"His tone?" Betty turned sharply. "What's the matter with his tone?"
Nicholson's ascetic face relaxed. He quoted:
"Too rash, too unadvis'd, too sudden;
Too like the lightning."
"He isn't rash; he's brave," said Betty. "And he isn't unadvised or sudden, for he has been thinking of all these things for a long time. But he is like the lightning, and these people he says are so wrong will find that out."
§3. Mr. Irwin was at the mass-meeting, too; he of the gray Vandyck beard and pink cheeks and twinkling eyes, the member of the law firm of Stein, Falconridge, Falconridge & Perry, whose name did not appear on the firm's letter-heads.
Irwin left Cooper Union directly the chief speech of the evening ended. He had been seated in an unostentatious corner high in air and close beneath the roof. The people about him must have thought him a warm admirer of the speaker, since he was so busy taking notes of what was said that he had leisure for only the most perfunctory applause. Irwin hurried down the Bowery. He went into the nearest public telephone booth, and from it he called up the hotel in which ex-Judge Stein made his home.
§4. Ex-Judge Stein had himself experienced a trying day, and Irwin was absent from the office, or he would have known it. Somebody, it seemed, had asked embarrassing questions of George J. Hallett and issued exacting orders to Hallett, who had passed on the embarrassing questions and the exacting orders to Stein. The questions and the orders gained in intensity by transmission, and Stein was upset.
"Yes, yes, this is Judge Stein," he answered into the black transmitter of the telephone when Irwin called him. "Who's talking, please?"
"Irwin."
"Eh? Well, where have you been, Mr. Irwin? I have wanted you to-day on some important business.