OWEN CAREY
It was. He heard a dog give a sort of shivering whine somewhere, and he stopped at once and stood looking about for it.
4
If I tell you this, you'll believe that Carey was not quite normal—morbid, a bit mad—but it is true that the sound of suffering from an animal went through him more piercingly than a human appeal. When he walked in the country his gait was erratic because he was always stepping aside to avoid treading on ants. In one of his early stories—so unanimously rejected by the magazines—his heroine went out strolling with her lover; she saw him pick up a stone and throw it at a bird which, by some miracle, he hit; she promptly turned home, in silence, and refused ever to speak to him again; and it was impossible for Carey to understand that this was not a "sufficient motive" for his plot. Most striking of all, perhaps: his mother, a religious zealot, had intended her son to be "a minister of the gospel"; she had planned to send him to a theological college and, being too poor to carry out the plan, she went to her pastor for aid and advice. He replied that the boy should first familiarize himself with the testaments, and Carey set to work to study them ambitiously—with an unexpected result! The cruelties of the Old Testament horrified him. Without any intention of blasphemy, in the most obvious sincerity,
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