"What I was seeing all the time was the way you were taking in his trick of putting whole lots of things in that didn't really matter, and leaving out things that did," she explained."He kept talking about what the invention would make in England, and how it would make it, and adding up figures and per cents.and royalties until my head was buzzing inside.And when he thought he'd got your mind fixed on England so that you'd almost forget there was any other country to think of, he read out the agreement that said `All rights,' and he was silly enough to think he could get you to sign it without reading it over and over yourself, and showing it to a clever lawyer that would know that as many tricks can be played by things being left out of a paper as by things being put in."Small beads of moisture broke out on the bald part of Joseph Hutchinson's head.He had been first so flattered and exhilarated by the quoting of large figures, and then so flustrated and embarrassed by his inability to calculate and follow argument, and again so soothed and elated and thrilled by his own importance in the scheme and the honors which his position in certain companies would heap upon him, that an abyss had yawned before him of which he had been wholly unaware.He was not unaware of it now.He was a vainglorious, ignorant man, whose life had been spent in common work done under the supervision of those who knew what he did not know.He had fed himself upon the comforting belief that he had learned all the tricks of any trade.He had been openly boastful of his astuteness and experience, and yet, as Ann's soft little voice went on, and she praised his cleverness in seeing one point after another, he began to quake within himself before the dawning realization that he had seen none of them, that he had been carried along exactly as Rosenthal had intended that he should be, and that if luck had not intervened, he had been on the brink of signing his name to an agreement that would have implied a score of concessions he would have bellowed like a bull at the thought of making if he had known what he was doing.
"Aye, lass," he gulped out when he could speak--"aye, lass, tha wert right enow.I'm glad tha wert there and heard it, and saw what I was thinking.I didn't say much.I let the chap have rope enow to hang himself with.When he comes back I'll give him a bit o' my mind as'll startle him.It was right-down clever of thee to see just what I had i' my head about all that there gab about things as didn't matter, an'
the leavin' out them as did--thinking I wouldn't notice.Many's the time I've said, `It is na so much what's put into a contract as what's left out.' I'll warrant tha'st heard me say it thysen.""I dare say I have," answered Ann, "and I dare say that was why it came into my mind.""That was it," he answered."Thy mother was always tellin' me of things I'd said that I'd clean forgot myself."He was beginning to recover his balance and self-respect.It would have been so like a Lancashire chap to have seen and dealt shrewdly with a business schemer who tried to outwit him that he was gradually convinced that he had thought all that had been suggested, and had comported himself with triumphant though silent astuteness.He even began to rub his hands.
