That day Jonah sat in comfort beneath his shelter. The wind was in the west, full of agreeable odors; at noon a farmer brought him meal, salt, and oil; he ate, was refreshed, and dozed beneath his vine. The sun went down over the desert; and the evening star grew brighter in the sky, which shone with a peaceful light. The dews descended; and Jonah, wrapped in his cloak, dreamed of home. But in the morning worms had eaten the leaves of the vine; gorged and comfortable, they regarded Jonah from the ground with pious looks. As the day progressed, the sun beat down upon him without pity, a strong wind blew up from the east, out of the desert, and the prophet grew faint with misery. Too hot even to sweat, he nevertheless refused to move. “No,” he said, “I shall sit here.” An obstinate rage kept him out in the sun, although he half expected to die of it. “Well,” he said to himself, “what if I do?” It seemed to him that he had nothing more to live for. Then God said to Jonah, “Do you do well to be angry, My son?” Jonah did not wish to reply. But he was sure of one thing: that he had every right to be angry. “Why did You wither my vine, Lord?” he asked bitterly. “Was that also necessary?” God, looking down on His prophet, smiled sadly. “What is a vine?” He said gently. “Was it your vine, Jonah? You neither planted it nor cared for it. It came up in a night, and it perished in a night. And now you think I should have spared the vine for your sake. Yes ... but what of Nineveh, that great city, where there are so many people who cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand? Shall I not spare them, too, for My sake, Jonah?” Jonah rose wearily to his feet. “Well,” he said, “I may as well go home again.” And with bowed head he passed through the city, and out of the western gate. In the streets the citizens made way for him with pious murmurs and anxious looks, but Jonah did not notice them. All his courage was gone, his pride, his hope of glory, all gone down in the dust of God’s mercy to others, to all but him. To him alone God had been merciless and exacting. One by one the warm hopes of the youth, the ardors of the man, had been denied him; peace, love, pride, everything had been taken from him. What was there left? Only the desert, stony as life itself ... only the empty heart, the deliberate mind, the bare and patient spirit. Well, Jonah ... what a fool to think of anything else. Glory ... yes, but the glory is God’s, not yours. But he had not learned even that. He was not a good prophet. The flowers of his hope, the bitter blossoms of his grief, sprang up everywhere, where there should have been only waste brown earth. No, he was not a prophet; he was a man, like anybody else, whose love had been false, whose God had been unkind.... And as he trudged dejectedly along, his heart, bare now of pride, filled with loneliness and longing. He thought of Judith, of the happiness that would never be his; and he wept.