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Take a hoss; a fine hoss is often jest the same. Long as it wins nothin' can touch some of them blooded boys. But let 'em go under the wire second, maybe jest because they's packing twenty pounds too much weight, and they're never any good any more. Any second-rater can lick 'em. I lost five hundred iron boys on a hoss that laid down like that."
Stefan, returning home one afternoon half way through the sittings, expressed a mild interest in the news of them, and, going out to the barn, unwrapped the wet cloths from the head. "He's an artist," said he; "this has power and beauty. Never sit to a second-rater, Mary, you've had the best now." And he covered the head again with a craftsman's thoroughness.
"Look here," he said, "at the fineness of the wool. See the serrations in each thread of it. See the density of it. Look at the way his legs and belly are clothed he's wool all over, that sheep. Grand animal, grand animal!" Then they went and had a drink, and the old squatter said, "Now, I'll show you the difference between a champion ram and a second-rater."
"The only difference," he explained to Peter, "is that Margaret sacrificed and fought and died for a king, and our Nada is willing to do all that for a poor beggar of an outlaw. Which makes Margaret a second-rater compared with Nada," he added. "For Margaret wanted a kingdom along with her husband, and Nada would take just you and me.
"If you ever did chance to get as far from home as that, there's a man at that address who'd fall on your neck and weep real tears if you happened to have the stuff," he said. "But just one additional word. Maybe I've led you astray a bit. Just because I said that Jed The Red is a second-rater, don't think for a moment that he fights like a schoolboy now. He doesn't nothing like that!"
To this primary sense of superiority is now added the disparagement of a concrete comparison, and over all is an ineradicable resentment of the fact that such a comparison has been necessary. In other words, the typical husband is a second-rater, and no one is better aware of it than his wife.
"The only difference," he explained to Peter, "is that Margaret sacrificed and fought and died for a king, and our Nada is willing to do all that for a poor beggar of an outlaw. Which makes Margaret a second-rater compared with Nada," he added. "For Margaret wanted a kingdom along with her husband, and Nada would take just you and me.
And the cravat was only a second-rater, too, a black-silk affair. He tossed up the sponge and went down to the dining-room, the ends of the conqueror straggling like the four points of a battered weather-vane. His wife and daughter and Mademoiselle Fournier were already at their table by the casement window, from which they could see the changing granite mask of Napoleon across Lecco.
The head-masters, or rather those of recent appointment, are, as a rule, well chosen. Their salaries run from £800 to £1,200 a year; and you can get either a first-class man, whose health prevents him from remaining in England, or a good second-rater for that sum.
Perhaps," he added, after a pause, "the discipline has been good for my soul." "In what way?" "Well, you see," he replied thoughtfully, "in my profession I always was a second-rater. I was aware of it; but I was content, because I did my best. In the Army my vanity leads me to believe I was a first-rater.
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