The husband smiled, a husbandly and superior smile, and said absently, "Oh, well, I presume they don't get much out of the courts, but they should learn to keep away from litigation. It's a rich man's game anyway!" He was thinking of the steps before him which might lead him to a higher court and still higher. His ambition vaulted as he spoke. "Laura, Father Jim wouldn't mind having a son-in-law on the United States Supreme Court, and I believe we can work together and make it in twenty years more!" As the young wife saw the glow of ambition in his fine, mobile face she stifled the altruistic yearnings, which she had come to feel made her husband uncomfortable, and joined him as he gazed into the crystal ball of the future and saw its glistening chimera. Perhaps the preceding dialogue wherein Dr. James Nesbit, his wife, his daughter and his son-in-law have spoken may indicate that politics as the Doctor played it was an exceedingly personal chess game. We see him here blithely taking from the people of his state, their rights to justice and trading those rights cheerfully for his personal happiness as it was represented in the possible reformation of his daughter's husband. He thought it would work--this curious bartering of public rights for private ends. He could not see that a man who could accept a judgeship as it had come to Tom Van Dorn, in the nature of things could not take out an essential self-respect which he had forfeited when he took the place. The Doctor was as blind as Tom Van Dorn, as blind as his times. Government was a personal matter in that day; public place was a personal perquisite. As for the reformation of Tom Van Dorn, for which all this juggling with sacred things was done, he had no idea that his moral regeneration was concerned in the deal, and never in all the years of his service did the vaguest hint come to him that the outrage of justice had been accomplished for his own soul's good. The next morning Tom Van Dorn read of his appointment as Judge in the morning papers, and he pranced twice the length of Market Street, up one side and down the other, to let the populace congratulate him. Then with a fat box of candy he went to his office, where he gave the candy and certain other tokens of esteem to Miss Mauling, and at noon after the partnership of Calvin & Van Dorn had been dissolved, with the understanding that the young Judge was to keep his law books in Calvin's office, and was to have a private office there--for certain intangible considerations. Then after the business with Joseph Calvin was concluded, the young Judge in his private office with his hands under his coattails preened before Miss Mauling and talked from a shameless soul of his greed for power! The girl before him gave him what he could not get at home, an abject adoration, uncritical, unabashed, unrestrained.