They're a Multitoode" and Other Stories

A prosperous businessman buried in his work receives an unexpected visitor: his old college friend, returned from years of missionary service in China. What begins as a reunion becomes something more complex when the conversation turns to a simple cardboard box, a Christmas mission offering, and the question that won't let either man sleep. The missionary speaks of darkness and need half a world away; the businessman counts his profits and wonders what his life adds up to. Neither man is villain or saint. Both are searching. These stories trace the quiet collision between worldly ambition and the pull toward something larger than oneself. Written in 1912, they carry the particular earnestness of an era that still believed such questions could be answered. But what endures is not the theology it wears so gently it's almost invisible. What endures is the image of two friends, on opposite sides of a question about money, faith, and what we owe to strangers. For readers who enjoy literary fiction that thinks hard about what it means to do good.