"
By the door below, while Valmore waited on the sidewalk, Telfer talked to
Jane McPherson.
"I wanted Sam to hear," he explained. "He needs a religion. All young men
need a religion. I wanted him to hear how even a man like Mike McCarthy
keeps instinctively trying to justify himself before God."
CHAPTER IV
John Telfer's friendship was a formative influence upon Sam McPherson. His
father's worthlessness and the growing realisation of the hardship of his
mother's position had given life a bitter taste in his mouth, and Telfer
sweetened it. He entered with zeal into Sam's thoughts and dreams, and
tried valiantly to arouse in the quiet, industrious, money-making boy some
of his own love of life and beauty. At night, as the two walked down
country roads, the man would stop and, waving his arms about, quote Poe or
Browning or, in another mood, would compel Sam's attention to the rare
smell of a hayfield or to a moonlit stretch of meadow.
Before people gathered on the streets he teased the boy, calling him a
little money grubber and saying, "He is like a little mole that works
underground. As the mole goes for a worm so this boy goes for a five-cent
piece. I have watched him.
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