When the hirer returned, a heated pedestrian, Grubb would ignore
all verbal complaints, and examine the machine gravely.

"This ain't 'ad fair usage," he used to begin.

He became a mild embodiment of the spirit of reason. "You can't
expect a bicycle to take you up in its arms and carry you," he
used to say. "You got to show intelligence. After all--it's
machinery."

Sometimes the process of liquidating the consequent claims
bordered on violence. It was always a very rhetorical and often
a trying affair, but in these progressive times you have to make
a noise to get a living. It was often hard work, but
nevertheless this hiring was a fairly steady source of profit,
until one day all the panes in the window and door were broken
and the stock on sale in the window greatly damaged and
disordered by two over-critical hirers with no sense of
rhetorical irrelevance. They were big, coarse stokers from
Gravesend. One was annoyed because his left pedal had come off,
and the other because his tyre had become deflated, small and
indeed negligible accidents by Bun Hill standards, due entirely
to the ungentle handling of the delicate machines entrusted to
them--and they failed to see clearly how they put themselves in
the wrong by this method of argument. It is a poor way of
convincing a man that he has let you a defective machine to throw
his foot-pump about his shop, and take his stock of gongs outside
in order to return them through the window-panes. It carried no
real conviction to the minds of either Grubb or Bert; it only
irritated and vexed them. One quarrel makes many, and this