She ushered me into a large corner office, an office bigger than my apartment. The view stretched south and west. Straight ahead Broad Street ran like a mighty river to Veterans Stadium in the distance, and to the right I could see old Franklin Field and the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, whose law school, along with Harvard’s and Yale’s and Stanford’s and NYU’s and all the other top ten’s, had rejected my application. Prescott’s office was wood clad, like a judge’s chambers, furnished with an elegant living room set at one end, a long oak table piled with briefs and exhibits in the middle, and a large, gilded desk in the windowed corner, with two tapestry-covered chairs before it and a low wooden credenza behind it. Across one of the walls was a flurry of framed photographs, pictures of mayors and congressmen, senators and presidents, each smiling as they stood next to a tall, stern-faced patrician, the photographs inscribed across the bottoms. On the far wall, above the living room set, hung a large neorealist painting of two boxers circling each other against an angry yellow background. The boxers’ bodies were clenched, they peered over their gloves, waiting for the moment to explode into violence. The painting was as tense as a coiled spring and the eyes of the fighters were filled with hate. It was a litigator’s painting.

“Mr. Prescott will be right in,” said my guide. “Make yourself comfortable.” She gestured at one of the chairs before the desk and I sat like a trained puppy.

On the credenza was a picture of the perfect family, three smiling beef-fed kids, a pretty wife, the tall patrician once again. In another the children were older, the wife wider, they stood before a beautiful country home with a wide veranda surrounded by thickly leafed trees, the patrician now in a wicker chair with a newspaper and a pipe. In that sad fall of my life such teeming family bliss seemed the most remote of all the ambitions I had so far failed to achieve.