"I want to cinch it while I've the money. You see, it's this way. In--in my--business"--she looked into John Smith's girlish eyes and hesitated--"everything is uncertain. It's a feast or a famine. A wave of reform may strike the town to-morrow, and the lid goes on. The protection you pay for may be taken from you next week. You've no rights. You ain't human. So I fix the fifty a month for the old man while I can, see?" "Gibbs--Gibbs!" said the judge. "Relation of yours?" "In a way. Does it make any difference?" "It goes to the consideration," said the lawyer. "Love and affection, you know." "Well," said the Slattery person, "his son was my solid man--my side-partner--my husband. The last thing he said when he got his was, 'Blanche, old girl, take care of dad. You know his weakness. Don't let him starve!' And I ain't going to!" "His weakness?" queried the judge. "What did he mean?" "Drink," said the Slattery person. "It's in the blood. But he can't last long--and he's Jim's father!" She looked out of the window and dabbed with a lace handkerchief at her bright eyes, which she dared not wipe for fear of ruin to the appliqué complexion. Suddenly she had, to the mind of the susceptible John Smith, become a woman, with a woman's weakness and yearning over the departed Jim--of the blackness of whose life John had no means of taking the measure. He felt all at once that this person had shown feelings so like those he would have expected from his mother that it startled him. "Oh, we're all alike!" said the judge when she had gone. "These things are worth the lawyer's study. Human nature--human nature! We must get above it and study it! Just ponder on the contradictions in the bases of life involved in this Slattery person and Mrs. Brunson's feeling toward Lear. Here's a woman, that no one at the circle last night would touch with anything shorter than a ten-foot pole or lighter than a club, who is actually carrying out toward a drunkard in Bloomington a policy of love and humanity that would be beyond Mrs. Brunson. She'd say: 'Let him behave the way I say, and I'll take him in!' Any of us moral folks would do the same, too. No knights and roistering for us! Quite a study--eh, John?" John sat silent, far afloat from his moorings. The judge was too deep, too ethically acute for him. Perhaps by long association he, John Smith, might grow in moral height and mental grasp, so as to-- "I don't know," said Judge Thornton, "which is the worse--sale of the body, or barter of the soul. I don't mean that the body can be sold without the soul going with it, though Epictetus seems a case in point in favor of the separable-transaction theory; but if it can, sale of the soul would seem the more ruinous. I--"