e kept saying. "I wish
you was to home. When are you coming back?"

It was very curious to see the different way in which he came to the
writing of letters to these two persons.

"Dear Nettie," he would begin, with a scowling brow, "I _can't_ write
any oftener, because in the first place I'm too busy, and in the second
place nothing happened here that you would care to hear about. I don't
know when I'll be home. I ought to finish my course here. No, I don't
expect you to mope. I expect you to have a good time, go to parties and
dances all you want to."

But when Miss Wilbur's letters arrived, he devoured them with tremulous
eagerness, and sat up half the night writing an elaborate answer, while
Nettie's letters lay unanswered for days.

"Miss Ida Wilbur, Dear Miss." (That was the way he addressed her. He
was afraid to call her Dear Miss Wilbur, it seemed a little too
familiar.) In the body of his letters there was no expressed word of
his regard for her. It was only put indirectly into the length of his
letters, and was shown in the eager promptness of his reply. She wrote
kindly, scholarly replies, giving him a great deal to think about. Her
letters were very far apart, however, as she was moving about so much.
She advised him to read the modern books.

"I'm always on the wrong side of everything," she wrote once, "so I'm
on the side of the modern novel. I champion Mr. Howells. Are you
reading his story in the _Century_? I like it because it isn't like
anybody else; and Mr. Cable, too, you should read, and Henry James and
Miss Jewett; they're all of this modern school, that most Western
people know nothing about. The West is so afraid of its own judgments.
My friends go about praising the classics because they know it's safe
to do so, I suppose, while I am an image breaker to them. Mr. Howells
says the idea of progress in art does not admit of the conception that
any art is finished. Just like the question of social advance, there is
always new work to be done and new victories to be won."

But more often she wrote upon economic subjects, as being more
impersonal; and then her wish to make Bradley a reformer was greater
than her desire to make him a lover of modern art.

"The spirit of reform is beginning to move over the face of the great
deep," she wrote at another time. "No one who travels about as I do,
can fail to see it. The labor question in the cities, and the farmer
question in the country, will soon b