Marshall Fannin was voted “Most Likely to Succeed” by his 1917 law school class, and the letter written by Mr. Priest informing him about the batch reunion comes as a punch to his gut. He always dreamed of being a city lawyer married to a city girl, but then the First World War started up, and he enlisted as a soldier. With the loss of his good friend Oliver Benedict, Fannin found that he could not go into the New York firms and ask for a job that he had always imagined they would do together. Upon returning home, he found that his father, Judge Fannin, was sick – and that he needed his son to run the family’s law business in Fort Mason. Fannin was dismayed; he wanted to practice in a city, but he found himself immersed in small town politics. At length, a high-profile case came his way, but he turned it down because he could not, in good conscience, help a powerful firm cheat an old man out of his land. The big firm won anyway, but Fannin gained a reputation as a do-gooder, which kept clients coming steadily to him. His faith in the power of the law returned when he prevented a mob from breaking into a jail and beating a prisoner by reminding them of the ‘American Ideal': a belief in reason and civility rather than chaos. At the start of the Second World War, Fannin found himself making a second sacrifice. His sons, Burns and Cary, went off to war, and for a few agonizing months, he was certain he would lose them. Fortunately, both of them came home, and Burns was determined to take over the family business in a way that Fannin himself never was. Having come to terms with the goodness of his life – even if it wasn’t exactly as he imagined it – Fannin writes back to Mr. Priest and kindly informs him that he cannot attend the reunion because there is a minor case that needs to be dealt with that is nonetheless close to his heart.