"I don't believe," she said thoughtfully, "that I'd call it feminism in talking to mother about it, if I were you. Mother's a suffragist, but"--there came another wave of faint color along with her smile--"but--well, she's awfully respectable, you know." She didn't seem to mind his laughing out at that, though she didn't join him. "What about the other interesting member of the family," he asked presently, "your sister? Which is she, a suffragist or a feminist?" "I suppose," she said, "you'll call Portia a feminist. Anyway, she smokes cigarettes. Oh, can't I get you some? I forgot!" He had a case of his own in his pocket, he said, and got one out now and lighted it. "Why," she went on, "Portia hasn't time to talk about it much. You see, she's a business woman. She's a house decorator. I don't mean painting and paper-hanging. She tells you what kind of furniture to buy, and then sells it to you. Portia's terribly clever and awfully independent." "All right," he said. "That brings us down to you. What are you?" She sighed. "I'm sort of a black sheep, I guess. I'm just in the university. But I'm to be a lawyer." Whereupon he cried out "Good lord!" so explosively that she fairly jumped. Then he apologized, said he didn't know why her announcement should have taken him like that, except that the notion of her in court trying a case--he was a lawyer himself--seemed rather startling. She sighed. "And now I suppose," she said, "you'll advise me not to be. Portia won't hear of my being a decorator. She says there's nothing in it any more; and my two brothers--one's a professor of history and the other's a high-school principal--say, 'Let her do anything but teach.' One of mother's great friends is a doctor, and she says, 'Anything but medicine,' so I suppose you'll say, 'Anything but law.'" "Not a bit," he said. "It's the finest profession in the world." But he said it off the top of his mind. Down below, it was still engaged with the picture of her in a dismal court room, blazing up at a jury the way she had blazed up at that street-car conductor. It was a queer notion. He didn't know whether he liked it or not. "I suppose," she hazarded, "that it's awfully dull and tiresome, though, until you get way up to the top." That roused him. "It's awfully dull when you do get to the top, or what's called the top--being a client caretaker with the routine law business of a few big corporations and rich estates going through your office like grist through a mill. I can't imagine anything duller than that. That's supposed to be the big reward, of course. That's the bundle of hay they dangle in front of your nose to keep you trotting straight along without trying to see around your blinders."