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 processes he had never done anything to make sure. He had never entertained one of them in his home, never laughed himself nearly into suffocation at one of their pet and venerable jokes, never favored them with the genial flattery of his smile, never deserved the gratitude of one of them through the opportunity to make an unerringly safe and immensely profitable investment. His wife had never poured tea for one of their wives, never rolled her glittering limousine to her door and said: "Use it this afternoon as your own, my dear, I beg of you." She had never helped one with the glamor of her social prestige, for the wife of a Supreme Court Justice outshines the wife of an encrusted western millionaire as the sun outshines the moon.

No; the arm of Boland had never been long enough to scratch a back in the Supreme Court of the United States. With all his plannings to insure men's right performance, he had now to depend upon the scales of simple justice—scales that turn upon a hair. It was just one man's right against another man's right; just John Boland, a straddling biped, against any other straddling biped—against Julius Hornblower, against Adam John, against Adolph Salzberg, against Henry Soderman. That, to one who thought as John Boland had been accustomed to think, was unthinkable—unendurable. Therefore, he walked the floor.

All the accumulations of his life, forty years of scheming, toiling, planning; all the industrial empire he had built; all the civilization he had created—for so it seemed to Old Two Blades, that he was the creator of civilization—all turned upon the decision of men upon whose backs he never once had bestowed