Sam Tilghman burst out laughing. “Well, Clara,” he said, “we’ll put you up for nomination next time. If we only had you now in the place of poor old Herod, you’d make things hum, and no mistake, and you’d be ever so much more proper.”
Gilderman listened to the silly, vapid words as though they were removed from him. He was thinking about the Man himself. How very interesting it would be if he could really see Him and hear Him speak. If he chose to go to see Him he might perhaps behold one of those miraculous cures, and could know for himself whether they were real or whether they were false.
“Hullo, Henry!” said Tom De Witt, suddenly. “Here’s an editorial about that blind man you were telling us about the other day–that fellow they turned out of the Church.”
“What does it say?” said Gilderman.
De Witt did not offer the paper to Gilderman. He ran his eye down the editorial. “It doesn’t seem to be very complimentary to the bishop,” he said. “The editor fellow seems to think it was no fault of the fellow’s own that he was cured, and that they oughtn’t to have turned him out of the Church just because he got his eyesight back again.”
“That wasn’t the reason,” said Gilderman.
“It’s a deuced pretty state of affairs, anyhow,” said Tilghman, “if the bishop isn’t fit to decide who’s fit to belong to the Church and who’s not fit. If the bishop isn’t able to decide, who is able to decide? Ain’t that so, Gildy?”
“I don’t know,” said Gilderman.
They were coming nearer and nearer to Brookfield. The scattered frame houses, some of them pretentiously villa-like, grew more and more frequent. Here and there were newly projected streets sliced out across the fields.