“No,” said Carter at last, as if answering Barnes’s own unspoken question. “No, I’m not a convert—not yet. But I want to tell you the most astonishing thing I witnessed six nights ago at Roswald Drake’s.

“You’ve read all about the Wall Street episode and the opera house scene and other events, but I don’t believe this got into print or ever will—at least not as it occurred—and I can’t get to work again on the regular grind until I get it out of my system and get your opinion of it.

“Remember, I’m relating this, not as a confession that I am finally convinced you are right about this being Jesus—I don’t concede, not yet. I’m telling it because it really is the most surprising thing I ever saw and heard, and because I want to be fair, at least as fair as you ever knew me to be.”

Barnes did not say anything, but his heart was beginning to hope vaguely for Carter.

“You don’t know Drake? Well, it’s not malice, for I’ve said it to his face, he is a sheer money grubber, with one hobby, if it can be called that—an admiration for what he calls ‘power.’

“He invited”—Carter always paused a little before Jesus’s name—“Jesus, as you call him, and a number of men and women of the same tribe as himself, to dinner. I was there, for I’ve been staying at Drake’s while in New York.

“In the first place, Drake’s ‘dinners’ are at an unearthly hour and prolonged beyond all reason. He got the idea from some foreign prince he claims he once entertained. We did not sit down until after eleven o’clock. Jesus—you understand, Barnes, I call him by your name for him, not mine—sat at the right of the hostess and the left of Mr. Ord Burrage, Drake’s partner. I sat at Mrs. Drake’s left, directly opposite Jesus.

“There had been nothing unusual about the talk or anything during the interval between Jesus’s arrival and the sitting down to the table. I was simply impressed with two things: first, the perfect air of good sense in everything he said as he joined in the general conversation; and second, the complete calmness of his whole person. Drake is always crossing his legs and moving his foot up and down. As I looked over the assembled company at different times, I was struck with the fact that there was not a calm person in the room among all those New Yorkers. Mrs. Silvester, the wife of the hotel proprietor, poses as a correctly cold and polished woman, but she is always fussing with her rings. There was not a man who could be called calm, no one except—” Carter broke off his sentence without finishing, and sat brooding over something.