“Accept my instructions for a brief.”
He stated it so abruptly that it took my breath away. If all this was
outside procedure, I was not going to quarrel with my bread and
butter. I motioned him to a chair, and, taking up pen and paper
tentatively, was in a position to scrutinize my visitor.
His appearance was certainly odd—a marked exaggeration, I should have
pronounced it, of the legal type. His face was very red; his enormous
side-whiskers very white. Large spectacles obscured his eyes, and he
wore his silk hat (of an obsolete pattern) cocked rakishly over one of
them. Add to this that his voluminous frock-coat looked like a much
larger man’s misfit; that his black cotton gloves were preposterously
long in the fingers; that he carried a “gamp” of the pantomime
pattern, and it will be obvious that I had some reason for my
astonishment. But I kept that in hand. A lawyer, after all, must come
to graduate in the eccentricities of clients.
He looked perkily, with an abrupt action of his head, round about him;
then came to me again.
“Large practice?” he asked.
“Large enough for my needs,” I answered winningly.
“H’m!” He sniffed. “They don’t appear to be many.”
“That—excuse me—is my affair,” I said with dignity.
“Of course,” he said; “of course. Only I looked you up—accident
serving intuition—on the supposition that you were green, you
know—one of the briefless ones—called to the Bar, but not chosen,
eh?”