"My own expenses are, railroad fare, lunches, tobacco—I smoke a pipe mostly—and clothes—probably about five hundred in all. We go on a big bat once a month and dine at a table-d'hôte restaurant, and take in the opera or the play. That costs some—about ten dollars a clip—say, eighty for the season; and, of course, I blow the kids to a camping trip every summer, which sets me back a good hundred and fifty. How does that come out?"
I had jotted the items down, as he went along, on the back of an envelope.
"Thirty-three hundred and eighty dollars," I said, adding them up.
"It seems a good deal," he commented, turning and gazing into the fire; "but I have usually managed to lay up about fifteen hundred every year—besides, of course, the little I give away."
I sat stunned. Thirty-three hundred dollars!—I spent seventy-two thousand!—and the man lived as well as I did! What did I have that he had not? But Hastings was saying something, still with his back toward me.
"I suppose you thought I must be an ungrateful dog not to jump at the offer you made me this morning," he remarked in an embarrassed manner. "It's worried me a lot all day. I'm really tremendously gratified at your kindness. I couldn't very well explain myself, and I don't know what possessed me to say what I did about my not being willing to exchange places with you. But, you see, I'm over forty. That makes a heap of difference. I'm as good a stenographer as you can find, and so long as my health holds out I can be sure of at least fifty dollars a week, besides what I earn outside.
"I've never had any kink for the law. I don't think I'd be a success at it; and frankly, saving your presence, I don't like it. A lot of it is easy money and a lot of it is money earned in the meanest way there is—playing dirty tricks; putting in the wrong a fellow that's really right; aggravating misunderstandings and profiting by the quarrels people get into. You're a high-class, honorable man, and you don't see the things I see." I winced. If he only knew, I had seen a good deal! "But I go round among the other law offices, and I tell you it's a demoralizing profession.
"It's all right to reorganize a railroad; but in general litigation it seems to me as if the lawyers spend most of their time trying to make the judge and jury believe the witnesses are all criminals. Everything a man says on the stand or has ever done in his life is made the subject of a false inference—an innuendo. The law isn't constructive—it's destructive; and that's why I want my boy to be a civil engineer."
He paused, abashed at his own heat.
"Well," I interjected, "it's a harsh arraignment; but there's a great deal of truth in what you say. Wouldn't you like to make big money?"