All at once she rose, shaken and frantic as a prophetess, and seizing her hair in her hands cried:
"Oh, those years, I see them, those seven terrible years!"
She began to wander about the room avoiding the lawyer, invoking always the youth which she seemed to see expiring before her, in the inexorable limits of nature.
Bofinger, after a vain attempt to check her, remained helpless in the presence of such hysteria. A moment later he stole from the room, took his satchel and went to the door. There he stopped, waited, saw her convulsed with sobbing, frowned, raised his shoulders and slipped out.
On the sidewalk the gods of suspicion, which ruled him, made him cry suddenly:
"Hell! I am a fool to be so tender-hearted. She's been lyin' to me to hide some mystery. That was the time to put the screws on!"
He hesitated, scanning the shade. From time to time a silhouette passed, frantic and suffering. This shadow, without life or body, representing nothing but an agony, horrified him. He turned and hastened away.
Six months previous to the events of the last chapter, four men were awaiting the opening of the afternoon session of the police court, in an office whose glass front displayed to the travel of Tenth Street the legend,
HYMAN GROLL & ALONZO BOFINGER _Counselors-at-Law._
Opposite, the Jefferson Market Court loomed from the triangular island which is formed by the junction of Sixth and Greenwich Avenues, whose muddy torrents descend, roaring, to shake it from its foundation.
The court is one of seven similar mouths, down which one may look aghast, into the cauldron at the depths of society. Vice nowhere has a more horrid aspect, for nowhere is it more mean and repulsive with the inequalities of suffering. Journalism, to strip the novice of all his illusions, sends him to this rude school, where he shortly learns not only that evil as well as good is inevitable and eternal, but that justice, in common with eternity, must be accepted in faith, for to explore its depths is to recoil in horror. To him, who knows the misery which bears the weight of the social superstructure, justice has the aspect of a seal over a living tomb, and the present building is a mockery. Where there should stand a waste of gray is a meaningless mass of red brick. In place of a stern, ponderous block of granite, unsoftened by ledge or cornice, crude with the crudity of man's justice to man, there rises in architectural legerdemain a jumble of turret and tower, as though variety and gaiety could be sought in this saddest and dreariest of the manifestations of society.