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helplessly.
     
    “I’m sorry,” he stammered. “You are a clergyman, a preacher. I can feel it, even from behind those curtains. I’ve insulted you. I’m sorry. But still, as a white man, you can’t know what it means to be despised and rejected.”
     
    He moved slowly to the curtains and timidly touched the button. The curtains rolled back, and he saw the light and who stood in the light.
     
    He burst into deep sobs. He extended his hands.
     
    “Forgive me,” he groaned. “For you know, don’t you?”
     
    He waited humbly. Then he whispered, “I’ve always known that I wanted to be a clergyman, to speak to my people with the authority of faith and with the love of God. But I was angry against man — and God. How could I tell my people of the goodness of God when they daily saw the hatefulness of man? There is a theological seminary here and they won’t reject me — you’ve made me see my own heart and what I really wanted, and where I was needed, for you’ve never despised us.”
     
    He smiled, and the smile was now neither haughty nor timid. It was the smile of an accepted son whose father has always loved him.
     

SOUL FOUR
     

The Betrayed
     
I do not know this man you are talking about.
     
Mark 14:71
     
    The man who sat in the marble chair was neither middle-aged nor old. His winter tweeds were good, if worn; his shoes were handmade, if beginning to crack. His expensive tie showed signs of constant ironing. He sat with dignity, his gray hair smooth, his quiet face rigid and bitter.
     
    Then he smiled with faint contemptuousness at the curtains. All this childish superstition! This amateur psychiatry, this self-diagnosis! He, Clive Summers, knew all the psychiatric jargon and the proclaimed methods. You ‘talked’ out your problems to an allegedly sympathetic ear — paid for by the expensive hour — and you found your own solution in the babblings of your own tongue. The new confessional! The most modern way of discovering your foolish self, as if it were precious! Hadn’t he tried it? He had tried three thousand dollars’ worth, and God knows he couldn’t afford that much waste of money now. It had been a long time, in fact, since he could afford much of anything. And of course there were Celia’s chronic doctors’ bills for her arthritis, and there was his idiot son — Well, no, George wasn’t quite an idiot, but pretty close, with his enthusiasms.
     
    The white and utterly silent room waited. Mr. Summers looked about him curiously. Where did the heat come from, this harsh winter day, and the light? He could hear no ventilating fans and see no warm-air outlets. He had never known John Godfrey, a small-time lawyer who had never entered through the door of the Summers Metals Company. He would not have gotten past the reception clerk, except with a subpoena, if even that. Yet he had had the money to build this trumpery pseudo-temple and create this maudlin religious atmosphere. For whimpering housewives and failures and clerks and petty mystics who needed an ear as others need a laxative. Well, then . . .
     
    He spoke in his tight and careful voice. “Good afternoon.”
     
    No one answered. He said, “I am Clive Summers. If you are a resident of this city you’ll recognize the name; everybody knows me or of me.”
     
    He looked at the curtains, and squared shoulders which had taken on a tendency to sag these past five years. The curtains remained shut and still.
     
    Mr. Summers thought of the psychiatrists he had known socially and the one he had known both socially and professionally. His thin cheeks reddened. One of them was behind that damned curtain! Could he be trusted? You could not trust a man unless you had bought him. And often, not even then.
     
    “I hope,” he said coldly, “that everything that is said in here is confidential? By the way, I have deposited twenty dollars in your — offering — box, with the suggested note, which no doubt you have had time to