When Marley went to pay his call on Wade Powell, he found many sensations as he glanced about the dingy little office where he had begun his studies. Wade Powell himself, smoking and reading his Cincinnati paper, was sitting at his old desk, with the same aspect of permanence he had always given the impression of. Marley rushed in on him with a face red and smiling and when Powell looked up, he threw down his paper, and leaped to his feet, saying:
“Well, I’ll be damned!”
But when their first greetings were over, Powell’s manner changed; he began to show Marley a certain respect, and he paid him the delicate tribute of letting him do most of the talking, whereas he used to do most of the talking himself. He was not prepared to hear that Marley was still studying law; and it cost him an effort to readjust his conception of Marley as a successful journalist to the old one of a struggling student. He gave Marley some intelligence of this, and of his disappointment when he said with a meekness Marley did not like to see in him:
“Well, of course, you know your own business best.”
But when Marley had taken pains to explain his position and when he had described the Chicago law offices, Powell grew more reconciled.
“I’ve watched you,” he said, “I’ve watched you, and I’ve asked your father about you every time I’ve seen him; my one regret was that you were not working on a Cincinnati paper; then I could have read what you were writing. I did try to get a Chicago paper—but you know what this town is.”
Powell was deeply interested in Marley’s description of his old friend, Judge Johnson, and as Marley gave him some notion of the judge’s importance and prosperity Powell could only exclaim from time to time:
“Well, I’ll be damned!”
Marley did not tell Powell that Judge Johnson had appeared to have forgotten him; he felt that it would be more handsome to accept the moral responsibility of a prevarication than to hurt Powell’s feelings in the way he knew the truth would hurt them. Even as it was, Judge Johnson’s success, now so keenly realized by Powell when it had been brought home to him in this personal way, seemed to subdue him, and he was only lifted out of his gloom when Marley said:
“But I’ll tell you one thing, there isn’t a lawyer in Chicago who can try a case with you.”