Marriott felt the deadly ennui that came over him at the thought of these petty criminal cases. The crimes were so small, so stupid, and so squalid, they had nothing to excuse them, not even the picturesque quality of adventure that by some sophistry might extenuate crimes of a more enterprising and dangerous class. They were so hopeless, too, and Marriott could hardly keep a straight face while he defended the perpetrators, and yet he allowed himself to be drawn into them; he found himself constantly pleading for some poor devil who had neither money to pay him nor the decency to thank him. Sometimes he wondered why he did it, and whenever he wondered he decided that he would never take another such case. Then the telephone would ring, and before he knew it he would be in police court making another poor devil’s cause his own, while more important litigation must wait--for the petty criminals were always in urgent need; the law would not stay for them nor abide their convenience; with them it was imperative, implacable, insistent, as if to dress the balance for its delay and complaisance with its larger criminals. Marriott often thought it over, and he had thought enough to recognize in these poor law-breakers a certain essential innocence; they were so sublimely foolish, so illogical, they made such lavish sacrifice of all that was best in their natures; they lived so hardly, so desperately; they paid such tremendous prices and got so little; they were so unobservant, they learned nothing by experience. And yet with one another they were so kind, so considerate, so loyal, that it seemed hard to realize that they could be so unkind and so disloyal to the rest of mankind. In his instinctive love of human nature, their very hopelessness and helplessness appealed to him. "Mr. Marriott, do you think he is guilty?" Gusta was asking. "Guilty?" said Marriott, automatically repeating the word. "Guilty? What difference does that make?" "Oh, Mr. Marriott!" the girl exclaimed, her blue eyes widening. "Surely, it makes all the difference in the world!" "To you?" "Why--yes--shouldn’t it?" "No, it shouldn’t, Gusta, and what’s more, it doesn’t. And it doesn’t to me, either. You don’t want him sent to prison even if he is guilty, do you?" "N--no," Gusta hesitated as she assented to the heresy. "No, of course you don’t. Because, Gusta, we know him--we know he’s all right, don’t we, no matter what he has done? Just as we know that we ourselves are all right when we do bad things--isn’t that it?" The girl was sitting with her yellow head bent; she was trying to think. "But father would say--" "Oh, yes," Marriott laughed, "father would say and grandfather would say, too--that’s just the trouble. Father got his notions from the Old World, but we--Gusta, we know more than father or grandfather in this country."