Dodge seemed to feel that the désagréments in this last case were trivial as compared with those of the former.
“Dodge is a born sceptic,” said Lady Engleton. “What would you say, Dodge, if some tiresome, reasonable person were to come and point out something to you that you couldn’t honestly deny, and yet that seemed to upset all the ideas that you had felt were truest and best?”
Dodge scratched his head. “I should say as what he said wasn’t true,” replied Dodge.
“But if you couldn’t help seeing that it was true?”
“That ud be arkard,” Dodge admitted.
“Then what would you do?”
Dodge leant upon the broom-handle, apparently in profound thought. His words were waited for.
“I think,” he announced at last, “as I shouldn’t do nothin’ partic’lar.”
“Dodge, you really are an oracle!” Hadria exclaimed. “What could more simply describe the action of our Great Majority?”
“You are positively impish in your mood to-day!” exclaimed Lady Engleton. “What should we do without our Great Majority, as you call it? It is absolutely necessary to put some curb on the wild impulses of pure reason”—a sentiment that Hadria greeted with chuckles of derision.