"Well, what do you propose? Come down to facts. It's all very interesting and ethical, this harangue of yours; I wouldn't ask any better if I were the defendants' counsel, but, as the opposition, it is not in line. Are you seriously suggesting that this firm refuse the case?"
"Exactly. I thought I made that plain at the beginning of my 'harangue.'"
John Lowell drew in his upper lip, frowned and swayed slowly back and forth, as was his habit when thinking out some intricate point of law. But, by the nervous tapping of the fingers upon the desk, Roger Barton knew that the other was not analyzing a point of law. He was angry and would continue to sway thoughtfully and tap with long, slim fingers until he had fashioned a verbal sword with which to slash Roger's repression to bits; then, smiling, would watch Roger flounder from abstraction to personality, and drown in the sea of his own anger. Roger Barton's wide mouth closed in a firm line.
At her stenographer's desk by the window, Anne Mitchell leaned across her machine, her eyes on the younger man. In the year of her secretaryship she had seen few men defy John Lowell and none emerge with dignity from the interval of his silent tapping.
"Well?"
Still Roger did not speak. Neither did he knit his brows nor make any outward sign of searching for a more cogent argument than the one he had already advanced. His blue eyes summed up the man in the chair and held his deduction quietly for the other to read. Against that look John Lowell's pretense of calmness finally splintered.
"If we don't, some one else will; and it's eight thousand a year for whoever gets the Morgan work."
Anne Mitchell rose and came round her desk. There she stopped, as Lowell reached the end of his sentence, and stood leaning against the edge. Standing so, she was slighter even than one would expect, almost frail but for a kind of compactness, a perfection of bodily finish that allowed no such waste of material as physical weakness. If Anne had been a few inches taller, or twenty pounds heavier; if she had been more sharply defined instead of being a small portion of space cased in a body for the convenience of physical motion; if she had obstructed attention instead of being almost fluid in the unobtrusiveness of her movements, she would long ago have doubled her twenty dollars a week. As it was, on the few occasions when John Lowell lent her to other members of the firm, they always looked puzzled for a moment: "Mitchell? Oh, sure, send her along. Good." And gave Anne twice the amount of work they had intended.
"Well?" John Lowell drew out his watch, murmured "four twenty-seven!" as if he were noting the amount to be charged later, and slipped his watch back. "You don't seem to have anything very constructive to offer, do you, Barton? Our not taking the case won't save your friends on the hill."
"No. Neither did your refusing that railroad franchise case save the public."