Bradley meets Mrs. Brown.

Though Bradley had called a good many times at the Russell house, to accompany Nettie to parties or home from school, yet he had never had any conversation to speak of with Russell, who was a large and somewhat pompous man. He knew his place, as a Western father, and never interfered with his daughter's love affairs. He knew Bradley as a likely and creditable young fellow, and besides, his experience with his two older daughters had taught him the perfect uselessness of trying to marry them to suit himself or his wife.

He was annoyed at this attack of Bradley upon him and his brother, the treasurer. It was really carrying things too far. Accustomed to all sorts of epithets and charges on the part of opposing candidates, he ought not to have been so sensitive to Bradley's charge, but the case was peculiar. It was exactly true, in the first place, and then it came from a young man whom his daughter had brought into the family, and whom he had begun to think of as a probable son-in-law.

On Tuesday morning, just as Bradley was tumbling his dishes into a pan of hot water ("their weekly bath," Milton called it), there came a sharp knock on the door, and a girl's voice called out clearly:

"Hello, Brad! Can I come in?"

"Yes, come in."

Nettie came in, her cheeks radiant with color, her eyes shining. "Oh, washing your dishes? Wait a minute, I'll help." She flung off her coat in a helter-skelter way, and rolled up her sleeves.

Bradley expostulated: "No, no! Don't do that! I'll have 'em done in a jiffy. They aint but a few."

"I'll wipe 'em, anyway," she replied. "Oh, fun! What a towel!" she held up the side of a flour-sack, on which was a firm-name in brown letters. She laughed in high glee. There was a delicious suggestion in the fact that she was standing by his side helping him in his household affairs. Bradley was embarrassed, but she chattered away, oblivious of space and time. Her regard for him had grown absolutely outspoken and without shame. There was something primitive and savage in her frank confession of her feelings. She had come to make all the advances herself, in a confidence that was at once beautiful and pathetic. She met him in the morning on the way to school, and clung to him at night, and made him walk home with her. She came afternoons with a team, to take him out driving. The presence of the whole town really made no difference to her. She took his arm just the same, proud and happy that he permitted it.

"Oh, say," she broke off suddenly, "pa wants to see you about something. He wanted me to tell you to come down to-night." She was dusting the floor at the moment, while he was moving the furniture. "I wonder what he wants?" she asked.

"I don't know," he replied, evasively.

"Something about politics, I suppose." She came over and stood beside him in silence. She was very girlish, in spite of her assumption of a young lady's dress and airs, and she loved him devouringly. She stood so close to him that she could put her hand on his, as it lay on the table. Her clear, sweet eyes gazed at him with the confidence and purity of a child.

It was a relief to Bradley to hear the last bell ring. She withdrew her hand and threw down the broom which she had been holding in her left hand. "Oh, that's the last bell. Help me on with my cloak, quick!" He put her cloak on for her. She stamped her foot impatiently. "Pull my hair outside!"

He took her luxuriant hair in both his hands, and pulled it outside the cloak, and fitted the collar about her neck. She caught both his hands in hers, and looking up, laughed gleefully.

"You dassent kiss me now!"

He stooped and kissed her cheek, and blushed with shame. On the way up the walk to the chapel, he suffered an agony of remorse. He felt dimly that he had done his ideal an irreparable wrong. Nettie talked on, not minding his silence, looking up into his face in innocent glee, planning some new party or moonlit drive.

All that morning he was too deep in thought to give attention to his classes, and at noon he avoided Nettie, and went home to think, but try as he might, something prevented him from getting hold of the real facts in the case.

He was fond of Nettie. She stood near him, an embodied passion. His love for Miss Wilbur, which he had no idea of calling love, was a vague and massive feeling of adoration, entirely disassociated from the flesh. She stood for him as the embodiment of a world of longings and aspirations undeveloped and undefined.

One thought was clear. He ought not to allow—that is the way it took shape in his mind—he ought not to allow Nettie to be seen with him so much, unless he intended to marry her, and he had never thought of her as a possible wife.

He didn't know how to meet Russell, so put off going down to his house, as he had promised. He excused himself by saying he was busy moving, anyway. He had determined upon taking a boarding-place somewhere in correspondence with his change of fortunes and when he had spoken of it, the Judge had said:

"Why not come up to my house? Mrs. Brown and I get kind of lonesome sometimes, and then I hate to milk, an' curry horses, an' split kindlings, always did. Come up and try living with us."

