Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/120



That peculiar form of human activity, or inactivity, known as getting a law practice, has been so abundantly treated on the printed page that I have not the temerity to add to the literature on the interesting subject. The experience is never dramatic, even if it is sometimes tragic, and it is so often tragic that there has seemed no other re-*course for mankind than, by one of those tacit understandings on which our race gets through life, to view it as a comedy. It is no comedy, of course, to the chief actor, who is sustained only by his dreams, his illusions, and his ideals, and he may count himself successful perhaps, if, when he has lost his illusions, he can retain at least some of his ideals, though the law is too apt to strip him of both. However that may be, in my own experience in that sort there was an incident which made its peculiar impressions; indeed, there were several such incidents, but the one which I have in mind involves the perhaps commonplace story of Maria R, which ran like a serial during those trying years.

I had intended to take up the practice of law in Chicago; I was quite certain that there I should set up my little enterprise, and this self-same certainty is perhaps the reason why I found myself back in Toledo, in a lonely little office in one of the new office buildings; sky-scrapers they were called in the new sense of metropolitan life that then began to pervade the town; they were not so very