CHAPTER XXVIII.
AN UNBIDDEN GUEST.
"What tainted people you have to deal with!" she exclaimed, unconsciously continuing her vein of silent thought. "I should crave another environment, I think."
"Your Christ lived with sinners and publicans. And they are not all tainted, my dear," added the mother, smiling so that Emily might know whom she meant to except. "There is so much in common between my son and Mr. Floyd. Both proud, serious, too serious, I tell him, and both true Castilians in honor. But the one looked about wisely and found him a—lady; and the other—"
"The other will grow gray by his good mother's side, I fear," said Shagarach, gently kissing the laughing and delighted old lady. Emily smiled herself to see John Davidson's sphinx, whose reticence outside was indeed a mask of stone, unbending thus to the frankness and simplicity of a child. The mother's ways were more demonstrative, but with deep reserves of dignity.
"But you are right, Miss Barlow. The lawyer's profession is one shade more distasteful than the surgeon's, for he handles the moral sores of humanity."
"Handles them to cure them," cried Emily, shifting about, like a true woman.
"Possibly. Though for my own part I agree with those who hold that the law perpetrates no less wickedness than it punishes—were it not that it prevents more than it perpetrates," he added, smiling, "we should live in a very troublesome world. It is a profession which uses the conscience as a whetstone upon which to sharpen the intellect. I attribute the venality of our congress and legislatures partly to the disproportion among them of lawyers."
"But surely there are exceptions?"