His life there was quiet and studious, for he felt that he had less time than the younger men. His age seemed excessive to him, by contrast. He was very generally respected as a quiet, decent fellow, who might be a fine consulting lawyer, but not a good man in the courts. They changed this opinion very suddenly upon hearing him present his first plea.
His life consisted for the most part of passing to and fro from his boarding-place to his recitation-room, or to long hours of digging in the library. He saw from time to time notices of Miss Wilbur's lectures in the interests of the grange and upon literary topics. He determined to hear her if she came into any neighboring city. There was no one to spy upon him, if he made an expedition of that sort.
One beautiful winter day he read in the weekly paper of the town that she was about to appear at the Congregational church in a lecture entitled, "The Real Woman-question." He had an impulse to sing, which he wisely repressed, for he couldn't sing—that is, nothing which the hearer would recognize as singing. The Fates seemed working in his favor.
He had preserved a marked sweetness and purity of thought through all his hard life that made him a good type of man. His clear, steady eyes never gave offence to any woman, for nothing but sympathy and admiration ever looked out of them. The very thought that she was coming so near brought a curious numbness into his muscles and a tremor into his hands. He looked forward now to the evening of the lecture with the keenest interest he had ever felt.
The dazzling winter day seemed more radiant than ever before, when he heard some ladies in the post-office say Ida was in town. The blue shadows lay on the new-fallen snow vivid as steel. The warm sun showered down through the clear air a peculiar warmth that made the eaves begin to drop in the early morning. Sleighs were moving to and fro in the streets, and bright bits of color on the girls' hoods and in the broad knit scarfs which the young men wore, formed pleasing reliefs from the dazzling blue and white. Bells filled the air with jocund music.
Bradley walked straight away into the country. He wanted to be alone. It seemed so strange and sweet to be thus shaken by the coming of a woman. In the first few minutes he gave himself up to the thought that she was near and that he was going to hear her speak again. It made his hand shake and his heart beat quick.
He wondered if she would be changed. She would be older a little, but she would look just the same. He saw her stand again under the waving branches of the oaks, the flickering shadow on her brown hair, speaking again the words which had become the measure of his ambition, the prophecy of a social condition:
"I want to have everything I do to help us all on toward that time when the country will be filled with happy young people, and hale and hearty old people, when the moon will be brighter, and the stars thicker in the skies."
This was his thought. He had not risen yet to the conception of the real barrenness and squalor of the life he had lived.
His studies had made him a little more self-analytical, but there were inner deeps where he did not penetrate and there was one sacred place which he dared not enter. A whirl of thought confused him, but out of it all he returned constantly to the thought that he should hear her speak again.