"
Valmore stumbled and half fell in the darkness at a street crossing.
Telfer went on talking.
"The world will some day grope its way into some kind of an understanding
of its extraordinary men. Now they suffer terribly. In success or in such
failures as has come to this imaginative, strangely perverted Irishman
their lot is pitiful. It is only the common, the plain, unthinking man who
slides peacefully through this troubled world."
At the house Jane McPherson sat waiting for her boy. She was thinking of
the scene in the church and a hard light was in her eyes. Sam went past
the sleeping room of his parents, where Windy McPherson snored peacefully,
and up the stairway to his own room. He undressed and, putting out the
light, knelt upon the floor. From the wild ravings of the man in the jail
he had got hold of something. In the midst of the blasphemy of Mike
McCarthy he had sensed a deep and abiding love of life. Where the church
had failed the bold sensualist succeeded. Sam felt that he could have
prayed in the presence of the entire town.
"Oh, Father!" he cried, sending up his voice in the silence of the little
room, "make me stick to the thought that the right living of this, my
life, is my duty to you.
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