For a man who professed to have had his supper Jennings did pretty well.

When the meal was over Brown sent Jennings back to the fireside while he himself washed the dishes.  When he rejoined his visitor Jennings looked up with a sombre face.

“Life’s just what that card a fellow tacked up in the office one day says it is:—­’one damned thing after another,’” he asserted grimly.  “There’s no use trying to see any good in it all.”

Brown looked up quickly.  Into his eyes leaped a sudden look of understanding, and of more than understanding—­anger with something, or some one.  But his voice was quiet.

“So somebody’s put that card up in your office, too.  I wonder how many of them there are tacked up in offices all over the country.”

“A good many, I guess.”

“I suppose every time you look up at it, it convinces you all over again,” remarked Brown.  He picked up the poker, and leaning forward began to stir the fire.

“I don’t need convincing.  I know it—­I’ve experienced it.  God!—­I’ve had reason to.”

“If you don’t believe in Him”—­Brown was poking vigorously now—­“why bring Him into the conversation?”

Jennings laughed—­a short, ugly laugh.  “That sounds like you, always putting a fellow in a corner.  I use the word, I suppose, to—­”

“To give force to what you say?  It does it, in a way.  But it’s not the way you use it when you address Him, is it?”

“I don’t address Him.”  Jennings’s tone was defiant.

Brown continued lightly to poke the fire.  “About that card,” said he.  “I’ve often wondered just how many poor chaps it’s been responsible for putting down and out.”

Jennings stared.  “Oh, it’s just a joke.  I laughed the first time I saw it.”

“And the second time?”

“I don’t remember.  The fellows were all laughing over it when it first came out.”

“It was a clever thing, a tremendously clever thing, for a man to think of saying.  There’s so much humour in it.  To a man who happened to be already feeling that way, one can see just how it would cheer him up, give him courage, brace him to take a fresh hold.”

Jennings grunted.  “Oh, well; if you’re going to take every joke with such deadly seriousness—­”

“You took it lightly, did you?  It’s seemed like a real joke to you?  It’s grown funnier and funnier every day, each time it caught your eye?”

But now Jennings groaned.  “No, it hasn’t.  But that’s because it’s too true to keep on seeming funny.”

Brown suddenly brought his fist down on the arm of Jennings’s rocker with a thump which made his nerve-strung visitor jump in his chair.  “It isn’t true!  It’s not the saying of a brave man, it’s the whine of a coward.  Brave men don’t say that sort of thing.  The sort of thing they do say—­sometimes to other men, oftener to themselves alone—­is what a famous Englishman said:  ’If you do fight, fight it out; and don’t give in while you can stand and see!’ How’s that for a motto?  If that had been tacked on the wall in your office all this while, would it have made you feel like giving up, every time you looked at it?”