"Last May I saw nothing as bad as this to-day. You haven't been playing it on me, I hope? Jim, have you got any grudge against me?"
"What should I have? You're deucedly suspicious and sensitive—far more so than I was with you. I believe I let you play on me to your heart's content, and never complained—did I?"
"Jim, I don't like this. There's a change in you: Hodge said so, and I didn't believe him. You're not the same man."
"O, we all change—from year to year, and from day to day. But I ought never to have left these woods, Bob, and that's the truth. You should have let me stay here as I was."
"I meant it in all kindness, for your good, Jim. Surely you'll do me the justice to acknowledge that."
"No doubt. But your philanthropic experiments are apt to be damnably expensive to the patient."
"You couldn't be much worse than you were, according to your own account. Any change ought to have been for the better."
"That was your assumption. Do I strike you as being changed for the better?"
"Well, no, you don't—not to put too fine a point upon it."
He certainly does not. His whole manner is altered. His former gentleness has given way to rough harshness. You have seen how he treats me. It may be his best, as he says; if so, his best is far from good. His bitterness used to be, if I may say so, in the abstract, and leveled against abstractions; now it seems to have a painfully concrete character and aim. His estrangement from the scheme of things, or from his kind at least, was purely intellectual, leaving his heart no more affected than the heart usually is by brain-disorders; now it is moral. He is like a man tormented by remorse, or regrets as savage. But I think I know a cure for his complaint.