With his tendency to think things out, he mulled for the next few days over the question of inferiority. Why was one man inferior to another? What made him so? Did nature send him into the world as an inferior, or did the world turn him into an inferior after he had come into it? Did God have any part in it? Was it God's will that there should be a class system among mankind, with class animosities, class warfares?
Of the latter he was hearing a good deal. In Grove Street, with its squirming litters of idealistic Jews and Slavs, class warfare was much talked about. Sometimes Tom heard the talk himself; sometimes Honey brought in reports of it. It was a rare day, especially a rare night, when some wild-eyed apostle was not going up or down the hill with a gospel which would have made old Boston, only a few hundred yards away, shiver in its bed on hearing it. To a sturdy American like Tom, and a sturdy Englishman like Honey, these whispered prophecies and plans were no more than the twitter of sparrows going to roost. But now that the boy was working toward man's estate, and had always, within his recollection, been treated as an inferior, he found himself wondering on what principle the treatment had been based. He would listen more attentively when the Jew tailor next door to Mrs. Danker began again, as he had so often, to set forth his arguments in favor of dragging the upper classes down. He would listen when Honey cursed the lor of proputty. He had long been asking himself if in some obscure depth of Honey's obscure intelligence there might not be a glimmer of a great big thing that was Right.
He had reached the age, which generally comes a little before the twenties, when the Right and Wrong of things puzzled and disturbed him. No longer able to accept Rights and Wrongs on somebody else's verdict, he was without a test or a standard of his own. He began to wander among churches. Here, he had heard, all these questions had been long ago threshed out, and the answers reduced to formulæ.
His range was wide, Hebrew, Catholic, Protestant. For the most part the services bewildered him. He couldn't make out why they were services, or what they were serving. The sermons he found platitudinous. They told him what in the main he knew already, and said little or nothing of the great fundamental things with which his mind had been intermittently busy ever since the days when he used to talk them over with Bertie Tollivant.
But one new interest he drew from them. The fragments of the gospels he heard read from altar or lectern or pulpit roused his curiosity. Passages were familiar from having learned them at the knee, so to speak, of Mrs. Tollivant. But they had been incoherent, without introduction or sequence. He was surprised to find how little he knew of the most dominant character in history.
On his way home one day he passed a shop given to the sale of Bibles. Deciding to buy a cheap New Testament, he was advised by the salesman to take a modern translation. That night, after he had finished his lessons, and Honey was asleep, he opened it.
It opened at a page of St. Luke. Turning to the beginning of that gospel, he started to read it through. He read avidly, charmed, amazed, appeased, and pacified. When he came to an incident bearing on himself he stopped.
"Now one of the Pharisees repeatedly invited Him to a meal at his house. So He entered the house and reclined at the table. And there was a woman in the town who was a notorious sinner. Having learnt that Jesus was at table in the Pharisee's house she brought a flask of perfume, and standing behind, close to His feet, weeping, began to wet His feet with her tears; and with her hair she wiped the tears away again, while she lovingly kissed His feet, and poured the perfume over them.
"Noticing this the Pharisee, His host, said to himself: