“Shift the pegs a little,” he said to himself, “and Mr. Brooke might be in the Cabinet, while I was Undersecretary. That is the common order of things: the little waves make the large ones and are of the same pattern. I am better here than in the sort of life Mr. Casaubon would have trained me for, where the doing would be all laid down by a precedent too rigid for me to react upon. I don’t care for prestige or high pay.”