The preacher's mind had caught the quotation, relating as it did to the shop, and he smiled as he said: "I am afraid, Uncle William, that the young man has read too much for us. In an argument he is a porcupine with sharp quills."
"A pig with the bristles of impudence," said William, and smiled an apology to the mother.
"Nevertheless," remarked the preacher, returning to the subject, "I don't see how the eye of faith could have been dimmed by such a mote. Conscience—"
"Meaning education," Howard interrupted.
The minister bowed to Howard, but continued to address himself to William. "Conscience ought to have pointed out the good you could do. You could at least have gone to a foreign country—"
"Or off Van Buren Street," said Howard.
Bradley braced himself for a debate. Alone with Howard he might have said, "let it pass," but in the presence of a woman, a believer in his faith, a preacher must not shun a controversy. It would be an acknowledgment of the strength of the doubt and of the weakness of faith. So he braced himself against the wall of creed, and with polemic finger raised was about to proceed when he heard the front door open.
"The girls," said Mrs. Elbridge, glad enough to break in.
"So soon?" remarked Bradley, looking at his watch and meaning so late. Florence and Agnes came in, laughing. Bradley got up with a bow. "You here?" said Agnes, and then corrected herself by saying that she was pleased to see him there. "I never know how anything is going to sound," she continued, throwing her hat on a sofa. "It's all improvisation with me. I never saw as awkward a man in my life—" Bradley looked at her with such a start that she hastened to exclaim: "Oh, not you, Mr. Bradley—the young man who walked home with us. I couldn't for the life of me get it out of my head that he wasn't on stilts." She sat down on the sofa. Bradley made bold to go over and sit down beside her, taking up her hat, looking about for some place to put it and ending by holding it on his knees, awkwardly pressing them together. He felt that Howard was laughing at him; he knew that Agnes was. But she didn't offer to take the hat. Florence, however, relieved him, and then everyone laughed except William. The preacher had been placed in an awkward position, though anyone might have made a grace of it—anyone but a man whom custom almost forces to adopt solemnity as a badge of office; and William gave Howard credit for it all. In certain humors he would have charged the young man with a rainy day, a frost or a cold wind. He looked at him in his reproachful way and cleared his throat.
"What is it now, Uncle William?" Howard asked.