She dressed herself with extreme care, in a tailor frock and toque of black and white. The costume was becoming, but she shook her head at her reflection in the mirror: hers was not the type of beauty to appeal to the class of men in whose hands her life would be; rather they would resent its cold pride, its manifest of race and civilisation. She remembered her youthful satisfaction in the fact that “common men did not like her.” Rosita or Honora would carry a jury by storm, but she was too subtle to appeal to men outside of her own social sphere. Tarbox liked her because she was game and dependent on him for comfort: it was doubtful if he thought her pretty. He came up at ten minutes to ten. He wore a new suit of clothes, and looked excited and impatient. “There’s a lot of swells come,” he said without preliminary; “some from New York and some from the county. We’ve got ’em up in the gallery, and they look fine in their new spring clothes, I tell you. First time I ever seen swells in this court house. I rather thought they didn’t go in for that kind of thing.” “They go in for fads, and you can as easily tell where lightning will strike next as what will be the next fad to possess fashionable women. Where is Mr. Bourke?” “Up in the court room, I guess. Ready?” A few moments later he led her up the stair at the back of the court room. A crowd of men at the door parted to let her enter, staring at her with eager curiosity. As she walked down the room to her seat beside her counsel she was conscious of a deep level of men’s faces below and a tier of high-bred faces and bright spring gowns in the gallery above. She felt as if she were being shot upon a battery of eyes, and an impulse to turn and run; she looked like a black and white effigy of pride. The large handsome room was tinted a pale blue and stencilled about the mouldings. The Bench and panelling behind it, the desks and tables, were of black walnut. Four long windows on each side of the room revealed the naked trees of March and the cheerless landscape. On the right of Patience’s chair was the empty jury box, before her the Bench. In the space thus formed—flanked on the other side by the talesmen summoned for the trial and at the back by the audience—was a right angle of long study tables, three or four round tables, and many chairs. Every chair was occupied. Writing pads lay on the smaller tables. Patience recognised several of the reporters. By one of the long tables before the jury box sat Bourke, Simms, and Lansing. The former whispered to her that many of the men within the rail were eminent lawyers who had come to hear the case tried.