the beautifully furnished office, the hard processes of the law softened by the tinted walls, the thick rugs, the great bunch of chrysanthemums in the old-blue, China vase, he sparred for time.
"Haven't made one yet."
Marsh frowned. His genuine admiration for Roger's ability was scarcely proof against a certain quality in Roger that he had always felt might, and now feared had already, swamped Roger's sense of proportion. As he put it to his wife, Helen: "Roger's got that dog-goned idealist sophistry in his bean, that nothing can be right or just or fine—if you make a decent living at it. And the joke of it, or the tragedy for men like Roger, is that it's only outsiders like him who feel that way. You can't get a real radical to do a thing without paying him up to the hilt. I'll wager that Labor god, O'Connell himself, has a pile salted down safely." For, like all financially successful men, Walter Marsh had a fixed belief that no able, sane person worked long for an ideal alone.
"Well, it's up to you," he said shortly.
For, although he was willing to talk the matter over with Roger for the rest of the afternoon if it would lead anywhere, he was not willing to waste more time even on Roger, who, after seven days' consideration of a decidedly advantageous opening, still announced that he had reached no decision. He picked up his pen, not quite indicating the interview over, but very clearly expressing his feeling toward Roger. Years after, Roger used to wonder what he would have done, if Walter Marsh had not picked up his pen in just that way, at just that moment. He looked quietly at Marsh, only a few years older than himself, but already with the fine lines of nervous concentration about his eyes, blue eyes glazed in assurance of their owner's mental processes; the eyes of a very successful man who realizes the uselessness of fretting his conscience over conditions beyond his personal power to change.
"But I don't think I'll take you up," Roger went on as if no interval had intervened. "I've grown too far away from the law. I can't go back."
"Or ahead," Walter almost snapped in his honest disappointment.
"Perhaps not." For a moment Roger felt very much alone.
"Well, I can't change you and I won't try. I hope you'll make a go of anything you settle to." Unconsciously Marsh intimated his doubt of Roger's ever settling to anything worth while.
Roger smiled, his momentary sadness dissolved in Marsh's solicitude. Walter Marsh might have been an elderly uncle, washing his hands of a wild nephew.