“Is he successful?”
“Oh, by all manner of means. Twenty years ago he was caddie master at the Rosemont Country Club; five years before that he was a caddie there. America, my child, is the land of opportunity. He’s magnificent when he gets started on the idle rich; it’s all right to be rich if you’re not idle—or well born. If you’re one of those well born society devils, you might just as well go and jump in the lake, if you ask Mr. Farr.”
“Does he still live in Rosemont?”
“No, hasn’t lived there for nineteen years; but I don’t believe that he’s forgotten one single snub or tip that he got in the good old days. Every now and then you can see him stop and turn them over in his mind.”
“What’s Mr. Lambert like?”
“Ah, there is a horse of a different colour—a cart horse of a different colour, if I may go so far. Mr. Dudley Lambert is a lawyer who knows everything that there is to know about wills and trusts and estates, and not another blessed thing in the world. If he’s as good now as he was when I heard him in a case two years ago, he’s terrible. I can’t wait to hear him.”
The red-headed girl looked pale. “Oh, then, why did she get him?”
“Ah, thereby hangs a tale. Mr. Lambert was a side kick of old Curtiss Thorne—handled his estate and everything—and being a crusty old bachelor from the age of thirty on, he idolized the Thorne children. Sue was his pet. She still calls him Uncle Dudley, and when the split came between Sue and her father he stuck to Sue. So I suppose that it was fairly natural that she turned to him when this thing burst; he’s always handled all her affairs, and he’s probably told her that he’s the best lawyer this side of the Rocky Mountains. He believes it.”
“How old is he?”
“Sixty-three—plenty old enough to know better. You might take everything that I say about these guys with a handful of salt; it’s only fair to inform you that they are anything but popular with the Fourth Estate. The only person that talks less in this world than Dudley Lambert is Daniel Farr; either of them would make a closed steel trap seem like a chatterbox. Stephen Bellamy’s counsel is Lambert’s junior partner and under both his thumbs; he’d be a nice chap if he didn’t have lockjaw.”