“How old are you, Mr. Marley?” he inquired.
“I am twenty-two,” said Marley, confidently, as if this maturity must incline the judge in his favor. “I cast my first vote for McKinley.” He thought this, too, would help matters, and possibly it did.
“You have completed your education?”
“I graduated this summer from the Ohio Wesleyan.”
“And what are you doing now, or proposing to do?”
“Just now, I am studying law,” he announced. “I’m going to make the law my profession.”
Marley looked up with a high faith in this final appeal, but even that did not impress the judge as Marley felt a tribute thus delicately implied should affect him.
“You are reading with a preceptor, I take it?”
“Yes, sir, in Mr. Powell’s office.”
Judge Blair looked at Marley as if he were deciding what to do with him. After he had looked a while he gazed off across the street, drumming with his finger-tips on the arm of his chair. Presently, without turning, and still gazing abstractedly into the distance—and in that instant Marley remembered that he had seen the judge stare at the ceiling of the court room in exactly the same way while sentencing a culprit—he began to speak.