Sometimes as they sat at tea Hubert told Rose about incidents that had taken place in the shop during the day. These anecdotes dealt mainly with the customers, and often the point they were working up to was the customer’s discomfiture, which Hubert found funny, or the customer’s ignorance, which Hubert also found funny. Some of the men who came to the shop were so dense that they did not know they were making fools of themselves or how they were laughed at after they left the place. They were the men who were too tall or too short or too fat or too thin for the patterns they preferred and for the cut and fit they decided upon. Hubert derided the dense customers, not because they looked ridiculous, but because they did not seem to know how ridiculous they were. Hubert could forgive any man for looking like a fool if he played the fool and showed that he could laugh at himself and take a joke, but he had no mercy on people who believed, or pretended to believe, that they looked just like anybody else. Outside the shop Hubert could call attention to people’s shortcomings and so test their sense of humor, but at work he naturally had to restrain himself, and it used to drive him nearly mad to see all those posturing fellows get away without knowing they had been observed by a man who had a sharp and humorous eye and a great gift for cutting people down when they got above themselves.