Bradley found a quiet and comfortable home with Judge Brown and his odd old wife, who manifested her growing regard for him by little touches of adornment in his room, and by infrequent confidences. As for the Judge, he took an immense delight in the young fellow, he made such a capital listener. Between Bradley and the grocery he really found opportunity to tell all his old stories and philosophize upon every conceivable subject. He talked a deal of politics, quoting Jefferson and Jackson. He criticised members of Congress, and told what he would have done in their places. He criticised, also, the grange movement, from what he considered to be a lofty plane.
"They profess to have for a motto 'equal rights to all and special privileges to none,' and then they go off into class legislation. It's easy to talk that principle, but it means business when you stand by it. I haint got the sand to stand by that principle myself. It goes too deep for me, but it's something you young politicians ought to study on. One o' these days that principle will get life into it, and when it does things will tumble. The Democratic party used to be a party that meant that, and if it ever succeeds again it must head that way. That's the reason I want to get you young fellows into it."
These talks didn't mean as much to Bradley as they should have done. He was usually at work at something and only half listened while the Judge wandered on, his heels in the air, his cheek full of tobacco. Old Colonel Peavy dropped in occasionally, and Dr. Carver, and then the air was full of good, old-time Democratic phrases. At such times the Judge even went so far as to quote Calhoun.
"As a matter of fact, Calhoun was on the right track. If he hadn't got his States' Rights doctrine mixed up with slavery, he'd 'a' been all right. What he really stood for was local government as opposed to centralized government. We're just comin' around back to a part of Calhoun's position."
This statement of the Judge stuck in Bradley's mind; months afterward it kept coming up and becoming more significant each time that he talked upon it.
He thought less often of Miss Wilbur now, and he could hear her name mentioned without flushing. She had become a vaguer but no less massive power in his life. That beautiful place in his soul where she was he had a strange reverence for. He loved to have it there. It was an inspiration to him, and yet he did not distinctly look forward to ever seeing her, much less to meeting her.
Indefinite as this feeling was, it saved him from the mistake of marrying Nettie. Poor girl! She was in the grasp of her first great passion, and was as helpless as a broken-winged bird in the current of a river. She was feverishly happy and unaccountably sad by turns. The commands of her father not to see Bradley only roused her antagonism, and her mother's timid entreaties made no impression upon her. Not even Bradley's unresponsiveness seemed to have a decided discouraging effect.
Her classmates laughed at her, as they did at three or four other pairs in the school who proclaimed their devouring love for each other by walking to and from the chapel with locked arms, or who sat side by side in their classes with clasped hands, indifferent to any rude jest, reprimand from the teacher, or slyly-flung eraser. The principal gave it up in despair, calling it a "sort of measles which they'll outgrow."
It was really pitiful to the comprehending observer. There was so much that was pain mixed with this pleasure. There were so many keen and benumbing disappointments, like that of waiting about the door of the office for Bradley to come down, and then to see him appear in company with some client of Judge Brown. Not that the client made so much difference, but the cold glance of Bradley's eyes did. At such times she turned away with quivering lip and choking throat.
She had lost much of her pertness and brightness. She talked very little at home, and it was only when with Bradley that she seemed at all like her old bird-like self. Then she chattered away in a wild delight, if he happened to be in a responsive mood, or feverishly and with a forced quality of gayety if he were cold and unresponsive.