As she turned into Main Street the intelligence that she was coming seemed in some mysterious way to speed before her. Those exemplars of male fashion, the dry goods clerks, craned furtively about front doors. Bare-armed and aproned proprietors of grocery stores and their hirelings appeared beneath the awnings and displayed an unprecedented concern in trying to resuscitate, with aid of sprinkling-cans, bunches of expiring radishes and young onions. Owners of amiable steeds that dozed beside the curb hurried out of cavernous doors, the fear of run-away writ large upon their countenances, to see if a buckle was not loose or a tug perchance unfastened. Behind her, as she passed, Main Street stood statued in mid-action, strap in motionless hand, sprinkling-can tilting its entire contents of restorative over a box of clothes-pins, and gaped and stared. This was epochal for Westville. Never before had a real, live, practising woman lawyer trod the cement walk of Main Street. When Katherine came to Court House Square, she crossed to the south side, passed the _Express_ Building, and made for the Hollingsworth Block, whose first floor was occupied by the New York Store's "glittering array of vast and profuse fashion." Above this alluring pageant were two floors of offices; and up the narrow stairway leading thereunto Katherine mounted. She entered a door marked "Hosea Hollingsworth. Attorney-at-Law. Mortgages. Loans. Farms." In the room were a table, three chairs, a case of law books, a desk, on the top of the desk a "plug" hat, so venerable that it looked a very great-grandsire of hats, and two cuspidors marked with chromatic evidence that they were not present for ornament alone. From the desk there rose a man, perhaps seventy, lean, tall, smooth-shaven, slightly stooped, dressed in a rusty and wrinkled "Prince Albert" coat, and with a countenance that looked a rank plagiarism of the mask of Voltaire. In one corner of his thin mouth, half chewed away, was an unlighted cigar. "I believe this is Mr. Hollingsworth?" said Katherine. The question was purely formal, for his lank figure was one of her earliest memories. "Yes. Come right in," he returned in a high, nasal voice. She drew a chair away from the environs of the cuspidors and sat down. He resumed his place at his desk and peered at her through his spectacles, and a dry, almost imperceptible smile played among the fine wrinkles of his leathery face. "And I believe this is Katherine West--our lady lawyer," he remarked. "I read in the _Express_ how you----" Bruce was on her nerves. She could not restrain a sudden flare of temper. "The editor of that paper is a cad!" "Well, he ain't exactly what you might call a hand-raised gentleman," the old lawyer admitted. "At least, I never heard of his exerting himself so hard to be polite that he strained any tendons." "You know him, then?" "A little. He's my nephew." "Oh! I remember."