A Man's Job For A Minister

Having thus received a sad jolt through the medium of his affections,
Mr. Thompson, like countless numbers of human beings before him, set
about gathering himself together. He did a tremendous lot of thinking
about things in general, about himself and Sophie Carr in particular.
Moping in that isolated cabin his mind took on a sort of abnormal
activity. He could not even stop thinking when he wanted to stop. He
would lie awake in the silent darkness long after he should have been
asleep, going over his narrow and uneventful existence, the unwelcome
and anguished present, the future that was nothing but a series of blank
pages which he had yet to turn in God only knew what bitterness and
sorrow. That was the way he gloomily put it to himself. He had still to
learn what an adaptable, resilient organism man is. This, his first
tentative brush with life, with the realities of pain and passion, had
left him exceedingly cast down, more than a little inclined to
pessimism.

He experienced gusts of unreasoning anger at Sophie Carr, forgetting, as
a man wounded in his egotism and disappointed in his first passionate
yearning for a mate is likely to forget, that he had brought it on
himself, that Sophie had not encouraged him, nor lured him to his
undoing, nor given him aught to nourish the illusion that she was his
for the asking.

Sometimes he would have a vivid flash of jealousy when he thought about
her and Tommy Ashe, when he recalled her admissions. And he would soften
from that mood, twisting his lips wryly, when he remembered the pitying
tenderness of her good-by.