which he made to himself:

"I wonder what that fellow would do if he ever got started!" A parson
was, after all, a parson, and he had done his best.




IV

A high, oozing note of the brakes, and the heavy train came to a stop.
Hodder looked out of the window of the sleeper to read the sign 'Marcion'
against the yellow brick of the station set down in the prairie mud, and
flanked by a long row of dun-colored freight cars backed up to a factory.

The factory was flimsy, somewhat resembling a vast greenhouse with its
multitudinous windows, and bore the name of a firm whose offices were in
the city to which he was bound.

"We 'most in now, sah," the negro porter volunteered. "You kin see the
smoke yondah."

Hodder's mood found a figure in this portentous sign whereby the city's
presence was betrayed to travellers from afar,--the huge pall seemed an
emblem of the weight of the city's sorrows; or again, a cloud of her own
making which shut her in from the sight of heaven. Absorbed in the mad
contest for life, for money and pleasure and power she felt no need to
lift her eyes beyond the level of her material endeavours.

He, John Hodder, was to live under that cloud, to labour under it. The