“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