“Oh, it wouldn’t do to let Pumpelly suspect we couldn’t handle it ourselves.  Besides, the lady wants distinguished counsel to represent her.  No, for once we’ve got to lay dignity aside.  I think I’ll send Maddox up to the Criminal Courts Building and have him find out just what to do.”

It may seem remarkable that neither of the members of a high-class law firm in New York City should ever have been in a police court, but such a situation is by no means infrequent.  The county or small-town attorney knows his business from the ground up.  He starts with assault and battery, petty larceny and collection cases and gradually works his way up, so to speak, to murder and corporate reorganizations.  But in Wall Street the young student whose ambition is to appear before the Supreme Court of the United States in some constitutional matter as soon as possible is apt to spend his early years in brief writing and then become a specialist in real estate, corporation, admiralty or probate law and perhaps never see the inside of a trial court at all, much less a police court, which, to the poor and ignorant, at any rate, is the most important court of any of them, since it is here that the citizen must go to enforce his everyday rights.

Mr. Wilfred Edgerton suspected that a magistrate’s court was a dirty sort of hole, full of brawling shyster lawyers, and he didn’t want to know any more about such places than he could help.  Theoretically he was aware that on a proper complaint sworn to by a person supposing himself or herself criminally aggrieved the judge would issue a warrant to an officer, who would execute it on the person of the criminal and hale him or her to jail.  The idea of Mrs. Wells being dragged shrieking down Fifth Avenue or being carted away from her house in a Black Maria filled him with dismay.

Yet that was what Mrs. Pumpelly proposed to have done, and unfortunately he had to do exactly what Mrs. Pumpelly said; quickly too.

“Maddox,” he called to a timid youth in a green eye-shade sitting in lonely grandeur in the spacious library, “just run up to the—­er—­magistrate’s court on Blank Street and ascertain the proper procedure for punishing a person for obstructing the highway.  If you find an appropriate statute or ordinance you may lay an information against Mrs. Rutherford Wells for violating it this afternoon in front of the residence next to hers; and see that the proper process issues in the regular way.”

To hear him one would have thought he did things like that daily before breakfast—­such is the effect of legal jargon.

“Yes, sir,” answered Maddox respectfully, making a note.  “Do you wish to have the warrant held or executed?”

Mr. Wilfred Edgerton bit his mustache doubtfully.

“We-ell,” he answered at length, perceiving that he stood upon the brink of a legal Rubicon, “you may do whatever seems advisable under all the circumstances.”