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Last week in the law offices behind this sign was a hustle-and-bustle indicative of a prime event. Clerks scuttled across thick-rugged floors in more-than-ordinary haste. Lawyers swung in and out of doorways bearing armfuls of documents. Typists rattled their keys with a triumphant staccato. In a high-ceiled inner room overlooking Trinity Church's grimy spire, an elderly man with thin white hair, a well-trimmed white beard parted in the middle, good solid shoulders and a small paunch, sat bolt upright in a stiff high-backed chair. The pivot of all the commotion, he was intensely busy—and intensely happy. Within a few days, God willing, he would become the eleventh Chief Justice of the U. S.
But he was not as excited as the youngest of his partners—a youth of 27 named John Fletcher Caskey who referred reverentially to the senior partner as "the judge." Only eight short years ago he came to the Yale Law School right out of Cassville in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri. The corn, said New Havenites, was growing rapidly out of his hair. It was therefore with some astonishment that his law mates observed him standing No. 1 in his class at the end of his first year and at the end of his course. That such a man, still bashful, should this year become a partner of the most famed lawyer in the land while contemporaries were struggling as clerks, is not only astounding but characteristic of the firm.
What is characteristic of the firm is the character of its chief. Exteriors, sociability, connections mean little or nothing to him. Solitude and brain output thereof is his delight.
Another man might contemplate the chief justiceship with some reluctance. Not so Charles Evans Hughes. It is a lonely job—one of the world's few entirely exalted and lonely life-jobs. By custom the Chief Justice is hedged off from free and easy association with his fellow beings lest they in some inexplicable manner corrupt his integrity, warp his judicial soul. Chief Justice White sought solitude to the point of never accepting a Washington invitation, of avoiding all official functions. For all his surface affability Chief Justice Taft observed much the same caution in his daily contacts. He shunned Society and it was only last year that he relaxed his stand against the world to the point of attending a Gridiron dinner (TIME, April 22).
But in no essential will it be necessary for Mr. Hughes to change his manner of life. He is a lonely man. These last years he has been making the "real money"—two or three hundred thousand a year perhaps—that he promised himself, when he left the Coolidge cabinet. He has not made it by much bartering and foregathering with his fellow man. Day after day he has gone to a skyscraper club for lunch—alone, or possibly with his partner and son, Charles Evans Hughes Jr.* with whom he has returned quickly to the office. Even on his frequent trips to Washington, where many a public man would be flattered to be his host, he has followed his lonely course, taking many of his meals alone.
Of course he has seen his clients (in the office) and they have included a long list of the premier U. S. corporations. Last week he had to dissociate himself from all those tangled legal alliances which make up the fabric of his profession. He had represented the Los Angeles & Salt Lake City R. R. in its valuation fight with the I. C. C. He was