“Certainly, if he agreeably agrees with me. There are—oh, there are hateful ways of agreeing with people.”
Then Rose was about to mention Mr. Carington’s use of the word agreeable, but refrained, she did not know why. She caught the words about to issue out, and put them back into a corner of silence, and did say:
“What you say, Aunt Anne, of water reminds me of what Mr. W. said about a picture, last spring, of great war-ships coming through a mist toward us. It was rather fine. But the water was set in such stiff, orderly billows that Mr. W. said, ‘Yes, Britannia certainly has been ruling the waves.’”
“I had forgotten it,” said Anne. “Now I remember that our English friend did not capture the meaning.”
“Oh, no. Really, Pardy, it sometimes makes life hard in England, this sort of inaptitude to turn with quick apprehension from grave to gay.”
“It would suit your mama. I am not sure that I like our unending tendency to see things or put things in ridiculous aspects—no, not just ridiculous,—help me to a word; not funny, either,—somewhere among the lost words, the verbal refuse-heaps of Old English, there must be the word I want.”
“We know what you mean,” said Anne. “I agree with you. Our newspapers are every day painfully funny for me. To deal all the time with the serious so as perpetually to make it seem trifling by putting it in comic guises is to damage one’s true sense of humor.”
“And of the serious, which is worse,” said Lyndsay.
“And, Archie, I don’t like the constant misuse of words it brings about. I don’t like to lose respect for words. I don’t like their characters taken away, so as to unfit them for their next place. Words have duties.”
“That is all true, Anne; but if we begin to abuse newspapers, we shall never get home. And they are so infallible, confound them!—an absolutely honest confession that they have told what was not true is the last thing you can get out of them. The editor who would not contradict a false paragraph as to a man’s death is a good example: he offered to put in a statement of the man’s birth! Let us go home.”