So Nicholas’s first fight for his manhood was fought and won.  He went back to his books—­went back because his intellect ordained it, and the ordinance of intellect is fate—­but bitterness had gone out of him, and he had come into his own.  From the stress of the last year he had found security in acceptance.  His life might not be such as he had planned it—­whose was?—­his work might not be the thing he wanted—­again, whose was?—­but life and work were with him, and it remained for him to make the best of them.  Fate might make him a shopkeeper; he would see to it that it made him a successful one.  Success read backwards spelt work, and work was his inheritance—­a heritage of sweat and labour.

He went to Jerry Pollard’s an hour earlier that he might rearrange to advantage the shelves.  His employer had secured, below cost, a supply of dry goods, and preparations were in the making for the first summer sale in Kingsborough.  Nicholas conducted the arrangements as conscientiously as he might have conducted a legal argument.  It was the thing before him, and it must not fail.

But at night he found his greater hour.  When supper was over and he had helped his father with the odd jobs of the farm, he would take the smoky kerosene lamp to his room and plunge into the pages of “The Federalist.”  From his sharp, retentive memory nothing passed.  He held his knowledge with the same vital grip with which he held his friends.

He had the judge’s library now and the judge’s assistance.  Evening after evening he sat in the dim, ghost-hallowed room, the shining calf-bound volumes girdling the walls, and absorbed the judge as the judge, in his own time, had absorbed the men who were gone.  From that rich storehouse of high principles and simple deeds Nicholas’s future was drawing nourishment.  Judge Bassett had lived his life in a village, but he had lived it among statesmen.  His book-shelves were green with their inspiration, his memory fresh from their impress.  In his youth he himself had been one of the hopes of his State; in his age he was one of her consolations.

He treated the younger man with that quaint courtliness which knew not affectation.  When he talked to him, as he often did, of the great legal minds, it was always with the courtesy of their titles.  He spoke of “Mr. Chancellor Kent,” of “Mr. Justice Blackstone,” as he spoke of “President Davis” or of “General Lee.”  To have alluded to them more familiarly he would have held to be a breach of etiquette of unpardonable grossness.

One day he had started in Nicholas his old political dreams of Jeffersonian lustre.

“Virginia is not dead but sleepeth,” the judge had said, as a prelude to denunciation of the Readjuster party then in power.

Nicholas was looking at a collection of autograph letters that lay on the judge’s desk.  He glanced up with an impulsive start.

“Oh, but I should like to have lived then!” he exclaimed.