'There!' said Mr Meagles, 'now you know all about Doyce. Except, which I
own does not improve my state of mind, that even now you don't hear him
complain.'

'You must have great patience,' said Arthur Clennam, looking at him with
some wonder, 'great forbearance.'

'No,' he returned, 'I don't know that I have more than another man.'

'By the Lord, you have more than I have, though!' cried Mr Meagles.

Doyce smiled, as he said to Clennam, 'You see, my experience of these
things does not begin with myself. It has been in my way to know a
little about them from time to time. Mine is not a particular case. I am
not worse used than a hundred others who have put themselves in the same
position--than all the others, I was going to say.'

'I don't know that I should find that a consolation, if it were my case;
but I am very glad that you do.'

'Understand me! I don't say,' he replied in his steady, planning
way, and looking into the distance before him as if his grey eye were
measuring it, 'that it's recompense for a man's toil and hope; but it's
a certain sort of relief to know that I might have counted on this.'

He spoke in that quiet deliberate manner, and in that undertone, which
is often observable in mechanics who consider and adjust with great
nicety. It belonged to him like his suppleness of thumb, or his peculiar
way of tilting up his hat at the back every now and then, as if he were
contemplating some half-finished work of his hand and thinking about it.

'Disappointed?' he went on, as he walked between them under the trees.
'Yes. No doubt I am disappointed. Hurt? Yes. No doubt I am hurt. That's
only natural. But what I mean when I say that people who put themselves
in the same position are mostly used in the same way--'

'In England,' said Mr Meagles.

'Oh! of course I mean in England. When they take their inventions into
foreign countries, that's quite different. And that's the reason why so
many go there.'

Mr Meagles very hot indeed again.

'What I mean is, that however this comes to be the regular way of our
government, it is its regular way. Have you ever heard of any projector
or inventor who failed to find it all but inaccessible, and whom it did
not discourage and ill-treat?'

'I cannot say that I ever have.'

'Have you ever known it to be beforehand in the adoption of any useful
thing? Ever known it to set an example of any useful kind?'

'I am a good deal older than my friend here,' sai