“Not more than others I deserve,
But Heaven has given me more.”
There is something singularly exasperating about other people’s joyousness, when it is purchased at one’s own expense!
We were restoring the last jug to its proper hook on the dresser, when once more we saw Miss Primkins toiling up the steep garden path.
She really felt terribly ashamed to be intruding on me again; but she had just read in the paper that the Prime Minister now said everyone must save, and no one who was a true patriot would spend more than was absolutely necessary. Now what was the difference between hoarding and saving? She did so want to do the right thing; it was so little she could do to help her country. Yet, for the life of her, she couldn’t make out whether she ought to save that £12 or spend it.
Would I mind explaining it to her? She never could understand anything Prime Ministers, or people like that, said nowadays; so different from what it was in her young days. When there was only Lord Salisbury and Mr. Gladstone everything was so sensible and straightforward. Her father used to say: “Always believe Lord Salisbury; never believe Mr. Gladstone”—or else it was the other way round, she wasn’t sure which. Whereas now, what with radicals, and coalitions, and territorials, and boards of this, that, and the other, her brain almost gave way trying to find out who anybody was.
“And when at last I think I’ve got it straightened out, I find there’s a lot of ‘antis,’ and it’s just the opposite thing they say you ought or ought not to do; or else you have to begin at the other end and work backwards. What a lot those Germans have to answer for!”
I offered my own simple political creed for her guidance: “When the King or Lord Kitchener says anything, then I know it’s all right. When they hold their tongues, I know it’s equally all right; and the rest I don’t worry about!”
She said I had expressed her own views entirely, only she never thought to put it so concisely as that. What a wonderful thing it was to have a brain like mine that grasped things so clearly! She should just go on being economical as her mother had always taught her to be, until the King—or, possibly, Queen Mary—said anything definite on the subject, then people would know where they were.