The Justice of the Peace (or, as he took some pains to inform Henry, the Most Honourable Court of Special Sessions) was a grizzled dyspeptic who held forth in the back room of a shoemaker's shop, while the rabble waited outside, flattening their noses against the window-glass. The dyspeptic had evidently been coached for the proceeding; on his desk he had a copy of the ordinance, and as soon as he had heard the charge, he delivered a lecture which he seemed to have by heart, and fined Henry twenty-five dollars and costs. Henry paid the fine, and turning to go, stumbled against two more policemen, each with his quarry. "Just out of curiosity," said Henry, speaking to no one in particular, and in a voice which came so faintly to his ears that he barely heard it, "Just out of idle curiosity, when the justice gets half the fine, isn't this court open on Sunday for godless profit, too?" And in the same, enduring haze of unreality, he paid an additional twenty dollars for contempt, and went out to the sidewalk. He emerged as the focus of interest for a large, exuberant crowd of loiterers. A camera clicked, and Henry saw that the man at the shutter was one of the _Herald's_ staff photographers. A youthful reporter caught up with him, and asked him what he had to say for publication. "Say for publication?" repeated Henry, dully. "Why, you can say--" He walked half a block before he completed the sentence. "You can say if I said it, you couldn't print it anyway." And although the reporter paced him for a quarter of a mile, Henry never opened his mouth again. He was curiously obsessed, as men under heavy mental pressure are so often obsessed, by a ridiculously trivial detail. How was he going to enter that forty-five dollars on his books? He had intended to go straight home to Anna, but automatically his steps led him to the Orpheum, where he went into his tiny office and sat down at his desk. There were two envelopes on his blotter; he slit them, diffidently, and found a bill from the novelty house which had supplied the souvenirs, and a supplementary statement from the decorator.