"Did it ever seem strange to you that good people have so much trouble in this world?" said Courtland, voicing his same old doubting thought.
"Well, now why? What's trouble going to be in the resurrection? We won't mind then what we passed through, and this world isn't forever, thank the Lord! If it's serving His plan any for me to get more than what seems my share of trouble, why, I'm willing. Aren't you? The trouble is we can't see the plan, and so we go fretting because it doesn't fit our ideas. If it was our plan now we'd patiently bear everything, I suppose, to make it come out right. We aren't up high enough to get the whole view of the finished plan, so of course lots of things look like mistakes. But if we trust Him at all, we know they aren't. And some time, I suppose, we'll see the whole and then we'll understand why it was. But I never was one to do much fretting because I didn't understand. I always know what my job is, and that's enough. I'm content to trust the rest to God. It's a God-size job to run the universe, and I know I'm not equal to it."
Her simple logic calmed his restless thoughts, but there was still a strange wistfulness in his heart about Bonnie. She looked so white and resigned and sad! He wished she hadn't gone quite so far out of his life.
Meantime, out in the darkness of the night Bonnie's train whirled along, and some time during the long hours between midnight and dawning it passed in a rush and a thunder of sound the express that was bearing back to Courtland another menace to his peace of mind.
CHAPTER XXII
Uncle Ramsey was large and imposing, with an effulgent complexion and a prosperous presence. He wore a double-jeweled ring on his apoplectic finger, and a scarab scarf-pin. His eyes were keen and shifty; his teeth had acquired the habit of clutching his fat black cigar viciously while he snarled his rather loose lips about them in conversation. Uncle Ramsay never looked one in the face when he was talking. He looked off into space, where he appeared to have the topic under discussion in visible form before him. He never took up with the conversation his host offered. He furnished the topics himself and pinned one down to them. It really was of no use whatever to start any subject unless it had been previously announced, because it never got further than the initiative. Uncle Ramsey always went on with whatever he had in mind. Tennelly knew this tendency, realized that in writing the letter he had taken the only possible way of bringing Courtland to his uncle's notice.
After an exceedingly good dinner at the frat. house, where Tennelly did not usually dine, and being further reinforced by one of the aforesaid fat black cigars, Uncle Ramsey leaned back in Tennelly's leather chair, and began:
"Now, Thomas!"
Tennelly stirred uneasily. He despised that "Thomas." His full name was Llewellyn Thomas Tennelly. At home they called him "Lew." Nobody but Uncle Ramsey ever dared the hateful Thomas. He liked to air the fact that his nephew was named after himself, the great Ramsey Thomas.