"Can I tub anywhere?" was his next question after he had finished shaving.
"Yes; this bath closet here is at your disposal." He opened a door into a small adjoining hall-room. Champney took the clothes and went in. While he was bathing, Father Honoré used the room telephone to order in a substantial evening meal. After the noise of the splashing ceased, he heard a half-suppressed groan. He listened intently, but there was no further sound, not even of the details of dressing.
A half-hour passed. He had taken in the tray, and was becoming anxious, when the door opened and Champney came in, clean, clothed, but with a look in his eyes that gave the priest all the greater cause for anxiety because, up to that time, the man had volunteered no information concerning himself; he had received what the priest said passively, without demonstration of any kind. There had been as yet no spiritual vent for the over-strained mind, the over-charged soul. The priest knew this danger and what it portended.
He ate the food that was placed before him listlessly. Suddenly he pushed the plate away from him across the table at which he was sitting. "I can't eat; it nauseates me," he said; then, leaning his folded arms on the edge, he dropped his head upon them groaning heavily in an agony of despair, shame, remorse: "God! What's the use—what's the use! There's nothing left—nothing left."
Father Honoré knew that the crucial hour was striking, and his prayer for help was the wordless outreaching of every atom of his consciousness for that One more powerful than weak humanity, to guide, to aid him.
"Your manhood is left." He spoke sternly, with authority. This was no time for pleading, for sympathy, for persuasion.
"My manhood!" The bitterest self-contempt was voiced in those two words. He raised his head, and the look he gave to the man opposite bordered on the inimical.
"Yes, your manhood. Do you, in your supreme egotism, suppose that you, Champney Googe, are the only man in this world who has sinned, suffered, gone under for a time? Are you going to lie down in the ditch like a craven, simply because you have failed to withstand the first assaults of the devil that is in you? Do you think, because you have sinned, there is no longer a place for you and your work in this world where all men are sinners at some time in their lives? I tell you, Champney Googe,—and mark well what I say,—your sin, as sin, is not so despicable as your attitude towards your own life. Why, man, you're alive—"
"Yes, alive—thanks to you; but knocked out after the first round," he muttered. The priest noted, however, that he still held his head erect. He took fresh courage.
"And what would you say of a man who, because he has been knocked out in the first round, does not dare to enter the ring again? So far as I've seen anything of life, it is a man's duty to get on his feet as quickly as he can—square away and at it again."