Sidney Meeks was older than Henry, and as unsuccessful as a country lawyer can well be.  He lived by himself; he had never married; and the world, although he smiled at it facetiously, was not a pleasant place in his eyes.

Henry, after he had washed himself at the sink in the shop, entered the kitchen, where the table was set, and passed through to the sitting-room, where the lawyer was.  Sidney Meeks did not rise.  He extended one large, white hand affably.  “How are you Henry?” said he, giving the other man’s lean, brown fingers a hard shake.  “I dropped in here on my way home from the post-office, and your wife tempted me with flapjacks in a lordly dish, and I am about to eat.”

“Glad to see you,” returned Henry.

“You get home early, or it seems early, now the days are getting so long,” said Meeks, as Henry sat down opposite.

“Yes, it’s early enough, but I don’t get any more pay.”

Meeks laughed.  “Henry, you are the direct outcome of your day and generation,” said he.  “Less time, and more pay for less time, is our slogan.”

“Well, why not?” returned Henry, surlily, still with a dawn of delighted opposition in his thin, intelligent face.  “Why not?  Look at the money that’s spent all around us on other things that correspond.  What’s an automobile but less time and more money, eh?”

Meeks laughed.  “Give it up until after supper, Henry,” he said, as Sylvia’s thin, sweet voice was heard from the next room.

“If you men don’t stop talking and come right out, these flapjacks will be spoiled!” she cried.  The men arose and obeyed her call.  “There are compensations for everything,” said Meeks, laughing, as he settled down heavily into his chair.  He was a large man.  “Flapjacks are compensations.  Let us eat our compensations and be thankful.  That’s my way of saying grace.  You ought always to say grace, Henry, when you have such a good cook as your wife is to get meals for you.  If you had to shift for yourself, the way I do, you’d feel that it was a simple act of decency.”

“I don’t see much to say grace for,” said Henry, with a disagreeable sneer.

“Oh, Henry!” said Sylvia.

“For compensations in the form of flapjacks, with plenty of butter and sugar and nutmeg,” said Meeks.  “These are fine, Mrs. Whitman.”

“A good thick beefsteak at twenty-eight cents a pound, regulated by the beef trust, would be more to my liking after a hard day’s work,” said Henry.

Sylvia exclaimed again, but she was not in reality disturbed.  She was quite well aware that her husband was enjoying himself after his own peculiar fashion, and that, if he spoke the truth, the flapjacks were more to his New England taste for supper than thick beefsteak.

“Well, wait until after supper, and maybe you will change your mind about having something to say grace for,” Meeks said, mysteriously.

The husband and wife stared at him.  “What do you mean, Mr. Meeks?” asked Sylvia, a little nervously.  Something in the lawyer’s manner agitated her.  She was not accustomed to mysteries.  Life had not held many for her, especially of late years.