George laughed.
‘But if you see something very wrong going on, a child working in a mine, or something like that, you want to do something about it. You want to stop it.’
‘No,’ said Hugo after a pause. ‘I am afraid I don’t. I only want to run away and not look.’
George laughed again.
‘I don’t believe that,’ he said, ‘I am afraid that is “intellectual dishonesty” on your part, Hugo. You don’t like to own to an ordinary good impulse.’
Then we all laughed, Hugo too. But he added presently:
‘It would not be a good impulse even if I did try to stop a child working in a mine; it would only be another sort of selfishness, removing something that was disagreeable to see.’
And George rejoined:
‘But I never said the Liberal Party was unselfish. I never suggested the motive that made them want to remove abuses. I only said they did want to!’
And so it would go on. I used to be interested listening to their arguments. I agreed most with Hugo, but what George said made things stand out quite differently from the way I had thought of them before. Chiefly, though, what interested me, was the fact that George and Mollie should be Liberals themselves. I had taken it for granted that political parties were silly; George and Mollie were not at all silly. That was more convincing to me than arguments on either side.