But the thing that rang through the girl's mind like the clang of a bell--the thing that made her catch her breath, was the quality of the big laugh with which he concluded it. He didn't ask her to be sorry for him. He wasn't sorry for himself one bit,--nor bitter--nor cynical. He didn't even seem trying to make a merit of his refusal to acquiesce in that sordid point of view. He just dismissed the thing with a cymbal-like clash of laughter and plunged ahead with his story. He told her how he'd got in with an altruistic bunch--the City Homes Association; how, finding him keen for work that they had little time for, the senior legal counselors had drawn out and let him do it. And from the way he told of his labors in drafting a new city building ordinance, she felt that it must have been one of the most fascinating occupations in the world, until he told her how it had drawn him into politics--municipal, city council politics, which was even more thrilling, and then how, after an election, a new state's attorney had offered him a position on his staff of assistants. In a sense, of course, it was true that he had, as Frederica would have put it, forgotten she was there--had forgotten, at least, who she was. Because, if he had remembered that she was just a young girl in the university, he would hardly, as he tramped about the room expounding the practise of criminal law in the state's attorney's office, have characterized the state's attorney himself as a "damned gallery-playing mountebank," nor have described the professions and the misdeeds of some of the persons he prosecuted in blunt Anglo-Saxon terms she had never heard used except in the Bible. The girl knew he had forgotten, and her only discomfort came from the fear that the spell might be broken and he remember suddenly and be embarrassed and stop. In the deeper sense--and she was breathlessly conscious of this too--he hadn't forgotten she was there. He was telling it all because she was there--because she was herself and nobody else. She knew, though how she couldn't have explained,--with that intuitive certainty that is the only real certainty there is,--that the story couldn't have been evoked from him in just that way, by any one else in the world. At the end of two years in the state's attorney's office, he told her, he figured he had had his training and was ready to begin.