"Dear me! Dear me!" his visitor murmured sympathetically.
"By turning my chair around," Aaron Rodd continued, "I can just catch a glimpse of the river across the Gardens there. I sit and watch, wonder whether a tug will go past next or a lighter, watch the people in the gardens, wonder where they are going, why they are loitering, why hurrying. I speculate about the few passers-by down in the street there. Sometimes I close my eyes and I fancy myself in Lincoln's Inn, seated in a padded morocco chair, with a Turkey-carpet on the floor, and rows of boxes, black tin boxes, with wonderful names inscribed upon them in white lettering, reaching to the ceiling, and my secretary poring over my engagement book, wondering when it would be possible for me to squeeze in half an hour for an important client."
"Too much of the dreamer about you," Harvey Grimm pronounced. "Perhaps, after all, it is the fault of your work. It's a sedative profession, you know, Aaron. It wouldn't suit me to have to sit and wait for clients."
"It's the black bogey of my life," the other assented, with a thin note of passion in his tone. "If only one could get out and work, even if one didn't get a penny for it!"
"And financially?" Harvey Grimm enquired, with an apologetic cough.
"On the rocks," was the bitter reply. "You can understand," he went on, with a heedless sarcasm, "what a wonderful thing it is for me to welcome a capitalist in my shabby office."
"And an old friend," was the cheerful reminder. "Come, come, Aaron, we must look into this. I must place some of my affairs in your charge."
Aaron Rodd's lip curled with bitter incredulity.
"Some of your affairs! I had a taste of those in the old days, Ned—I mean Harvey. You brought me to the brink of Sing-Sing, you drove me over here to make a fresh start."
Harvey Grimm waved his hand. These reminiscences were indelicate.