“Well, we did,” said Fillmore, accepting the amendment with the air of a man who has no time for chopping straws. “Anyway, what I mean is, I don't see why, just because one has known people at a certain period in one's life when one was practically down and out, one should have them round one's neck for ever. One can't prevent people forming an I-knew-him-when club, but, darn it, one needn't attend the meetings.”
“One's friends...”
“Oh, friends,” said Fillmore. “That's just where all this makes me so tired. One's in a position where all these people are entitled to call themselves one's friends, simply because father put it in his will that I wasn't to get the money till I was twenty-five, instead of letting me have it at twenty-one like anybody else. I wonder where I should have been by now if I could have got that money when I was twenty-one.”
“In the poor-house, probably,” said Sally.
Fillmore was wounded.
“Ah! you don't believe in me,” he sighed.
“Oh, you would be all right if you had one thing,” said Sally.
Fillmore passed his qualities in swift review before his mental eye. Brains? Dash? Spaciousness? Initiative? All present and correct. He wondered where Sally imagined the hiatus to exist.
“One thing?” he said. “What's that?”
“A nurse.”
Fillmore's sense of injury deepened. He supposed that this was always the way, that those nearest to a man never believed in his ability till he had proved it so masterfully that it no longer required the assistance of faith. Still, it was trying; and there was not much consolation to be derived from the thought that Napoleon had had to go through this sort of thing in his day. “I shall find my place in the world,” he said sulkily.
“Oh, you'll find your place all right,” said Sally. “And I'll come round and bring you jelly and read to you on the days when visitors are allowed... Oh, hullo.”
The last remark was addressed to a young man who had been swinging briskly along the sidewalk
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