Therefore Katie, hearing this horrible tale, had quailed, and had straightway given away this devil who was the sinister glory of her house. She had agreed that he was a man whom anybody might righteously have shot on sight, and had gathered her Greenaway garments about her whenever she had passed within a mile of Sir Joseph’s door....
But now he was “Uncle Joe” again, and—well, it must have been rather funny. For Katie’s impressionable conscience had given her no rest day or night until she had sought Uncle Joe out and had made a clean breast of it all before him. Katie had fancied she had seen something like a twinkle in those sinful old eyes, but (this was when she mentioned the name of the “Novum”) the twinkle had vanished again. Oh, yes, Sir Joseph, had heard of the “Novum.” Didn’t a Mr. Prang write for it?...
And thereupon Katie had given Mr. Prang away too....
But in the end Sir Joseph had forgiven her, and had told her that she had better not be either a revolutionary, nor yet the kind of Conservative that is only a revolutionary turned inside-out, but just a good little girl, and had asked her how she was getting on, and why she hadn’t been to see her Aunt Anne, and whether she would like some tickets for a Needlework Exhibition; and now she was just beginning to forget that he had ever been anything but “Uncle Joe,” who had given her toys at Christmas, and Sunday tickets for the Zoo whenever she had wanted to go there on that particularly crowded day.
Dorothy had had something of this in her mind when she had brought Katie to Cromwell Gardens that Sunday afternoon. From Katie’s new attitude to her own Ludlow project was not so far as it seemed. If she could lead the zealous ’vert to such promising general topics as Boy Scouts, Compulsory Service, and the preparation of boys for the Army (topics that Katie constantly brought forward by denunciation of their opposites), her scheme would certainly not suffer, and might even be advanced.
And, as it happened, no sooner had Dorothy tucked her last letter back into its envelope than Katie broke out—earnestly, proselytizingly, and very prettily on the stump.
“There you are!” she exclaimed. “That’s all exactly what I mean! Why, any one of those letters ought to be enough to convince anybody! Here are all these stupid people at home, ready to believe everything a native tells them, going on as they do, and hardly one of them’s ever set foot out of England in his life! Of course the Indians know exactly what they want, but don’t you see, Dorothy—,” very patiently she explained it for fear Dorothy should not see, “—don’t you see that it’s all so much a matter of course to Mollie and those that they can actually write whole letters about window-curtains! I love that about the window-curtains! It’s all such an old story to them! They know, you see, and haven’t got to be talking about it all the time in order to persuade themselves! There it is!—But these other people don’t know anything at all. They don’t even see what a perfect answer window-curtains are to them! They go on and on and on—you do see what I mean, Dorothy?——”
“Yes, dear,” said Dorothy, mildly thinking of the great number of people there were in the world who would take no end of trouble to explain things to her. “Go on.”
And Katie continued to urge upon her friend the argument that those know most about a country who know most about it.
Katie had got to the stage of being almost sure that she remembered Mollie’s coming into the studio in Cheyne Walk one day, when Lady Tasker, who had not spoken, suddenly looked up from her crochet and said, “Look, Dorothy—that’s the girl I was speaking about—coming along past the Museum there.”