The kindled hope on the Bishop’s face died like a quenched flame. In its stead slowly there grew in his eyes their great and brooding pity. “Lad, you’re tired to the depths this morning, and I am fretting you with the thought of new responsibilities. Forgive me. I hope that in eighty-one years I’ve learned to listen. Suppose you do the talking now. What are some of the bothers back of this headache?” “My head is the chief bother, back of all bothers! It won’t let me go on and I can’t stop!” Newbold sprang up and then reseated himself at his desk, sweeping a fret of papers aside so that some fell on the floor, then taking up a flexible paper cutter that he kept snapping in his hands while he swung the revolving chair slowly from side to side. “The truth is, I’ve been going down hill ever since I came here eight years ago. The air of Westbury is knocking me to pieces.” “Yet it agreed with you during your other stay here, twenty odd years ago.” “I was a boy then; I had a different body.” “And perhaps,” mused the Bishop, “a different soul.” “Oh, that!” cried Newbold with a shrug, then, “Do you suppose if I’d had my health, I’d ever have let the vestry bully me into giving up the Southside Mission!” “Yet I used to think sometimes that opposition was the breath of life to you. I wonder,” a flicker of whimsical humor in the blue eyes, “if perhaps it would still be the breath of life to you,--if you tried it!” “Can I fight a spirit in the air? Can I fight, of all things, mere amusement at enthusiasm? Can I fight the impenetrable self-satisfaction of Westbury?” “Yet I thought you were one who loved Westbury!” “I love it, yes! And I hate it!” “Yet Westbury has loved you and taken you in, as it once took me, also a stranger.” “It has never taken me in! Has Mrs. Hollister ever taken me in?” “Newbold, may I ask,” the Bishop sought to be patient with a resentful child, “whether Mrs. Hollister has ever shown you the slightest incivility?” “Never!” Newbold pressed his lips together in a curious grim smile. He studied the paper-knife in his hands intently, “Oh, no, I should not find fault with Westbury. It has given me what I wanted when I came here as a boy, to be rector of St. John’s. I did not perceive then the price a man pays to be rector of--a St. John’s.” “What price?” “The price of his freedom! There’s no way to please the congregation of St. John’s, except to _please_ them! I’ve learned the trick of that! Ah, commend me to the clergy as latter-day courtiers!” It was sentences such as these, applied in the chancel to his congregation, not to himself, that his people so enjoyed in his sermons, feeling him at one with them in a comfortable, workaday cynicism. Newbold’s words were pressed through closed teeth as he concluded, “But I despise my people!” “Your people of the Southside, too?”