“You know very well, Norman, there are scores of lawyers, good ones, who’d crawl at his feet for his business.  Nowadays, most lawyers are always looking round for a pair of rich man’s boots to lick.”

“But I am not ‘most lawyers,’” said Norman.  “Of course, if Galloway could make me come to him, he’d be a fool to come to me.  But when he finds I’m not coming, why, he’ll behave himself—­if his business is important enough for me to bother with.”

“But if he doesn’t come, Fred?”

“Then—­my Universal Fuel scheme, or some other equally good.  But you will never see me limbering my knees in the anteroom of a rich man, when he needs me and I don’t need him.”

“Well, we’ll see,” said Tetlow, with the air of a sober man patient with one who is not sober.

“By the way,” continued Norman, “if Galloway says he’s too ill to come—­or anything of that sort—­tell him I’d not care to undertake the affairs of a man too old or too feeble to attend to business, as he might die in the midst of it.”

Tetlow’s face was such a wondrous exhibit of discomfiture that Norman laughed outright.  Evidently he had forestalled his fat friend in a scheme to get him to Galloway in spite of himself.  “All right—­all right,” said Tetlow fretfully.  “We’ll sleep on this.  But I don’t see why you’re so opposed to going to see the man.  It looks like snobbishness to me—­false pride—­silly false pride.”

“It is snobbishness,” said Norman.  “But you forget that snobbishness rules the world.  The way to rule fools is to make them respect you.  And the way to make them respect you is by showing them that they are your inferiors.  I want Galloway’s respect because I want his money.  And I’ll not get his money—­as much of it as belongs to me—­except by showing him my value.  Not my value as a lawyer, for he knows that already, but my value as a man.  Do you see?”

“No, I don’t,” snapped Tetlow.

“That’s what it means to be Tetlow.  Now, I do see—­and that’s why I’m Norman.”

Tetlow looked at him doubtfully, uncertain whether he had been listening to wisdom put in a jocose form of audacious egotism or to the effervescings of intoxication.  The hint of a smile lurking in the sobriety of the powerful features of his extraordinary friend only increased his doubt.  Was Norman mocking him, and himself as well?  If so, was it the mockery of sober sense or of drunkenness?

“You seem to be puzzled, Billy,” said Norman, and Tetlow wondered how he had seen.  “Don’t get your brains in a stew trying to understand me.  I’m acting the way I’ve always acted—­except in one matter.  You know that I know what I’m about?”

“I certainly do,” replied his admirer.

“Then, let it go at that.  If you could understand me—­the sort of man I am, the sort of thing I do—­you’d not need me, but would be the whole show yourself—­eh?  That being true, don’t show yourself a commonplace nobody by deriding and denying what your brain is unable to comprehend.  Show yourself a somebody by seeing the limitations of your ability.  The world is full of little people who criticise and judge and laugh at and misunderstand the few real intelligences.  And very tedious interruptions of the scenery those little people are.  Don’t be one of them. . . .  Did you know my wife’s father?”