"If I have unconsciously offended you in any way," Theron went on, "I
beg you to tell me how. I liked you from the beginning of my pastorate
here, and the thought that latterly we seemed to be drifting apart has
given me much pain. But now it is still more distressing to find you
actually disposed to quarrel with me. Surely, Brother Gorringe, between
a pastor and a probationer who--"

"No," Gorringe broke in; "quarrel isn't the word for it. There isn't any
quarrel, Mr. Ware." He stepped down from the door-stone to the sidewalk
as he spoke, and stood face to face with Theron. Working-men with
dinner-pails, and factory girls, were passing close to them, and he
lowered his voice to a sharp, incisive half-whisper as he added, "It
wouldn't be worth any grown man's while to quarrel with so poor a
creature as you are."

Theron stood confounded, with an empty stare of bewilderment on his
face. It rose in his mind that the right thing to feel was rage,
righteous indignation, fury; but for the life of him, he could not
muster any manly anger. The character of the insult stupefied him.

"I do not know that I have anything to say to you in reply," he
remarked, after what seemed to him a silence of minutes. His lips
framed the words automatically, but they expressed well enough the blank
vacancy of his mind. The suggestion that anybody deemed him a "poor
creature" grew more astounding, incomprehensible, as it swelled in his
brain.

"No, I suppose not," snapped Gorringe. "You're not the sort to stand up
to men; your form is to go round the corner and take it out of somebody
weaker than yourself--a defenceless woman, for instance."