This last was Dale Bannister's frame of mind as he lay, idly and yet not peacefully, on his sofa next morning. This Doctor, with his unflinching logic and unrestrained zeal, was a nuisance. His devotion had not been sought, and certainly, if it entailed scenes like yesterday's, was not desired. Dale never asked him to ruin his practice, as Philip Hume said he was doing, in order to uphold Dale's principles; Dale did not want a starving family to his account, whose hungry looks should press him to a close questioning of his conscience. Any man with an ounce of common sense would understand that there was a time for everything, and a place. It was one thing to publish your views in a book, addressed to the world of thinkers and intelligent readers; it was quite another to brandish them in the face of your neighbors, and explode them, like shells, in the innocent streets of Denborough. And yet, because he recognized this obvious distinction, because he had some sense of what was suitable and reasonable, and because he refused to make enemies of people simply because they were well off, the Doctor stormed at him as if he were a traitor and a snob. And Philip Hume had taken to smiling in an aggravating way when the Grange was mentioned; and even Nellie---- But Dale, alert as he was in his present mood to discover matter of complaint, found none against Nellie, unless it might be some falling off in her old cheerfulness and buoyancy. Dale lit his pipe and set himself to consider with impartiality whether Roberts had in fact any grievance against him. He wanted to satisfy himself that there was no basis for the Doctor's indignation; his self-esteem demanded that the accusation should be disproved. But really it was too plain. What had he done? Refused to acquiesce in being made a fool of, refused to meet civility with incivility, to play the churl, to shut his eyes to intelligence and culture and attractiveness because they happened to be found among people who did not think as he did or as Roberts was pleased to think. He knew what those sneers meant, but he would go his own way. Things had come to a pretty pass if a man might not be civil and seek to avoid wholly unnecessary causes of offense without being treated as a renegade to all his convictions. That was not his idea of breadth of mind or toleration, or of good feeling either. It was simple bigotry, as narrow as--aye, narrower than--anything he at least had found on the other side.