“One would have thought,” she said, “that men of University training, like Mr. Asquith—one would have thought that an appeal to reason would not be unheard by them. But reason,” she reflected, “what is reason without Reality?”
Doing homage to the phrase, she repeated it once more, and caught the ear of Mr. Clacton, as he issued from his room; and he repeated it a third time, giving it, as he was in the habit of doing with Mrs. Seal’s phrases, a dryly humorous intonation. He was well pleased with the world, however, and he remarked, in a flattering manner, that he would like to see that phrase in large letters at the head of a leaflet.
“But, Mrs. Seal, we have to aim at a judicious combination of the two,” he added in his magisterial way to check the unbalanced enthusiasm of the women. “Reality has to be voiced by reason before it can make itself felt. The weak point of all these movements, Miss Datchet,” he continued, taking his place at the table and turning to Mary as usual when about to deliver his more profound cogitations, “is that they are not based upon sufficiently intellectual grounds. A mistake, in my opinion. The British public likes a pellet of reason in its jam of eloquence—a pill of reason in its pudding of sentiment,’ he said, sharpening the phrase to a satisfactory degree of literary precision.
His eyes rested, with something of the vanity of an author, upon the yellow leaflet which Mary held in her hand. She rose, took her seat at the head of the table, poured out tea for her colleagues, and gave her opinion upon the leaflet. So she had poured out tea, so she had criticized Mr. Clacton’s leaflets a hundred times already; but now it seemed to her that she was doing it in a different spirit; she had enlisted in the army, and was a volunteer no longer. She had renounced something and was now—how could she express it?—not quite “in the running”
