found revealed to him an unsuspected and staggering truth. It was that
he was an extremely ignorant and rudely untrained young man, whose
pretensions to intellectual authority among any educated people would be
laughed at with deserved contempt.

Strangely enough, after he had weathered the first shock, this discovery
did not dismay Theron Ware. The very completeness of the conviction it
carried with it, saturated his mind with a feeling as if the fact had
really been known to him all along. And there came, too, after a little,
an almost pleasurable sense of the importance of the revelation. He had
been merely drifting in fatuous and conceited blindness. Now all at once
his eyes were open; he knew what he had to do. Ignorance was a thing to
be remedied, and he would forthwith bend all his energies to cultivating
his mind till it should blossom like a garden. In this mood, Theron
mentally measured himself against the more conspicuous of his colleagues
in the Conference. They also were ignorant, clownishly ignorant: the
difference was that they were doomed by native incapacity to go on all
their lives without ever finding it out. It was obvious to him that his
case was better. There was bright promise in the very fact that he had
discovered his shortcomings.

He had begun the afternoon by taking down from their places the various
works in his meagre library which bore more or less relation to the task
in hand. The threescore books which constituted his printed possessions
were almost wholly from the press of the Book Concern; the few
exceptions were volumes which, though published elsewhere, had come to
him through that giant circulating agency of the General Conference,
and wore the stamp of its approval. Perhaps it was the sight of these
half-filled shelves which started this day's great revolution in
Theron's opinions of himself. He had never thought much before about