I applied for a position at Talbott, Kittredge as a second-year law student. I wrote a spiffy letter and goosed my resume until I didn’t recognize myself on its crisp ivory paper. I was not law review and my grade point average was merely mediocre, but still I sent my application off with a queer confidence, sure that my true quality would shine through the flat black type, and for all I know it did. But only the best was good enough for Talbott, Kittredge and Chase. I didn’t even rate an interview.

I wasn’t consciously thinking of this rejection as I walked through the great stone lobby of One Liberty Place and stepped onto the marble-walled elevator seven years after sending off that letter, but as I rose to the fifty-fourth floor my resentment rose with me, and not just a resentment of Talbott, Kittredge and Chase. There was Dechert Price & Rhoads, there was Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, there was Rawle & Henderson, White & Williams, there was Drinker, Biddle, and Reath. There was even Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen. Out of law school I applied to the top twenty-five firms in the city and they all passed on my offer to slave in their libraries and work outrageous hours so their partners could become obscenely rich. Cut adrift, I was forced to stoop lower than I could ever have imagined and work for myself.

By the fall of my visit to Talbott, Kittredge and Chase there were only two of us left in our sad little firm, we were now merely Derringer and Carl. Our third partner, Guthrie, had fled. Seeing the inevitability of our failure, Guthrie had found himself a rich girl with family connections and had ridden her name to a job with Blaine, Cox, Amber & Cox, one of the fine old firms that had initially rejected us all. Where he found his young and prosperous wife, now Lauren Amber Guthrie, was in my bedroom, which made his leaving for the money and the prestige and the wood-paneled offices of his new employer particularly galling.