"I'm a business man now, Theodore."
"You are," said his newest friend, "and we couldn't keep house without you now. You're in a class by yourself."
This was true. Neil did not take his big chance at life as other boys equally in need of it would have done. He did not lose his head. He showed no pride in it. Green River, soon seeing this, rewarded him in various ways, each significant in its own fashion. Nondescript groups round the stove in his uncle's little store ceased to look for signs that he felt superior to them, and welcomed him as before, restoring to him his privilege of listening to talk that was more important than it seemed, public sentiment uncoloured and without reserve, the real voice of the town. Mrs. Saxon, of the old aristocracy of the town, with inborn social prejudices stronger than any acquired from the Everards, broke all her rules and invited him to Sunday-night supper.
"The boy's not spoiled," his old friend Luther Ward said to the Judge approvingly. "He knows his place."
"That's the surest way to climb out of it," said Judge Saxon, advisedly, for it was the Judge who had the closest and most discerning eyes upon Neil Donovan's career. Listlessly at first, because he had looked on at too many uphill and losing fights against the world, but later with interest, forced from him almost against his will, he watched it grow.
To a casual observer the boy would have seemed to be fitting himself not for an ornament to the legal profession, but for the office boy Colonel Everard had called him, but he would have seemed a willing office boy. He spent hours uncomplainingly looking up obscure points of law for some purpose nobody explained to him. He devoted long, sunny afternoons to looking up titles connected with some mortgage loan which nobody gave him the details of, and he seemed satisfied with his occupation, and equally satisfied to devote a morning to plodding through new-fallen snow delivering invitations to some party of Mrs. Saxon's.
When he was actually studying, he lost himself in the Judge's out-of-date reference books, as if they contained some secret as vital as the elixir of youth, and might yield it at any moment. Mr. Burr, at first ridiculing pupil and course of instruction alike, and with some show of reason, began shamefacedly and afterward openly to give him what benefit he could from the more modern education which had been wasted upon him. Between his two teachers the boy arrived at conclusions of his own. Neil was studying law by the old method which evolved so many different men of letters and keen-witted lawyers, a method obsolete as the Judge's clothes, but Neil gave allegiance to it ardently, as if it had been invented for him.
"What do you get out of this?" the Judge demanded, coming upon Neil late one afternoon, poring over the uninspired pages of Mr. Thayer by the fading light. "What do you hope to get?"
"All there is in it," said the boy simply, and without oratorical intent.
"Suppose you do pass your bar examinations. What then? What will you do with it?"