John had been only a negative sort of success, but Bob had been a failure all along the line. He had not liked his first situation from the start, and it was not long before the situation ceased to care about him. He had taken to changing places very soon, and, as is usually the case, the changes were mostly towards a lower grade. Marriage had anchored him, after a fashion, but at the same time it had finished his chance of ever rising higher. He now lived in the village across the marsh, acting as odd-job man to a cattle dealer in the place. His cottage was an abode of tempest and wrath, slatternly beyond belief, full of crawling and screaming children and the loud alarums of a nagging woman’s voice. It was easy to see where Bob would probably end, with a public-house almost cheek by jowl with his own. And yet, as Agnes had just said, he had been a smart enough lad.... Thomas, indeed, was the only one who had made out, unless John’s translation from a workaday world might be counted a higher achievement still. At his first hiring he had found for himself a rare good spot, and had stayed there solidly all through. Bob’s flights of fancy in the way of new jobs did not appeal to his farther-seeing mind; never, indeed, stirred him to anything but a sort of wondering contempt. He knew what he wanted, and, once set upon the course that led to it direct, could not be forced from it or lured aside. He had his settled programme of life long before it came anywhere within his reach. He would save enough brass to start comfortably on his own; he would take a farm on the marsh, and he would marry Agnes Black. But he was thirty-five before any of these things came to pass. Yet, up to the last few years, he had had no doubt about them at all. They would follow, he thought, as naturally as harvest followed seed-time or summer fulfilled spring. Nature’s checks to the plans of man had, as a rule, some form of logic at their back, and were generally rectified in Nature’s time. Checks in his own scheme, if they came, would follow the same lines, and his practised country patience would be able to see them through. And then suddenly and with lasting amazement he discovered that life was not like that—that it was more complicated and subtle than Nature, more idiotic, incomprehensible and perverse. It threw things awry without purpose or natural law, wrecked, and did not renew, robbed, and did not repay. His way had been blocked, as if by logs piling terribly in a stream, and there had been nothing for it but to hack himself out.