No, he did not blame Sophie Carr for refusing to allow her judgment to

be fogged with sentiment. He only marvelled that she could do it where

he had failed. He could not blame her--not if his speech and activities

since he came to Lone Moose were the measure of his possible

achievement.

He was taking grim, unsparing stock of himself, of what he had, of what

he had accomplished altogether, by this time. It was not much. It was

not even promising. A theological education, which, compared to the sort

of culture Sam Carr and his daughter had managed to acquire, seemed

rather inadequate and one-sided. They knew more about the principles he

was supposed to teach than he knew himself. And their knowledge extended

to fields where he could not follow. When he compared himself with Tommy

Ashe--well, Tommy was an Oxford man, and although Oxford had not

indelibly stamped him, still it had left its mark.

These people had covered all his ground--and they had gone exploring

further in fields of general knowledge while he sat gazing smugly at

his own reflection in a theological mirror. Upon that score certainly

the count was badly against him.

As for his worldly possessions, when Mr. Thompson sardonically

considered them as a means of supporting a wife he was forced to admit

that the provision would be intolerably meager. His prospects included a

salary that barely sufficed for one. It was apparent, he concluded, that

the Board of Home Missions, like the Army and Navy, calculated its rank

and file to remain in single blessedness and subsist frugally to boot.

As to his late accomplishments in the field of labor, Mr. Thompson

looked out of his cabin door to where he could see dimly through the

trees the uncompleted bulk of his church--and he set down a mental

cipher against that account. It was waste effort. He felt in his heart

that he would never finish it. What was the use?

He tried to whip up the old sense of duty to his calling, to the Church,

to the great good which he had been taught he should accomplish. And he

could muster up nothing but an irritating sense of hollow wordiness in

many of his former dictums and utterances, a vast futility of effort.

Whereupon he at once found himself face to face with a fresh problem, in

which the question of squaring his material needs and queer half-formed

desires with his actions loomed paramount. In other words Mr. Thompson

began, in a fashion scarcely apprehended, upon the painful process of

formulating a philosophy of life that would apply to life as it was

forcing itself upon his consciousness--not as he had hitherto conceived

life to be.

But he was unable to pin himself down to any definite plan. He could not

evolve a clear idea of what to do, nor even of what he wanted to do. And

in the interim he did little save sit about his cabin, deep in

introspection, chop firewood as needed and cook his plain fare--that was

gradually growing plainer, more restricted. Sometimes he varied this by

long solitary tramps through the woods along the brushy bank of Lone

Moose Creek.




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