to which she listened with a half smile

She asked all these questions directly, as a man would, and listened to his replies. "I suppose you have an office picked out?" she surmised. At his mention of the Merchants' Exchange Building she raised her arched eyebrows half humorously. "You picked out an expensive place." Keith went over his reasoning, to which she listened with a half smile. "You may be right," she commented; "the reasoning is perfectly sound. But that means you must get the business in order to make it pay. What are your plans?" He confessed that as yet they were rather vague; there had not been time to do much--too busy settling. "The usual thing, I suppose," he added: "get acquainted, hang out a shingle, mix with people, sit down and starve in the traditional manner of young lawyers." He laughed lightly, but she refused to joke. "There are a good many lawyers here--and most of them poor ones," she told him. "The difficulty is to stand out above the ruck, to become noticed. You must get to know all classes, of course; but especially those of your own profession, men on the bench. Yes, especially men on the bench, they may help you more than any others--" He seemed to catch a little cynicism in her implied meaning, and experienced a sense of shock on his professional side. "You don't mean that judges are--" "Susceptible to influence?" She finished the sentence for him with an amused little laugh. She studied him for an instant with new interest, "They're human--more human here than anywhere else--like the rest of us-- they respond to kind treatment--" She laughed again, but at the sight of his face her own became grave. She checked herself. "Everything is so new out here. In older countries the precedents have all been established. Out here there are practically none. They are being made now, every day, by the present judges. Naturally personal influence might get a hearing for one point of view or the other--"