But he went into the usurer's counting-room to meet the borrowing world, to be amazed and shocked and finally to fortify himself to control it.
It was not to change his nature; it was to develop latent powers in him that were the fruit of long generations of Judaism. At night his fingers were soiled by contact with the coins, the counting-room had become noisome with the day's heat and the unhappy humanity that had come and gone through the busy hours. But he summed up, not what he had sacrificed in soul-sweetness and optimism, for that was a loss he did not realize, but his triumphs in achieving whatever he had been bidden to do, in his mastery of men and things and in the thoroughness of his workmanship. However loudly his mind declared that he was out of place, he felt no great repugnance to his duty.
After the newness of his experience wore off, as it did in a very short time, the days began to go with wearing deliberation, as all days go that are counted impatiently. His sorrow and his wrongs were his only companions; as his anxiety for his liberty and Agrippa's success increased, his healthy indifference to his unwholesome atmosphere began to decline rapidly, his resentment against his oppression to grow. The six weeks ebbed out and passed. His anxiety flowed into his bitterness and his bitterness into his anxiety until they were one. Troubled about his liberty, he clenched his teeth and thought on Saul; thinking of his impotent position against the powerful Pharisee, he watched the harbor from the counting-room and trembled whenever a sail crossed it.
Inactivity became eventually unbearable, for an unemployed moment was a miserable moment. He could not devise a way to liberty, nor further aid his one ally into power, so he turned to his own resources against Saul.
Continuing cautiously to visit the proseuchæ by night, he learned something, which he heard casually at the time, but which eventually developed into a matter of importance. He heard that the Nazarenes were flying from Jerusalem in great numbers, scattering in bodies from Damascus to Alexandria, and from Jerusalem to Rome. The rabbis of Ptolemais were concerned to discover that there was a community hiding in the city, because they feared the evils of a persecution, established in Ptolemais, as much as the influence of the apostasy upon the faithful.