"Bah!" he answered, "this carcase be less to me than the bones the crows have plucked beside the way. I've reached a high pitch of mind now when I could drive a red-hot needle through the calf of my leg and care nought for the pang. D'you think these things matter to a man who have been hammered into a heap of bruised, senseless flesh four different times in his life like what I have? 'Tis the inner pain that hurts me, and if I was canker-bitten and racked with every human ill, I'd laugh at it all, if only my wife had been spared to sit beside me and hold my hand. Things ban't fairly planned here. You say they are, but it isn't so. I know 'tis a common speech on easy tongues, but it won't stand the test of workaday life. Happy people may say it to calm their consciences if they be having an extra good life, but 'tisn't true, and never was true. Things ban't fair all round--nothing like it."
"No, they're not," she confessed. "'Tis just a foolish parrot speech. I know they're not fair as well as you do really."
"Then I go on to my argeyment," said Reuben. "Granted the Lord, for His own secret ends, ban't concerned to play fair with us, then, being a just God, He must let us right the balance and use our own judgment where we have the power. If even you--with all your big share of good luck--allow on second thoughts that things don't fall fair, how much more must the most of people feel it so?"
"My luck--" she began, and stopped, but her tone indicated she was about to demur, and he invited her to do so.
"There again," he said, "we can only speak what we see, but what we see ban't always the truth. The outside ban't a glass pane to show the inside, but more often a clever door to hide it. I say in my haste how that none ever had more luck to her share than you. Well, I've no right to say that. Perhaps I'm wrong."
"In a way, yes. David, you must know, is a great man now, and 'tisn't the least of a loving woman's hardships to see her husband growing great and herself biding little."
"Good Lord! what a silly point of view!" said he. "Ban't you bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh? How the deuce can the man grow great and leave you behind?"
"I can't explain," she said. "But 'tis so--off and on. Sometimes he catches sight of me in his life, if you understand, and remembers me, and we have precious days. Then again he loses sight of me for a bit. I tell you these things, because you be such a big-hearted, understanding man, Mr. Shillabeer."
"I am," he said. "'Tis my sole vartue to be so. But my usefulness is nearly over. So we come back to that usefulness we started with."
"Your usefulness ban't ended, I'm very sure."