In as far as he received an answer, it came one night when he waked from a light doze. He waked repeating certain words which he recognized as vaguely familiar:
"Thou therefore endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ."
He said them over two or three times before getting their significance.
"That's it," he thought then. "That's why we have to go through all this rumpus. 'Thou therefore endure hardness!' Endure it! Accept it! Rub it in! That's it, by gum!" The expletive was the strongest in which his feeble state allowed him to indulge; but he continued: "That's what's the matter with me. I'm not hard. I'm soft. I'm soft inside. In my mind, in my heart, I'm like putty, like dough. It isn't that I'm tender; I'm just soft. If I've ever had to bear anything hard, I've kicked like the dickens; and that's why I'm such an ass now. 'Thou therefore endure hardness!' I'll be hanged if I won't try."
So the trying came to be a kind of religion—not a very vital religion, or one as to which he was very keen, and yet a religion. During the winter he was seeing Jennie, and the spring he married her, and the summer he spent in South America, he had fumbled with it without getting hold of it. Not till he began his strivings with Teddy, and his efforts to divert the minds of Teddy's family, did it grow sharply defined to his vision as a way of life.
Perhaps it was Teddy who taught him. Perhaps they mutually taught each other. He couldn't tell. He only became aware that something was working in the boy like the might of spirit in the inner man. Possibly Teddy was learning more quickly than himself because his lessons were more intensive.
He noticed this first on the day when he went, at the lawyer's suggestion, to back up the argument that to plead guilty was the only hope.
"I've done all I can with him," Stenhouse declared. "Now it's up to you. He thinks you're God; and so you may have some influence."
"But I never will," Teddy answered, coolly. "I'd never have done society—as the chaplain calls it—any harm if society hadn't done me harm to begin with. I may be guilty in the second place, but society is guilty in the first, and no one will make me say anything different from that."
"That's all very well, Teddy; but society won't accept the plea."