Bradley contented himself with a gesture of general deprecation, and did not ask WHY Mainwaring's young brother should contemplate his death with satisfaction. Nevertheless, some time afterwards Miss Macy remarked that it seemed hard that the happiness of one member of a family should depend upon a calamity to another. “As for instance?” asked Mainwaring, who had already forgotten the circumstance. “Why, if you had died and your younger brother succeeded to the baronetcy, and become Sir Robert Mainwaring,” responded Miss Macy, with precision. This was the first and only allusion to his family and prospective rank. On the other hand, he had—through naive and boyish inquiries, which seemed to amuse his entertainers—acquired, as he believed, a full knowledge of the history and antecedents of the Bradley household. He knew how Bradley had brought his young wife and her cousin to California and abandoned a lucrative law practice in San Francisco to take possession of this mountain mill and woodland, which he had acquired through some professional service.
“Then you are a barrister really?” said Mainwaring, gravely.
Bradley laughed. “I'm afraid I've had more practice—though not as lucrative a one—as surgeon or doctor.”
“But you're regularly on the rolls, you know; you're entered as Counsel, and all that sort of thing?” continued Mainwaring, with great seriousness.
“Well, yes,” replied Bradley, much amused. “I'm afraid I must plead guilty to that.”
“It's not a bad sort of thing,” said Mainwaring, naively, ignoring Bradley's amusement. “I've got a cousin who's gone in for the law. Got out of the army to do it—too. He's a sharp fellow.”
“Then you DO allow a man to try many trades—over there,” said Miss Macy, demurely.
“Yes, sometimes,” said Mainwaring, graciously, but by no means certain that the case was at all analogous.
Nevertheless, as if relieved of certain doubts of the conventional quality of his host's attainments, he now gave himself up to a very hearty and honest admiration of Bradley. “You know it's awfully kind of him to talk to a fellow like me who just pulled through, and never got any prizes at Oxford, and don't understand the half of these things,” he remarked confidentially to Mrs. Bradley. “He knows more about the things we used to go in for at Oxford than lots of our men, and he's never been there. He's uncommonly clever.”
“Jim was always very brilliant,” returned Mrs. Bradley, indifferently, and with more than even conventionally polite wifely deprecation; “I wish he were more practical.”