In the robing room after the noon recess, Judge Mann was assailed by a feeling of being out of place, ludicrously so, dismayingly. The village atheist blundering into a crowd of churchgoers to retrieve his hat; or an explorer required to take part in a tribal ritual without a briefing on the rules. Innocent oversight, by the way, on the part of local chieftains and witchdoctors, for why wouldn't they assume that everybody knew the rules from infancy as they did? _What am I doing here?_ He could ask the question of Joe Bass and receive an intelligent answer. No good. No use making Joe uneasy about the Judge's state of mind. Even the door to the courtroom looked unfamiliar. Why had he never before noticed that the swirling grain of the oak resembled the smoke lines of a bonfire? He stood with his hand on the knob, reflecting also that technique is not enough: he should spend several months, say a year, in a special kind of discipline, before it would be right to start taking piano pupils--supposing he had any such intention. He turned the knob, hearing the muted uproar of a hundred conversations in the dull room beyond; opened the door a crack, and the noise became a sonorous flow; opened it then all the way, and the roar was shut off by the action, since every talker had been watching that door, impatient for the continuation of ritual. _For example, I would have to learn much more about children_-- "All rise!" He walked to the Judge's bench a stranger. Why the devil must they stand up? Settling their damn lunches? Seated, noticing how quickly today the rustle and throat-clearing subsided, his eyes were annoyed by shabbiness. Old stains, scratches on the woodwork, in every corner a pinch of dust; on every face--Callista Blake's, Hunter's, even Mr. Delehanty's--the marks of that peculiarly human strain that people experience in the presence of the heavy institutions they themselves have made. Maybe his eyes were exaggerating the dust, to support the bias of his mind, which insisted on pointing up the dirt, cracks, awkwardly mended spots and general bad housekeeping of the law itself. _Well, there are certain things to do before I go._ "Are you ready for your opening, Mr. Warner?"