'O, had you gone back there?' she said. 'I think it takes very little philosophy to decline what one does not want.'
'Evidently. But how came you not to want what everybody else wants? There is the philosophy, you see. If you bring all things down to bare truth, you will be Diogenes in his tub presently.'
' "Bare truth!" '—said the girl. 'How people say that, as if truth were only a lay figure!'
'But think how disagreeable truth would often be, if it were not draped! Could you stand it? I beg pardon! I mean, not you, but other people!'
'I have stood it pretty often,' said the girl with a grave gesture of her head.
'Impossible! But did you believe that it was truth?'
'Too self-evident to be doubted!'
Stuart laughed, again with a very unfeigned tribute of pleasure or admiration in his face. 'It is a disagreeable truth,' said he, 'that that is not a good sandwich. Permit me to supply its place with something else. Here is cake, and nothing beside that I can see; will you have a piece of cake? It is said to be a feminine taste.'
'No, not any cake,' said Wych Hazel, her eyes searching the brook shadows. 'But I will have another sandwich, Mr. Nightingale—if there is one. At least, if there is more than one!'
'Ah,' said Stuart, 'you shall have it, and you shall not know the state of the basket. Those two people have so much to talk about, they have no time to eat!' And he took another sandwich himself.