Andrew’s great eyes flashed in the lamplight.
“The mill,” he said. “Sometimes I feel inclined to let it stop working. Who would care if one wheel ceased to turn? There are so many others.”
“Ah, that’s the sort of thing I shall cut out of the book!” cried Henley, turning the soda-water into his whisky with a cheerful swish.
“We will be powerful, but never morbid; tragic, if you like, but not without hope. We need not aspire too much; but we will not look at the stones in the road all the time. And the dunghills, in which those weird fowl, the pessimistic realists, love to rake, we will sedulously avoid. Cheer up, old fellow, and be thankful that you possess a corrective in me.”
Trenchard’s face lightened in a rare smile as, with a half-sigh, he said:
“I believe you are right, and that I need a collaborator, an opposite, who is yet in sympathy with me. Yes; either of us might fail alone; together we should succeed.”
“Will succeed, my boy!”
“But not by pandering to the popular taste,” added Andrew in his most sombre tones, and with a curl of his thin, delicately-moulded lips. “I shall never consent to that.”
“We will not call it pandering. But we must hit the taste of the day, or we shall look a couple of fools.”
“People are always supposed to look fools when, for once, they are not fools,” said Andrew.