Wiggie had a bad time with the enormous meal, but while he tried to disguise his primary plate of beef as turkey and various other dishes, his mind was busy with his surroundings. He knew that he had before him an ancient system working at its best under the most ideal conditions, a triangular relationship which needed the right men in each department to keep the bearings smooth. Just such a state of things might never come his way again. Men said the system was getting played out, becoming extinct as the dodo; but here at least it seemed as if change, however well-intentioned, could mean little but disintegration. The fascination of that most claiming of problems, the interdependence of human beings, not only for things of the body but of the spirit, took him as he looked round the ring of faces, after staving off a too-attentive plum-pudding. The townsman knew many employers of labour, men of large hearts and high standards, who had their thousands at a nod in the morning, and could play “smack-at-back-o’-t’lug” with them of an evening without the faintest troubling of authority. But here was something altogether different, reaching back into far years that had, even then, given each man present his place. Here were ease and understanding, but no forcing of either. The invisible silken strings between the three elements yielded this way and that to the need of the moment, but readjusted themselves immediately. You could shake hands across them, hail flesh and blood on the other side and hear the beating of good human hearts, but you could not climb them. They were always there, stretched by long custom and spun on many graves. Brack alone was out of place, with his over-smart good looks and jarring mannerisms. If he could not scale the strings he could snip them, and you heard the click of the scissors. Even Stubbs, already well on the way to becoming a “kindred object,” and talking as broad Westmorland as anybody present, was to be preferred to Brack. Later, however, he began to get really warmed-up and quarrelsome, and it took pounds of Rotifer Magic to keep him quiet. Wiggie had spent the whole of the previous evening with a weary eye glued to the microscope, so that he was in a position to be fluent, and if he made bad breaks at times, the kindred object was not in a condition to point them out. Wiggie had a knack of acquiring information that was of no earthly use to himself, but smoothed the way for other people; and if the opportunity did not always turn up immediately, that did not prevent him getting ready for it. Sitting on stiles waiting for lame dogs was constitutional with Wiggie.