“That hardly explains away your kindness towards myself. Even at this short notice you could have got plenty of men to have consented to a verdict.”
“I am aware of it, but then it is not quite the method of Whitcomb and Whitcomb. We like ‘Thorough’ to be our motto. If we accept a client, we feel we owe it to ourselves to leave no stone unturned, irrespective of position or emolument.”
“But I understand this case is too dead to be fought?”
“Ah, we are now about to approach the first of the ‘peculiar’ circumstances. At five o’clock this evening Tobin himself was holding this brief, but at that hour his bicycle had the misfortune to collide with a motor-car, and the poor fellow now lies in hospital with a compound fracture of the right thigh.”
“Poor fellow, poor fellow!”
“I think you and I are agreed that Tobin is without a rival in a case of this nature.”
“You must forgive me if I express surprise that Tobin should have accepted the brief.”
“That is easily explained. Tobin is the generous-hearted Irishman who is never weary of affirming that Whitcomb and Whitcomb gave him his start. He never refuses us, and I am afraid we, in the interests of a client, trade occasionally on his good nature.”
“Then the practitioners of law are sometimes more disinterested than they seem.”
“My dear fellow, among a considerable body of men must there not be a leaven of human nature? And my own experience is that human nature is so much more disinterested than the young and cynical like to consider it.”