But Nelly had no patience with the philosophy of Mr. Roberts.

“You’re so windy when you’ve got anything on your chest,” she said.  “You keep talking and don’t get any forwarder.  What’s the fuss about now?”

“You’ve been listening to Baggs, I expect,” suggested the wife of Nicholas.  “Baggs has got the boot at last and leaves at Christmas, and his pension don’t please him, so he’s fairly bubbling over with verjuice.  I should hope you’d got too much sense to listen to him, Nick.”

“So should I. He’s no more than the winter wind in a hedge at any time,” answered Mr. Roberts.  “Baggs gets attended to same as a wasp gets attended to—­because of his sting.  All bad-tempered people win a lot more attention and have their way far quicker than us easy and amiable ones.  Why, we know, of course.  Human nature’s awful cowardly at bottom and will always choose the easiest way to escape the threatened wrath of a bad temper.  In fact, fear makes the world go round, not love, as silly people pretend.  In my case I feel much like Sabina Dinnett, who was talking about life not a week ago in the triangle under the sycamore tree.  And she said, ’Those who do understand don’t care, and those who don’t understand, don’t matter’—­so there you are—­one’s left all alone.”

“I’m sure you ain’t—­more’s Sabina.  She’s got lots of friends, and you’ve got your dear wife and children,” said Nelly.

“I have; but the mind sometimes takes a flight above one’s family.  It’s summed up in a word:  there’s nothing so damned unpleasant as being took for granted, and that’s what’s the matter with me.”

“Not in your home, you ain’t,” declared Sarah.  “No good, sensible wife takes her husband for granted.  He’s always made a bit of a fuss over under his own roof.”

“That’s true; but in my business I am.  To see people—­I’ll name no names—­to see other people purred over, and then to find your own craft treated as just a commonplace of Nature, no more wonderful than the leaves on a bush—­beastly, I call it.”

Mr. Legg had joined them and he admitted the force of the argument.

“We’re very inclined to put our own job higher in the order of the universe than will other people,” he said; “and better men than you have hungered for a bit of notice and a pat on the back and never won it.  But time covers that trouble.  I grant, all the same, that it’s a bit galling when we find the world turns a cold shoulder to our best.”

“It’s a human weakness, Nicholas, to want to be patted,” said Nelly, and her husband agreed.

“It is.  We share it with dogs,” he declared.  “But the world in general is too busy to pat us.  I remember in my green youth being very proud of myself once and pointing to a lot of pewter in a tub, that I’d worked up till it looked like silver; and I took some credit, and an old man in the bar said that scouring pots was nothing more than scouring pots, and that any other honest fool could have done them just as well as me.”