He was growing sure of one thing.  Over and above the good of his soul and other people’s souls, a man must eat—­to put it baldly.  He should earn his keep.  He must indeed calculate upon provision for two.  Mr. Thompson had made the common mistake of believing himself self-sufficient, and Sophie Carr had unwittingly taught him that a male celibate was an anomaly in nature’s reckoning.  He had thought himself immune from the ordinary passions of humanity.  The strangest part of it was a saddened gladness that he was not.  Somehow, he did not want to be a spiritual superman.  He would rather love and struggle and suffer than stand aloof, thanking God that he was not, like the Pharisees, as other men.  Sitting moodily by his rusty stove he confessed to himself that a man who would gladly give up his hopes of eternal salvation for the privilege of folding Sophie Carr close in his arms had no business in the ministry—­unless he simply wanted to hold down an easy, salaried job.

Whatever other sorts of a fool he might have been Thompson was no hypocrite.  He had never consciously looked upon the ministry as a man looks upon a business career—­a succession of steps to success, to an assured social and financial position.  Yet when he turned the searchlight of analysis upon his motives he could not help seeing that this was the very thing he had unwittingly been doing—­that he had expected and hoped for his progress through missionary work and small churches eventually to bestow upon him a call to a wider field—­a call which Sam Carr had callously suggested meant neither more nor less than a bigger church, a wider social circle, a bigger salary.  And Thompson could see that he had been looking forward to these things as a just reward, and he could see too how the material benefits in them were the lure.  He had been coached and primed for that.  His inclination had been sedulously directed into that channel.  His enthusiasm had been the enthusiasm of one who seeks to serve and feels wholly competent.

But he doubted both his fitness and his inclination now.  He said to himself that when a man loses heart in his work he should abandon that work.  He tried to muster up a resentful feeling against Sophie Carr for the emotional havoc she had wrought, and the best he could do was a despairing pang of loneliness.  He wanted her.  Above all he wanted her.  And she was a rank infidel—­a crass materialist—­an intellectual Circe.  Why, in the name of God, he asked himself passionately, must he lose his heart so fully to a woman with whom he could have nothing more in common save the common factor that she was a woman and he a man.

Mr. Thompson had not as yet discovered what a highly important factor that last was.

He managed to get a partial insight into that some three days later, and the vision was vouchsafed him in a simple and natural manner, although to him at the time it seemed the most wonderful and unaccountable thing in the world.