He was so happy over all this that it came to him with a sense of retrospective discovery that he must like children—not sentimentally, but with a simple, almost casual affection. “You’d have made a good schoolmaster,” Blampied once said, and then, when Smith replied he wasn’t sure he’d care to spend all his time with children, the other added: “Exactly. Good schoolmasters don’t. Anyhow, you can help to make up for the fact that I’m a bad parson.” “Do you really think you are?” “Oh yes. Ask anybody round here. People don’t take to me. I haven’t an ounce of crowd magnetism. And then I’m lazy.
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