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hearings and confirmation by about seventy to twenty-six, wouldn’t you, Wally?”
    “Higher than that,” Justice Flyte said with a calculation harking back to his own Senate days. “More like eighty to seventeen, I hear. Tay has some problems, but I don’t think they lie with the Senate.”
    “Things are running down with that marriage,” Justice Wallenberg observed with characteristic bluntness. “It could affect his work as a Justice. It’s not unheard of, in Court history.”
    “He’ll subordinate it to the Court,” Mary-Hannah suggested. “He won’t let anything disturb his work here.”
    “You like him,” Rupert Hemmelsford said, his tone almost an accusation. She nodded briskly.
    “Very much, Rupe. Shouldn’t I?”
    Justice Hemmelsford sniffed. “You liberals always stick together.”
    “And you conservatives don’t?” she inquired. “Anyway, you know this institution, Rupe. Today’s liberal is tomorrow’s conservative is next day’s liberal is next day’s conservative—you know how it goes.”
    “That’s one of the great things about us, isn’t it?” Hughie Demsted agreed with a grin. “Nobody can tie us down, not even our own past records. Once we come on this bench there’s not a soul on earth can control us or be absolutely sure what we’re going to do. That’s one of our great strengths—infinitely better to have us sitting up here a bunch of unpredictable independent mavericks than it would be if we were just a gang of puppets for some transient in the White House. Right?”
    “He wouldn’t like to be referred to like that,” Rupe Hemmelsford said with a chuckle. “Like all of ’em, he’s got the idea he’s eternal. Whereas in reality”—he gave his sly grin—“we are. But you’re right, of course. It keeps him wonderin’ and hoppin’.”
    “Which is all to the good for the country,” Hughie Demsted said triumphantly, settling back to take a sip of his coffee. “If not, Ray, the law.”
    “The law has got to be consistent if it’s to mean anything,” Justice Ullstein insisted with his quiet stubbornness that often achieved more than another man’s flamboyant dramatics.
    “We’re the law,” Moss Pomeroy said with his usual irreverent grin, “and we’re not consistent, half the time. So how can the law be?”
    “It’s got to be,” Ray Ullstein said doggedly. “Or at least we’ve got to try to make it so. We’ve got to subordinate our personal feelings and problems, as we were saying about Tay Barbour earlier, to the needs of this Court.”
    “Well,” Justice McIntosh said with some dryness, “we’re important, all right, but I don’t know that we’re all that keeps the country from drifting. There’s a whole complex of things—tradition, old habit, respect for and devotion to the Constitution, a basic respect for law and order among the great majority of our countrymen—”
    “Who are about, as Dunc says, to take the law into their own hands and raise counter-hell with everything,” Wally Flyte remarked dryly.
    “Listen!” Justice McIntosh said, as sternly as though she were still dean of the Stanford Law School, which she had been for five years before her appointment to the Court. “Don’t lecture me on the situation in this country! I know what it is. I also know that not an hour ago we voted five to three to deny certiorari to Evans v. Minnesota, a very pertinent case, and it wasn’t my vote that kept us from considering it. The Chief asked us to face up to it. Well, we just didn’t. What is it going to take?” she demanded with a concluding burst of indignation. “Will one of us, or somebody near us, have to be slaughtered or mutilated or something, before we come to grips with it?”
    “Well, now, May,” Dunc Elphinstone said soothingly, figuring it was time, as Rupert Hemmelsford often put it behind his back, “to spread on a little of the old snake oil,” “I don’t think we need to get personal about things. It’s