Bradley managed to say, in a comparatively firm tone of voice, that he had heard of Miss Wilbur as a Grange lecturer, and that he would like to know more about her. "Well, I'll introduce you. She aint very easy to understand. She is one of these infernal advanced women. Now, I like thinkers, but what right has a woman to think? To think is our manly prerogative. I'm free to admit that we don't exercise it to much better advantage than we do our prerogative to vote; but then, damn it, how could we stand wives that think?" Bradley had given up trying to understand when Cargill was joking and when he was in earnest. He knew this was either merciless sarcasm or the most pig-headed bigotry. Anyhow he did not care to say anything for fear of drawing him off into a discussion of an impersonal subject, just when he seemed likely to tell something about Ida's early life. It was a singular place to receive this information. He sat there with his elbow on the desk, leaning his head on his palm, studying Cargill's face as he talked. Over at the other end of the room, the operator was feeding himself on a pickle with his left hand, and receiving the telegrams from the far-off, roaring, tumultuous wheat exchange, every repeated message being a sort of distant echo of the ocean of cries and the tumult of feet in the city. They were as much alone and talking in private as if they were in Cargill's own room at the hotel. Cargill talked on, unmindful of the telephone, the telegraphic ticking, and the brisk, business-like action of his partner. "Yes, I have known her ever since she was a girl. Her father was a queer old seed of a farmer, just out of town here, cranky on religion--a Universalist, I believe. Had the largest library of his town; I don't know but the largest private library outside of a city in the State. His house was literally walled with books. How he got 'em I don't know. It was currently believed that he was full of information, but I never heard of any one who was able to get very much out of him. His wife had been a beauty; that was her dowry to her daughter. "The girl went to school here at sixteen. I was a student then, six or seven years older than she, and I remember there were about six of us who used to stand around the schoolhouse door to carry her books for her; but she just walked past us all without a turn of the head. She didn't seem to know what ailed us. She was one of these girls born all brains, some way. I never saw her face flushed in my life, and her big eyes always made me shiver when she turned them on me." "Wheat falls to ninety-three and a fourth. There is a break in the market. New York is still hammering," called the operator, his mouth full of pie. Cargill was distinctly talking to himself, almost as much as to Bradley. The hardness had gone out of his eyes, and his voice had a touch of unconscious sadness in it. "Does Miss Wilbur live here?" Bradley asked, to start him off again.