They were only paying him forty dollars a month, to be sure,
but they figured that forty dollars practically a total loss and they
thought he might better go to practising law for himself. In other
words, he was fired.
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.
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