“He won’t run far.  Let him stop where he is for a few months, till he’s heartily sick of it and ready to listen to sense.  Then perhaps I’ll go over and see him myself.  You’ve done great things, Estelle.  I feel more sanguine than I have ever felt about him.  I wish I could do what he wants; but that’s impossible his way.  However, I’ll do it in my own.  Sense is beginning in him, and that is the great and hopeful discovery you’ve made.”

“I’m ever so glad you’re pleased about it,” she said.  “He loved the motor car much better than the sight of us.  Yet he was glad to see us too.  He’s really a very human boy, you know, Ray.”

CHAPTER XV

CRITICISM

Upon a Sunday afternoon, Sarah Roberts and her husband were drinking tea at ‘The Seven Stars.’  They sat in Nelly Legg’s private room, and by some accident all took rather a gloomy view of life.

As for Nelly, she had been recently weighed, and despite drastic new treatment, was found to have put on two pounds in a month.

“Lord knows where it’ll end,” she said.  “You can’t go on getting heavier and heavier for ever more.  Even a vegetable marrow, and such like things, reach their limit; and if they can it’s hard that a creature with an immortal soul have got to go growing larger and larger, to her own misery and her husband’s grief.  To be smothered with your own fat is a proper cruel end I call it; and I haven’t deserved it; and it shakes my faith in an all-wise God, to feel myself turning into a useless mountain of flesh.  Worse than useless in fact, because them that can’t work themselves are certain sure to make work for others.  Which I do.”

“I never knew anything so aggravating, I’m sure,” assented Nicholas; “but so far as I can see, if life don’t fret you from within, it frets you from without.  It can’t leave you alone to go on your way in a dignified manner.  It’s always intruding, so to speak.  In fact, life comes between us and our living, if you understand me, and sometimes for my part I can look on to the end of it with a lot of resignation.”

Sentiments so unusual from her husband startled Mrs. Roberts as well as her aunt.

“Lor, Nicholas!  What’s the matter with you?” asked Sarah.

“It ain’t often I grumble,” he answered, “and if anybody’s better at taking the rough with the smooth than me, I’d like to see him; but there are times when nature craves for a bit of pudding, and gets sick to death of its daily meal of bread and cheese.  I speak in a parable, however, because I don’t mean the body but the mind.  Your body bothers you, Missis Legg, as well it may; but your mind, thanks to your husband, is pretty peaceful year in year out.  In my case, my body calls for no attention.  Thin as a rake I am and so shall continue.  But the tissue is good, and no man is made of better quality stuff.  It’s my mind that turns in upon itself and gives me a pang now and again.  And the higher the nature of the mind, the worse its troubles.  In fact the more you can feel, the more you are made to feel; and what the mind is built to endure, that, seemingly, it will be called to endure.”