"Well, well." Old Mole was aware of the entire inadequacy of this either as comment or as consolation, but he was baffled by the self-absorption which had gone to the making of this elaborate analysis: and yet he had been stirred by the Demon King's vision of the possibilities of human nature and roused by the words "every deed and every thought an act of love." There was a platonic golden idealism about it that lifted him back into his own youth, his own always comfortable dreams, and, contrasting himself with Timmis (or Jones), he saw how immune his early years had been from suffering. Timmis might be done for, but if anyone was to blame it was his malicious, erratic father. Then, with his mind taking a wide sweep, he saw that there could be no question of blame or of attaching it, since that father had also had a father who perhaps suffered from something worse than Edinburgh philosophy. There could be no question of blame. The world was so constructed that Timmis (or Jones) was bound to be out of luck and to fail, just as it seemed to be in the order of creation that he himself, H. J. Beenham, should be comfortable and beyond the reach of the cares most common to mankind. There were fat kine and lean kine, and, come what may, the lean kine would still light upon the meager pasture. There be fat men and lean men, but men have this advantage over kine, that they can understand and help each other. So Old Mole nursed his knee and told himself that Timmis was obviously sincere in believing himself to be done for, and therefore for all practical purposes he was done for, and there was no other useful course to pursue than to listen to what further he might have to say, and then, from his point of view, to consider the position and see if there were not something he had overlooked in his excited despair.