She felt enkindled. She felt herself to be on her way, at last, to strike a blow at Mr. Clarke, who accused, arrested and jailed in the name of the State.
She detached herself from the crowd on the walk, and stepped from the clear, October chill of the street into a vestibule, where an old-fashioned steam radiator was hissing, and which communicated with a hall with a high-vaulted roof, two old-fashioned stories in height, and black iron elevator cages rising and descending upon unwinding cables behind old, black, filigreed gratings.
The building, in contrast to the immaculate, compact and yet far taller, modern structure where Hoberg had his offices, reminded Joan Daisy of the Criminal Courts Building and, in fact, it belonged to the same era. The interior trim, on the floor where Joan Daisy emerged from the elevator, was golden oak as in the court; the musty odor of old, often-washed wooden floors was redolent of the courts and fixed in the girl's mind the image of this building as the courts' opponent since the decade when both were new. There in the courts beside the jail, abode the prosecution; here dwelt the defense.
Above and below Max Elmen's name, in the neat white letters of the black board of the building directory, were series of firm titles which Joan Daisy vaguely had recognized as the names of lawyers famous for their defense of persons accused in great criminal trials. Some of the persons accused had been freed, triumphantly freed, she remembered; but some, in spite of all that their lawyers could do, had been sentenced to the penitentiary for life and never heard of again; and some had been hanged or the gallows in that jail yard below the black walls which imprisoned Ket.
Very soberly, Joan Daisy sought the door which was the entrance to the extensive suite of Elmen, Elmen, Kleppman and Wein. A young, bald man with shell-
