"Answer me at once," thundered his preceptor. "Was it because—"
"No," interrupted Tommy, so conscious of Mr. Cathro's inferiority that to let him go on seemed waste of time. "It was because, though it is a beautiful thing in itself, I felt a servant lassie wouldna have thought o't. I was sweer," he admitted, with a sigh; then firmly, "but I cut it out."
Again Cathro admired, reluctantly. The hack does feel the difference between himself and the artist. Cathro might possibly have had the idea, he could not have cut it out.
But the hack is sometimes, or usually, or nearly always the artist's master, and can make him suffer for his dem'd superiority.
"What made you snivel when you read the pathetic bits?" asked Cathro, with itching fingers.
"I was so sorry for Peter and Mrs. Dinnie," Tommy answered, a little puzzled himself now. "I saw them so clear."
"And yet until Betsy came to you, you had never heard tell of them?"
"No."
"And on reflection you don't care a doit about them?"
"N-no."