“Why, you old thing, can't you see that if it's done by aniline dyes it's all right—true to Nature and all that?”
“Good heavens! that a child of mine—Dorothy, did you hear her? How can you sit there and smile as if nothing had happened? Have you brought her up as an atheist or what?”
“Every one who doesn't agree with all you say isn't a confirmed atheist,” replied Dorothy calmly. “As for Rosamund, what I'm afraid of is that, so far from being an atheist, she is rather too much in the other direction—like 'Lo, the poor Indian.' She'll explain what's in her mind if you give her a chance What do you mean, my dear, by laying the emphasis on aniline dyes? Don't you know that most of them are awful?”
“Of course I do, darling,” said Rosamund. “But I've been reading about them, and so—well, you see, they come from coal tar, and coal is a bit of a tree that grew up and fell down thousands of years ago, and its burning is nothing more than its giving back the sunshine that it—what is the word that the book used?—oh, I remember—the sunshine that it hoarded when it was part of the forest. Now, I think that if it's natural for flowers to be coloured by the sunshine it doesn't matter whether it's the sunshine of to-day or the sunshine of fifty thousand years ago; it comes from the sun all the same, and as aniline dyes are the sunshine of long ago it's no harm to have them to colour flowers now.”
“Daddy was only complaining of the horrid ones, my dear,” said the Mother, without looking at me. “Isn't that what you meant?” she added, and now she looked at me, and though I was suspicious that she was smiling under her skin, I could not detect the slightest symptom of a smile in her voice.
“Of course I meant the hideous ones—magenta and that other sort of purple thing. I usually make my meaning plain,” said I, with a modified bluster.
“Oh,” remarked Rosamund, in a tone that suggested a polite negation of acquiescence.
There was another little silence before I said,—“Anyhow, it was those German brutes who developed those aniline things.”
“Oh, yes; they could do anything they pleased with coal tar,” said Dorothy. “But the other sort could do anything he pleased with the Germans—and he did.”
“The other sort?” said I inquiringly.