The professor supplied it, and ruthlessly.
"Mental carpet slippers. Precisely. And I could give him boots and spurs."
"Why don't you do it, then?" Opdyke asked him bluntly.
In the interest of the subject, the old professor forgot that he was talking to one of his students and about another.
"Because he's got the very devil of a conscience, and won't let me. There is a widowed mother in the background, and a perfect retinue of preaching ancestors, whole dozens of them and all Baptists, and they have conspired to poison the boy's mind with the notion that it's up to him to preach, too. It would be all right, if he had anything to say; but he hasn't. He's tongue-tied and unmagnetic at the best; what's more, he has learned too many things to let him flaunt abroad the old beliefs as battle standards. He's gone too far, and not far enough. His life is bound to be a miserable sort of compromise, a species of battledore and shuttlecock arrangement between the limits of the deep sea and the devil." And then the professor pulled himself up short. "Know him?" he queried curtly, as he lit his match.
Opdyke nodded.
"As one does know people one never meets out anywhere," he said.
"What do you mean by that?" The question was still curt.
"He waits at my joint."
"Of course. And?"