A slight change, shall we say expansion on your part, might have enabled you to"-- the Bishop chose his words as carefully as a doctor counts drops into a medicine glass--"to keep pace with him ?" "I do not regard friendship as a race or a combat of wits," said Wentworth.

"Friendship is to my mind something sacred.

I hope I can remain Grenfell's friend without believing him to be absolutely faultless.

If he is so unreasonable as to expect that of me, which I should not for a moment expect of him, why then----" Wentworth shrugged his shoulders.
One of the few friends who had not drifted from him looked at him with somewhat pained affection.
Why does a life dwelt apart from others tend to destroy first generosity and then tenderness in man and woman?
Why does one so often find a certain hardness and inhumanity encrusting those who have withdrawn themselves behind the shutters of their own convenience, or is it, after all, their own impotence?
"Has he always been hard and cold by nature ?" said the Bishop to himself, "and is the real man showing himself in middle age, or is his meagre life starving him ?" He tried again.
"You nearly lost my friendship a year ago by attributing a sordid motive to me, Wentworth." Wentworth understood instantly.
"That is all past and forgotten," he said quickly.

"I never think of it.
Have I ever allowed it to make the slightest difference ?" "No," said the Bishop, looking hard at him, "and for that matter neither have I.We have never talked the matter out.