"There's two hours till bedtime."
Peter straightened and began strolling aimlessly about the deck, half regretting that they had decided to spend the evening on the yacht. Varney looked after him with a certain sense of guilt. Against this background of quiet night and moonlit peace, his enterprise began to look very small and easy. A ramble through the pleasant woods over there, a little girl met and played with, a leisurely stroll hand-in-hand down a woodland path to the yacht—was it for this that he had begged the assistance of Peter Maginnis, of the large administrative abilities and the teeming energies? Varney began to be a little ashamed of himself. To follow out Peter's own figure, it appeared that he had called out the fire department to help him put out a smoking sheet of note-paper on a hearth.
Soon, in one of his goings and comings, Peter halted. "There was another
Hunston dispatch in the paper this morning," he vouchsafed.
"Politics?"
"Said the reform movement was a joke."
"Good one?"
"Good movement, you mean?"
"No—good joke."
"No reform movement is ever a good joke, under any circumstances whatsoever. Where it appears a joke at all, it is the kind that would appeal only to pinheads of the dottiest nature."
"I see."