Moxon had placed a vase of daffodils in five different positions about the room and, compelled at last to be satisfied with them, he was about to leave me to myself. At that moment I strolled casually to the window and, at the very door, he paused.
"Oh, here's our first snowdrop in blossom," said I.
I think he liked my calling it "ours." A big smile spread across his face, and he came over to my side with such speed as he might, consistent with a proper respect for my confidence.
"Wonderful where they get the white from out of that dirty mould," said he. From the ready way he announced it, I felt sure that he had had that sentence in his mind all the time, that he had thought it would please me to know he did think of such things. He had probably been harboring it in his head since seven o'clock in the morning. Whether that is so or not, it did please me. It is just the thing I always marvel at myself.
"But don't call it dirty mould," said I. "There's hardly a thing I know so clean as a ploughed field in spring, when the earth has just been turned after a long winter."
No doubt it was I who was considering my dignity now. No matter how right a schoolboy may be in his answer, the master always corrects him, sets him right in a phrase or some insignificant fact. I was doing much the same with Moxon. All these little tricks are the efforts of the superior human being for the maintenance of dignity. I know a man who every evening of his life partakes of a glass of milk for his health's sake. One night his dog fell foul of it and consumed it all. But it was not for punishment alone that he stole two of the dog's biscuits in return. What can be more undignified than having your evening's milk stolen by your dog! What, then, can more perfectly regain your dignity than stealing two of his biscuits and calling it the adjustment of punishment to the crime? If Moxon could not openly admit that he had seen the snowdrop before, I could not entirely agree with him. It cut both ways.
"Of course, I didn't mean dirty in that sense, sir," he replied. "Only that it makes my hands what I should call not quite clean."
"When you tidy up, you mean?" said I.
"Well"—I had caught him in that trap—"yes, sir—when I—tidy up."
This all sounds very ridiculous, I admit. Two men wrangling about the bloom of a snowdrop do not present an object for much respect! But when you come to think of it, it is just of such incidents as these that life is composed, with here and there some real event falling heavily into the peaceful rippling of the stream. It may fall upon a gravel bottom, when the broken water catches in a thousand points of light the glorious reflection of the sun. It may fall where there is sleeping mud which, disturbed, sullies all the clearness of the stream. Then only Time, who not alone heals but cleanses, shall sweep the ugliness of it away.