“I love it, yes! And I hate it!”
“Yet Westbury has loved you and taken you in, as it once took me, also a stranger.”
“It has never taken me in! Has Mrs. Hollister ever taken me in?”
“Newbold, may I ask,” the Bishop sought to be patient with a resentful child, “whether Mrs. Hollister has ever shown you the slightest incivility?”
“Never!” Newbold pressed his lips together in a curious grim smile. He studied the paper-knife in his hands intently, “Oh, no, I should not find fault with Westbury. It has given me what I wanted when I came here as a boy, to be rector of St. John’s. I did not perceive then the price a man pays to be rector of—a St. John’s.”
“What price?”
“The price of his freedom! There’s no way to please the congregation of St. John’s, except to please them! I’ve learned the trick of that! Ah, commend me to the clergy as latter-day courtiers!” It was sentences such as these, applied in the chancel to his congregation, not to himself, that his people so enjoyed in his sermons, feeling him at one with them in a comfortable, workaday cynicism. Newbold’s words were pressed through closed teeth as he concluded, “But I despise my people!”
“Your people of the Southside, too?”
“They! Oh, no! Poor wretches! They are honest! I understand them! But it is the strain of trying to understand St. John’s that is killing me!” his hand went impatiently to his head.
Serene and low the Bishop’s words, “Then why not go to your people of the Southside?”