Dickson suffered a spasm of mortal agony. "Oh, I'm surely not so bad
as all that," he groaned. But the hurt was not only in his pride.
He saw himself being forced to new decisions, and each alternative
was of the blackest. He fairly shivered with the horror of it.
The car slipped past a suburban station from which passengers were
emerging--comfortable black-coated men such as he had once been.
He was bitterly angry with Providence for picking him out of the
great crowd of sedentary folk for this sore ordeal. "Why was I
tethered to sich a conscience?" was his moan. But there was that
stern inquisitor with his pointer exploring his soul. "You flatter
yourself you have done your share," he was saying. "You will make
pretty stories about it to yourself, and some day you may tell your
friends, modestly disclaiming any special credit. But you will be
a liar, for you know you are afraid. You are running away when the
work is scarcely begun, and leaving it to a few boys and a poet whom
you had the impudence the other day to despise. I think you are
worse than a coward. I think you are a cad."

His fellow-passengers on the top of the car saw an absorbed middle-aged
gentleman who seemed to have something the matter with his bronchial tubes.
They could not guess at the tortured soul. The decision was coming nearer,
the alternatives loomed up dark and inevitable. On one side was submission
to ignominy, on the other a return to that place which he detested, and yet
loathed himself for detesting. "It seems I'm not likely to have much peace
either way," he reflected dismally.

How the conflict would have ended had it continued on these lines
I cannot say. The soul of Mr. McCunn was being assailed by moral and
metaphysical adversaries with which he had not been trained to deal.