"No, Glenn, I'll tell you. There's no use to think of locating in Macochee or any other small town. The business is dead here. It's too bad, but it's so. When I began there was plenty of real estate law to do, and plenty of criminal law, but the land titles are all settled now--"
"That's what Judge Blair said," interrupted Marley.
"Well, not exactly," he said. "I heard him say that."
"Yes," mused Powell. "Well, he feathered his nest pretty well while they were being settled. But as I was saying--the criminal business has died out, or rather, it has changed. The criminals haven't any money any more, that is, the old kind of criminals; the corporations have it all now--if you want to make money, you'll have to have them for clients. Of course, the money still goes to the criminal lawyer just as it used to."
"I like Macochee," said Marley, his spirits falling fast.
"Well, it's a nice old town to live in," Powell assented. "But the devil of it is how're you going to live? Of course, you can study here just as well as anywhere; better than anywhere, in fact; you have plenty of time, and plenty of quiet. But as for locating here--why, it's utterly out of the question for a man who wants to make anything of himself and has to get a living while he's doing it--and I don't know any other kind that ever do make anything out of themselves."
"I had hoped--" persisted Marley, longing for Powell to relent.
"Oh, I know," the lawyer replied almost impatiently, "but it's no use, there's nothing in it. No one with ambition can stay here now. The town, like all these old county-seats, is good for nothing but impecunious old age and cemeteries. It was nothing but a country cross-roads before the railroad came, and since then it's been nothing but a water-tank; if it keeps on it'll be nothing but a whistling-post, and the trains won't be bothered to stop at all. Its people are industrious in nothing but gossip, and genuine in nothing but hypocrisy; they are so mean that they hate themselves, and think all the time they're hating each other. Just look at our leading citizen, Brother Dudley, over there in his bank; he owns the whole town, and he thinks he's a bigger man than old Grant. Sundays he sits in his pew with a black coat on, squinting at the preacher out of his sore little eyes, and waiting for him to say something he can get the bishop to fire him for, and he calls that religion. Mondays he goes back to his business of skinning farmers and poor widows out of their miserable little pennies, and he calls that business; Does he ever look at a flower or a tree, or turn round in the street at the laugh of a child? He's the kind of man that runs this town, and he makes the rest of the people like it. Well, he don't run me! God! If I'd only had some sense twenty years ago I'd have pulled out and gone to the city and been somebody to-day."