It was this atmosphere which Sargent breathed for three years, and perhaps, as has been said, that may account for some of his many eccentricities and explain, in a measure, his treatment of Fenton.
Fenton had married the daughter of Brayton Garland, one of Mr. Harding’s clients, and when his wife sued him for divorce he brought the papers to Sargent.
It was in offices very different from the Ancients’ that Fenton found his counsel. They were on the 17th floor of the Titan Building, on lower Broadway, where the draught in the hall steadily sucked a stream of people into elevators, which, with the regularity of trip-hammers, shot them up breathless and dropped them gasping.
There were three law firms in the same suite with Sargent,—four attorneys “on their own hook,” a Seamless Mattress Company, an Electric Drying Company and a Collection Agency. Typewriters clicked in every room, messengers clattered up and down the long hallway, brass gates on the railed-off spaces swung to and fro crashing with every swing, the telephones sung a constant chorus, electric bells buzzed and tinkled, doors banged, papers rustled, voices droned or struck the air in sharp staccato, and yet in the midst of all this restless human energy there were times when Sargent felt lonely. It was not merely that he missed the atmosphere of quiet and study, but the very rush and scramble seemed to generate ideas and actions foreign to the code of professional ethics and dignity which governed the Ancients.
Sometimes the denizens of the Titan Building discussed the matter with him.
“Theoretically your venerable friends are all right,” a brilliant, pushing young lawyer told him one day. “The man who lives by maxims in this day and generation will have food for thought, but he’ll never earn his salt. We start with the same point of view, but——”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“But someone throws gold-dust in our eyes?” suggested Sargent.
“Bosh!” was the retort. “Don’t talk the cant of the incompetent. The Bar is of a higher average to-day than it ever was before.”
But despite the “high average,” Sargent often felt himself a solitary outsider looking on at the mad clamour and pitiless pursuit and wondering if it was worth all it seemed to cost. A defect in early education—this pausing to think—for philosophers on lower Broadway are apt to have but brief careers.