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"You know," he said to Steger, "I feel sorry for George. He's such a fool. Still I did all I could."
Cowperwood also watched Mrs. Stener out of the tail of his eye-- an undersized, peaked, and
sallow little woman, whose clothes fitted her abominably. It was just like Stener to marry a
woman like that, he thought. The scrubby matches of the socially unelect or unfit always
interested, though they did not always amuse, him. Mrs. Stener had no affection for
Cowperwood, of course, looking on him, as she did, as the unscrupulous cause of her
husband's downfall. They were now quite poor again, about to move from their big house into
cheaper quarters; and this was not pleasing for her to contemplate.
Judge Payderson came in after a time, accompanied by his undersized but stout court
attendant, who looked more like a pouter-pigeon than a human being; and as they came, Bailiff
Sparkheaver rapped on the judge's desk, beside which he had been slumbering, and mumbled,
"Please rise!" The audience arose, as is the rule of all courts. Judge Payderson stirred among a
number of briefs that were lying on his desk, and asked, briskly, "What's the first case, Mr.
Protus?" He was speaking to his clerk.
During the long and tedious arrangement of the day's docket and while the various minor
motions of lawyers were being considered, this courtroom scene still retained interest for
Cowperwood. He was so eager to win, so incensed at the outcome of untoward events which
had brought him here. He was always intensely irritated, though he did not show it, by the whole
process of footing delays and queries and quibbles, by which legally the affairs of men were too
often hampered. Law, if you had asked him, and he had accurately expressed himself, was a
mist formed out of the moods and the mistakes of men, which befogged the sea of life and
prevented plain sailing for the little commercial and social barques of men; it was a miasma of
misinterpretation where the ills of life festered, and also a place where the accidentally wounded
were ground between the upper and the nether millstones of force or chance; it was a strange,
weird, interesting, and yet futile battle of wits where the ignorant and the incompetent and the
shrewd and the angry and the weak were made pawns and shuttlecocks for men--lawyers, who
were playing upon their moods, their vanities, their desires, and their necessities. It was an
unholy and unsatisfactory disrupting and delaying spectacle, a painful commentary on the
frailties of life, and men, a trick, a snare, a pit and gin. In the hands of the strong, like himself
when he was at his best, the law was a sword and a shield, a trap to place before the feet of the
unwary; a pit to dig in the path of those who might pursue. It was anything you might choose to
make of it--a door to illegal opportunity; a cloud of dust to be cast in the eyes of those who might
choose, and rightfully, to see; a veil to be dropped arbitrarily between truth and its execution,
justice and its judgment, crime and punishment. Lawyers in the main were intellectual
mercenaries to be bought and sold in any cause. It amused him to hear the ethical and
emotional platitudes of lawyers, to see how readily they would lie, steal, prevaricate,
misrepresent in almost any cause and for any purpose. Great lawyers were merely great
unscrupulous subtleties, like himself, sitting back in dark, close-woven lairs like spiders and
awaiting the approach of unwary human flies. Life was at best a dark, inhuman, unkind,
unsympathetic struggle built of cruelties and the law, and its lawyers were the most despicable
representatives of the whole unsatisfactory mess. Still he used law as he would use any other
trap or weapon to rid him of a human ill; and as for lawyers, he picked them up as he would any
club or knife wherewith to defend himself. He had no particular respect for any of them--not
even Harper Steger, though he liked him. They were tools to be used--knives, keys, clubs,
anything you will; but nothing more. When they were through they were paid and dropped--put
aside and forgotten. As for judges, they were merely incompetent lawyers, at a rule, who were
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