"May I not be serious?"
"It isn't serious to offer to take important steps because it would please a girl."
"Aren't you rather contradicting yourself? You called that becoming serious just now."
"If I am, it is a privilege we all have."
"Girls, you mean? Well, you refuse to help me?"
"Entirely."
"Even to counteract Miss Smith's illicit influence?"
"I shall trust to your own sense of propriety."
Dale walked home, grievously puzzled. A small matter may raise a great issue, and he felt, perhaps without full reason, that he was at the parting of the ways. "No more Kings! No more Priests!" Or "An Ode to H. R. H. the Duke of Mercia on his visit to Denborough"! Dale ruefully admitted that there would be ground for a charge of inconsistency. Some would talk of conversion, some of tergiversation; he could not make up his mind which accusation would be the more odious. There was clearly nothing for it but absolute neutrality; he must refuse both requests. Janet would understand why; of course she would, she must; and even if she did not, what was that to him? The throne above politics!—that must be a mere sophism; there could not be anything in that. No doubt this young Prince was not morally responsible for the evils, but he personified the system, and Dale could not bow the knee before him. If it had been possible—and as he went he began idly to frame words for an ode of welcome. An idea or two, a very happy turn, came into his head; he knew exactly the tone to take, just how far to go, just the mean that reconciles deference to independence. He had the whole thing mapped out before he recalled to himself the thought that he was not going to write at all, and as he entered his own garden he sighed at the necessary relinquishing of a stately couplet. There was no doubt that work of that class opened a new field, a hitherto virgin soil, to his genius. It was a great pity.