"But can't I come to see you?"
"No, bride of my dreams. It would not be—suitable. We must respect the little conventions. You must wait until I come."
His tone was decided. She felt that he knew best. In a few minutes he rose. "I must return to my room," he said wearily. "Ah, heart's delight, it is terrible for a strong man to find himself thus weak. Pity me. Pray for me."
He noted with satisfaction her look of love and anxiety. It was some slight salve to his cruelly wounded vanity. He walked feebly away, but it was pure acting, as he no longer felt so downcast. He had soon put Hilda into the background and was busy with his plans for revenge upon Ganser—"a vulgar animal who insulted me when I honored him by marrying his ugly gosling." Before he fell asleep that night he had himself wrought up to a state of righteous indignation. Ganser had cheated, had outraged him—him, the great, the noble, the eminent.
Early the next morning he went down to a dingy frame building that cowered meanly in the shadow of the Criminal Court House. He mounted a creaking flight of stairs and went in at a low door on which "Loeb, Lynn, Levy and McCafferty" was painted in black letters. In the narrow entrance he brushed against a man on the way out, a man with a hangdog look and short bristling hair and the pastily-pallid skin that comes from living long away from the sunlight. Feuerstein shivered slightly—was it at the touch of such a creature or at the suggestions his appearance started? In front of him was a ground-glass partition with five doors in it. At a dirty greasy pine table sat a boy—one of those child veterans the big city develops. He had a long and extremely narrow head. His eyes were close together, sharp and shifty. His expression was sophisticated and cynical. "Well, sir!" he said with curt impudence, giving Feuerstein a gimlet-glance.
"I want to see Mr. Loeb." Feuerstein produced a card—it was one of his last remaining half-dozen and was pocket-worn.
The office boy took it with unveiled sarcasm in his eyes and in the corners of his mouth. He disappeared through one of the five doors, almost immediately reappeared at another, closed it mysteriously behind him and went to a third door. He threw it open and stood aside. "At the end of the hall," he said. "The door with Mr. Loeb's name on it. Knock and walk right in."
Feuerstein followed the directions and found himself in a dingy little room, smelling of mustiness and stale tobacco, and lined with law books, almost all on crime and divorce. Loeb, Lynn, Levy and McCafferty were lawyers to the lower grades of the criminal and shady only. They defended thieves and murderers; they prosecuted or defended scandalous divorce cases; they packed juries and suborned perjury and they tutored false witnesses in the way to withstand cross-examination. In private life they were four home-loving, law-abiding citizens.
Loeb looked up from his writing and said with contemptuous cordiality: "Oh—Mr. Feuerstein. Glad to see you—AGAIN. What's the trouble—NOW?"
At "again" and "now" Feuerstein winced slightly. He looked nervously at Loeb.