Attorney and client -- Fiction; Law firms -- Fiction; Legal stories; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction
Yet Tutt was no more of a Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde than most of us.
Merely, his daily transition was a little more abrupt. And when all is
said and done most of the devices invented by his fertile little brain
to further the interests of his clients were no more worthy of
condemnation than those put forward by far higher-priced and much more
celebrated attorneys.
Not that Mrs. Tutt was blind to the dangers to which her husband by
virtue of his occupation was exposed. Far from it. Indeed she made it
her business to pay periodical visits to the office, ostensibly to see
whether or not it was properly cleaned and the windows washed, but in
reality--or at least so Tutt suspected--to find out whether the
personnel was entirely suitable for a firm of their standing and
particularly for a junior partner of his susceptibilities.
But she never discovered anything to give her the slightest cause for
alarm. The dramatis personae of the offices of Tutt & Tutt were
characteristic of the firm, none of their employees--except Miss
Sondheim, the tumultous-haired lady stenographer--and Willie, the office
boy, being under forty years of age.
When not engaged in running errands or fussing over his postage-stamp
album, Willie spent most of his time teasing old Scraggs, the scrivener,
an unsuccessful teetotaler. A faint odor of alcohol emanated from the
cage in which he performed his labors and lent an atmosphere of
cheerfulness to what might otherwise have seemed to Broadway clients an
unsympathetic environment, though there were long annual periods during
which he was as sober as a Kansas judge. The winds of March were apt,
however, to take hold of him. Perhaps it was the spring in his case
also.
The backbone of the establishment was Miss Minerva Wiggin. In every law
office there is usually some one person who keeps the shop going.
Sometimes it is a man. If so, he is probably a sublimated stenographer
or law clerk who, having worked for years to get himself admitted to the
bar, finds, after achieving that ambition, that he has neither the
ability nor the inclination to brave the struggle for a livelihood by
himself. Perchance as a youth he has had visions of himself arguing test
cases before the Court of Appeals while the leaders of the bar hung upon
his every word, of an office crowded with millionaire clients and
servile employees, even as he is servile to the man for whom he labors
for a miserly ten dollars a week.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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