FROM THE LIFE
office-boy for Judge Stephen Wales, and the judge in the end had practically adopted him. (Hence the "Wales" in "Thomas Wales Warren.") He sent Warren to law-school. He took him as a partner in his office. He even accepted him as a son-in-law, proud of the boy and his ability. And when the judge died Warren and his wife were already living in the old Wales home as the accepted heirs of it.
This was Judge Wales's library in which Warren now sat, thinking. It was Judge Wales's granddaughter Meta of whom he was sitting there to think. And she was much more the judge's granddaughter to Warren than she was his own child. She looked like a Wales. She spoke and moved like a Wales. She had all the high, impractical ideals of a Wales. And Warren felt, before her, the same class inferiority that he had felt with her dead mother.
He had always been, in his own mind, Tommy the office-boy to the judge's daughter; and still, subconsciously, with the judge's granddaughter, he was Tommy the office-boy grown old. It was some sort of arrested immaturity in him—like his playing with the button. Neither the mother nor the daughter had ever suspected it. They had never suspected, when they looked at Tom Warren, that they were not looking at a husband or a father, but at a devoted, adoring, confidential servant, who understood them affectionately and protected
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