"Now, see here, Brady, it's all damned tommyrot," he was saying,—and he had said something of the kind several times before in the course of their earnest conversation. "There's just one course open to you, and that's the right one. You've got to come back to New York and look people in the eye and tell 'em to go to Gehenna if they don't like what you're doing. You can't go on living like this, no matter how much you love it now. You're not cut out for this sort of thing. Lordy, if I was as big and brutal looking as you are at this minute I'd stand up for myself against—" "But you will not understand," repeated Thorpe doggedly. "If my attainments, as you call them, are to be of no value to me in helping mankind, what is there left for me to do but this? Didn't I have enough of it in those horrible two months down there to prove to me that they hate me? They—" "You weren't so thin skinned as all this when you were writing those inspired articles of yours, were you? Confound you, Brady, you invited all of this, you brought it down upon your head with all that nonsense about—why, it was you who converted old Templeton Thorpe and here you are running away like a 'white-head.' Haven't you any back-bone?" "That's all very well, Simmy, but of what value is a back-bone in a case like mine? If I had ten back-bones I couldn't compel people to come to me for treatment or advice. They are afraid of me. I am a doctor, a surgeon, a friend to all men. But if they will not believe that I am their friend, how can I be of service to them?" "You'll get patients, and plenty of 'em too, if you'll just hang on and wait. They'll come to know that you wouldn't kill a cockroach if you could help it. You'll—what's the matter?" He broke off suddenly with this sharp question. A marked pallor had come over Thorpe's sunburnt face. "Nothing—nothing at all," muttered the other. "The heat up there in the woods—" "You must look out for that, old boy," said Simmy anxiously. "Go slow. You're only a city feller, as they'd say up here. What a God-forsaken place it is! Not more than two hundred miles from Boston and yet I was a whole day getting here." "It is peaceful, Simmy," said Thorpe. "I grant you that, by Jove. A fellow could walk in the middle of the street here for a solid year without being hit by an automobile. But as I was saying, you can make a place for yourself—" "I should starve, old fellow. You forget that I am a poor man." "Rats! You've got twenty-five thousand dollars a year, if you'll only be sensible. There isn't another man in the United States who would be as finicky about it as you are, no matter how full of ideals and principles he may be stuffed."