Often, when I was given a brief to work up for Mr. Thompson, I
would slave over it until the small hours of the morning and then, to
his disgust--and my unspeakable mortification--find that my work was
valueless, that I had not seized the fundamental points of the case, or
that I had built all my arguments on some misapprehension of the law.
Worse than that, I was unhappy at home. Poverty was fraying us all
out. If it was not exactly brutalizing us, it was warping us, breaking
our healths, and ruining our dispositions. My good mother--married out
of a beautiful Southern home where she had lived a life that (as I
remembered it) was all horseback rides and Negro servants--had started
out bravely in this debasing existence in a shanty, but it was wearing
her out. She was passing through a critical period of her life, and
she had no care, no comforts. I have often since been ashamed of
myself that I did not sympathize with her and understand her, but I was
too young to understand, and too miserable myself to sympathize. It
seemed to me that my life was not worth living--that every one had lost
faith in me--that I should never succeed in the law or anything
else--that I had no brains--that I should never do anything but scrub
floors and run messages.
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