My uncle repairs bicycles in a small shop behind the lake. He is not good at business. If a child comes in with a broken wheel, he fixes it in a quiet manner and says nothing about money. In the fall he keeps a bowl of soup by his side. (11) My aunt says he will never be rich. He agrees, (12) he has never once changed the way he works. Last winter he was ill for a month, and people he had helped came by turns to keep the shop open. (13) I saw that his way of working was not foolish at all. For thirty years he had been lending small things to everybody around him, (14) the whole countryside gave them back in one month.
We like to say that a person is brave or lazy, as if it were written inside them. (15) A student who is lazy in one class may work hard in another. A guide who is patient with visitors may shake his head at his own children. What looks like character is often the room a person is standing in. This matters because we judge people from one meeting, (16) one meeting shows us one room only. (17), it does not mean character is nothing. It means character is a habit we build, not a thing we are given, (18) a habit can be changed at any age.