CHAPTER III.
THE FAMILY SOLICITOR The senior member of the legal firm of Rae & Macpherson was perplexed and annoyed, indeed angry, and angry chiefly because he was perplexed.
He resented such a condition of mind as reflecting upon his legal and other acumen.

Angry, too, he was because he had been forced to accept, the previous day, a favour from a firm--Mr.Rae would not condescend to say a rival firm--with which he for thirty years had maintained only the most distant and formal relations, to wit, the firm of Thomlinson & Shields.Messrs.Rae & Macpherson were family solicitors and for three generations had been such; hence there gathered about the firm a fine flavour of assured respectability which only the combination of solid integrity and undoubted antiquity can give.Messrs.Rae & Macpherson had not yielded in the slightest degree to that commercialising spirit which would transform a respectable and self-respecting firm of family solicitors into a mere financial agency; a transformation which Mr.Rae would consider a degradation of an ancient and honourable profession.
This uncompromising attitude toward the commercialising spirit of the age had doubtless something to do with their losing the solicitorship for the Bank of Scotland, which went to the firm of Thomlinson & Shields, to Mr.Rae's keen, though unacknowledged, disappointment; a disappointment that arose not so much from the loss of the very honourable and lucrative appointment, and more from the fact that the appointment should go to such a firm as that of Thomlinson & Shields.
For the firm of Thomlinson & Shields were of recent origin, without ancestry, boasting an existence of only some thirty-five years, and, as one might expect of a firm of such recent origin, characterised by the commercialising modern spirit in its most pronounced and objectionable form.

Mr.Rae, of course, would never condescend to hostile criticism, dismissing Messrs.

Thomlinson & Shields from the conversation with the single remark, "Pushing, Sir, very pushing, indeed." It was, then, no small humiliation for Mr.Rae to be forced to accept a favour from Mr.Thomlinson.

"Had it been any other than Cameron," he said to himself, as he sat in his somewhat dingy and dusty office, "I would let him swither.