Bradley had accepted the offer with the greatest delight. It meant a great deal to him. It took him out of a cellar and put him into one of the finest houses in town—albeit it was a cold and gloomy house. It was large, and white, and square, with sharp gables, and its blinds were always closed. He went up to dinner that day with the judge, to meet Mrs. Brown, whom he had never seen; nobody saw her, for she was a "perfect recluse."

She looked at her husband through her glasses in a calm surprise, as he introduced Bradley, and stated he had invited him to dinner.

"Well, Mr. Brown, if you will do such things, you must expect your company to take every-day fare."

"Maybe our every-day fare, Mrs. Brown, will be Sunday fare for this young man."

They sat down at the table, which Mrs. Brown waited upon herself, rising from her place for the tea or the biscuits. She said very little thereafter, but Bradley caught the gleam of her glasses fixed upon him several times. She had a beautiful mouth, but the line of her lips seemed to indicate sadness and a determined silence.

"Mrs. Brown, I wish you'd take care of this young man for a few weeks. He's my clerk, and I—ahem!—I—suppose he's going to milk the cow and split the kindlings for me, to pay for his board in that useful way." She looked at him again in silence, and the line of her lips got a little straighter, as she waited for the Judge to go on.

"This young man is going to study law with me, and I hope to make a great man of him, Mrs. Brown."

"Mr. Brown, I wish you'd consult with me once in a while," she said without anger.

"Mrs. Brown, it was a case of necessity. I was on the point of giving up the milking of that cow, and my back got a crick in it every time I split the kindlings. I consider I've done you a benefit and myself a favor, Mrs. Brown."

She turned her glasses upon Bradley again, and studied him in silence. She was a very dignified woman of fifty. Her hair was like wavy masses of molasses candy, and her brow cold and placid. Her eyes could not be seen, but her mouth and chin were almost girlish in their beauty.

The Judge felt that he had done a hazardous thing. He took a new tone, his reminiscent tone. "Mrs. Brown, do you remember the first time you saw me? Well, I was 'pirating' through Oberlin—(chopping wood, you remember we didn't saw it in those days) and living in a cellar, just like this young man. He's been cookin' his own grub, just as I did then, because he hasn't any money to pay for board. Now I think we ought to give him a lift. Don't you think so, Mrs. Brown?"

Her mouth relaxed a little. The glasses turned upon Bradley again, and looked upon him so steadily that he was able to see her gray eyes.

"Mr. Brown is always doing things without consulting me," she explained to Bradley, "but you are welcome, sir, if our lonesome house aint worse than your cellar. Mr. Brown very seldom takes the trouble to explain what he wants to do, but I'll try to make you feel at home, sir."

They ate the rest of the meal in silence. The Judge was evidently thinking over old times, and it would be very difficult to say what his wife was thinking of. At last he rose saying:

"Now if you'll come out, I'll show you the well and the cow." As he went by his wife's chair, he stopped a moment, and said gently, "He'll do us two lonely old fossils good, Elizabeth." His hand lay on her shoulder an instant as he passed, and when Bradley went out of the room, he saw her wiping her eyes upon her handkerchief, her glasses in her hand.

The Judge coughed a little. "We never had but one child—a boy. He was killed while out hunting"—he broke off quickly. "Now here's the meal for the cow. I give her about a panful twice a day—when I don't forget it."

Somehow, Mrs. Brown didn't seem so hard when he met her again at supper. The line of her mouth was softer. In his room he found many little touches of her motherly hand—a clean, sweet bed, and little hand-made things upon the wall, that made him think of his own mother, who had been dead since his sixteenth year. He had never had such a room as this. It appeared to him as something very fine. Its frigid atmosphere and lack of grace and charm did not appear to his eyes. It was nothing short of princely after his cellar.

His knowledge of the inner life of the common Western homes made him feel that this rigid coldness between the Judge and his wife was only their way. The touch of the Judge's hand on her shoulder meant more than a thousand worn phrases spoken every day. Under that silence and reserve there was a deep of tenderness and wistful longing which they could not utter, and dared not acknowledge, even to themselves. Their lonely house had grown intolerable, and Bradley came into it bringing youth and sunlight.