"And therefore," continued Mr. Mablethorpe, "I counsel you to go to London and take up the new billet. Go and reason with the Yorkshire foreman, and pulverize the gentleman in spats, and argue with creditors—go and study People. Study the way they walk, the way they talk, the way they think, the way they drink. You won't like them. They will shirk their work, or blow in your face, or tell you anecdotes which will make you weep. But they will restore your balance. They will develop the human side of you. Then you will be really rather an exceptional character, Philip. Very few of us are evenly balanced between Things and People. All women, for instance, have a permanent list toward People. Things have no meaning for them. A triumph of engineering, or organisation, or art, or logical reasoning, makes no appeal whatever to a woman's enthusiasm. She may admire the man who achieves them, of course, but only because he happens to have sad eyes, or a firm mouth, or a wife in an asylum. If the personal touch be lacking, Things simply bore Woman. I once showed an aunt of mine—a refined and intelligent woman—round the finest cathedral in England, and the one solitary feature of the whole fabric which interested her was a certain stall in the choir, where a grandnephew of hers had once sat for eighteen months as a choir-boy! Yes, women are undoubtedly lopsided. Men, as a whole, are predisposed the other way—which largely accounts for what is known as sex-antagonism. Heaven help all novelists if no such thing existed!"
"Shop!" remarked the unfilial Dumps.
Mr. Mablethorpe, recalled to his text, continued:
"Very well, then. We agree that Things—by which we mean Work—are not the Alpha and Omega of Life. Alpha, perhaps; Omega, certainly not."
"Don't you mean, 'Archibald, Certainly Not!' Daddy?" enquired Miss Dumps, referring to a popular ditty of the moment. Mr. Mablethorpe took no heed.
"Labor omnia vincit," he said, "is only half a truth. There is another maxim in the same tongue which supplies the other half. You can easily commit it to memory if you bear in mind the fact that it ends a pentameter, while the other ends a hexameter. It is: Omnia vincit amor."
He translated for the benefit of his unlearned daughter, and swept on.
"Now, consider. If it is true that Work conquers All, and equally true that Love conquers All, what must be our logical and inevitable conclusion?"
"That Love and Work come to the same thing in the end," she said. Her eyes met Philip's, and dropped quickly.