The general took off his straw hat and mopped his brow.
"Worthy of her!" he exclaimed. "He's got to be worthy of her, sir. If he takes any notion in his head not to be, I'll thrash him within an inch of his life. Let him try it, the young scamp!"
The judge laughed easily, having regained his self-possession. "Well, well, there's no telling," he said; "but he's as bright as a steel trap. I wish Tom had half his sense." Then he turned past the church on his way home, and the general, declining an invitation to dinner, went on to the post-office, where he awaited his carriage.
From this time Dudley Webb attended classes at the judge's house and became the popular tyrant of his little schoolroom. He was a dark, high-bred looking boy, with a rich voice and a nature that was generous in small things and selfish in large ones. There was a convincing air of good-fellowship about him, which won the honest heart of slow-witted Tom Bassett, and a half-veiled regard for his own youthful pleasures, which aroused the wrath of Eugenia.
"I can't abide him," she had once declared passionately to Sally Burwell. "Somehow, he always gets the best of everything."
When, after the first few years, Nicholas Burr entered the schoolroom and took his place upon one of the short green benches, Mrs. Webb called upon the judge in person and demanded an explanation.
"My boy has been carefully brought up," she said; "he is a gentleman, and he will not submit to association with his inferiors. His grandfather would not have done so before him."
The judge quailed, but it was an uncompromising quailing—a surrender of the flesh, not the spirit.
"My dear lady," he began in his softest voice, "your son is a fine, spirited fellow, but he is a boy, and he doesn't care a—a—pardon me, madam—a continental whether anybody else is his inferior or not. No wholesome boy does. He doesn't know the meaning of the word—nor does Tom—and I shan't be the one to teach him. Amos Burr's son is a clever, hard-working boy, and if he will take an education from me, he shall have it."
The judge was firm. Mrs. Webb was firm also.