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 be the great disturbing factors in politics. The protective theory will go down: it is based on a privilege; and the new war, like the old war, is going to be against all kinds of special privileges." It was with a peculiar feeling of pain and relief that he read Miss Wilbur's renunciation of her home-market idea. It seemed as if something sweet and fine had gone with it; and yet it strengthened him, for he had come to believe that a home-market built up by legislation was unnatural and a mistake. Judge Brown's constant hammerings had left a mark. He wrote to her something of his hesitation, and she replied substantially that there was no abandonment of the home-market idea; only the method of bringing it about had changed. She had come to believe in what was free and natural, not what was artificial and forced.