Newbold’s answer was as direct to the soul as the Bishop’s question, “I don’t know!” Then sharp and querulous, “How could I? How can I?”
The kindled hope on the Bishop’s face died like a quenched flame. In its stead slowly there grew in his eyes their great and brooding pity. “Lad, you’re tired to the depths this morning, and I am fretting you with the thought of new responsibilities. Forgive me. I hope that in eighty-one years I’ve learned to listen. Suppose you do the talking now. What are some of the bothers back of this headache?”
“My head is the chief bother, back of all bothers! It won’t let me go on and I can’t stop!” Newbold sprang up and then reseated himself at his desk, sweeping a fret of papers aside so that some fell on the floor, then taking up a flexible paper cutter that he kept snapping in his hands while he swung the revolving chair slowly from side to side. “The truth is, I’ve been going down hill ever since I came here eight years ago. The air of Westbury is knocking me to pieces.”
“Yet it agreed with you during your other stay here, twenty odd years ago.”
“I was a boy then; I had a different body.”
“And perhaps,” mused the Bishop, “a different soul.”
“Oh, that!” cried Newbold with a shrug, then, “Do you suppose if I’d had my health, I’d ever have let the vestry bully me into giving up the Southside Mission!”
“Yet I used to think sometimes that opposition was the breath of life to you. I wonder,” a flicker of whimsical humor in the blue eyes, “if perhaps it would still be the breath of life to you,—if you tried it!”
“Can I fight a spirit in the air? Can I fight, of all things, mere amusement at enthusiasm? Can I fight the impenetrable self-satisfaction of Westbury?”
“Yet I thought you were one who loved Westbury!”