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“What have they said to you?”

Jim hesitated.

“Out with it, now. One thing you may be sure of: nothing that you can tell me will alter my opinion of your two nieces for the worse. As for poor Joe Beecher, there is no opinion, one way or the other. What did they say?”

Jim regarded his friend with a curiously sweet, far-off expression. “Edward,” he said, “sometimes I believe that the greatest thing a man’s friends can do for him is to drive him into a corner with God; to be so unjust to him that they make him understand that God is all that mortal man is meant to have, and that is why he finds out that most people, especially the ones he does for, don’t care for him.”

Hayward looked solemnly and tenderly at the other’s almost rapt face. “You are right, I suppose, old man,” said he; “but what did they do?”

“They called me in there about a week ago and gave me an awful talking to.”

“About what?”

Jim looked at his friend with dignity. “They were two women talking, and they went into little matters not worth repeating,” said he. “All is — they seemed to blame me for everything I had ever done for them, and for everything I had ever done, anyway. They seemed to blame me for being born and living, and, most of all, for doing anything for them.”

“It is an outrage!” declared Hayward. “Can’t you see it?”

“I can’t seem to see anything plain about it,” returned Jim, in a bewildered way. “I always supposed a man had to do something bad to be given a talking to; but it isn’t so much that, and I don’t bear any malice against them. They are only two women, and they are nervous. What worries me is, they do need things, and they can’t get on and be comfortable unless I do for them; but if they are going to feel that way about it, it seems to cut me off from doing, and that does worry me, Edward.”

The other man stamped. “Jim Bennet,” he said, “they have talked, and now I am going to.”

“You, Edward?”

“Yes, I am. It is entirely true what those two women, Susan Adkins and Mrs. Trimmer, said about you. You ARE a door-mat, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself for it. A man should be a man, and not a door-mat. It is the worst thing in the world for people to walk over him and trample him. It does them much more harm than it does him. In the end the trampler is much worse off than the trampled upon. Jim Bennet, your being a door-mat may cost other people their souls’ salvation. You are selfish in the grain to be a door-mat.”

Jim turned pale. His child-like face looked suddenly old with his mental effort to grasp the other’s meaning. In fact, he was a child — one of the little ones of the world — although he had lived the span of a man’s life. Now one of the hardest problems of the elders of the world was presented to him. “You mean –” he said, faintly.

“I mean, Jim, that for the sake of other people, if not for your own sake, you ought to stop being a door-mat and be a man in this world of men.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to go straight to those nieces of yours and tell them the truth. You know what your wrongs are as well as I do. You know what those two women are as well as I do. They keep the letter of the Ten Commandments — that is right. They attend my church — that is right. They scour the outside of the platter until it is bright enough to blind those people who don’t understand them; but inwardly they are petty, ravening wolves of greed and ingratitude. Go and tell them; they don’t know themselves. Show them what they are. It is your Christian duty.”