Bureaucracy -- Fiction; England -- Fiction; Satire; Science fiction
Dr. Cross said, "The queer thing about Stephen Dixon is that you never
know when he'll take a thing in this way and when he won't. I've known
him sit at tea in the houses of the lowest slum criminals--by the way,
that is surely the scriptural line--and I've known him cut in the street
people who were doing the same things in a different way--a sweating
shopowner, for instance. I sometimes think it depends with him on the
size and comfort of the house the criminal lives in, which is too
hopelessly illogical, you'd think, for an intelligent man like him. I
lose my patience with him sometimes, I confess. But anyhow he knows his
own mind."
"He's gone," Pansy said to Anthony, who was waiting for them at the
gate. "He thinks it's important not to acquiesce in us. So he's gone to
the inn.... By the way, I nearly told him that the innkeeper is leading
a double life too--ever so much worse than ours--but I thought it would
be too unkind, he'd have had to sleep on the green."
"Well," Anthony said crossly, "we can get on without him. But another
time, darling, I wish you'd remember that there's not the least need to
explain our domestic affairs in the lane to casual acquaintances, even
if they do happen to be spending the night. It's simply not done, you
know! It makes a most embarrassing situation all round. I know you're
not shy, but you might remember that I am."
"Sorry, old dear," said Pansy. "There's been so much explainin' this
evenin' that I suppose I caught it.... You people," she added to Dr.
Cross and Kitty, "have got awkwarder things to explain than I have. I'd
a long sight rather have to explain free love than love by Act of
Parliament."
"But on the whole," said the doctor, relieved to have got on to that
subject again after the rather embarrassing interlude of private
affairs, "I thought the meeting this evening not bad. What did you
think, Miss Grammont?"
"I should certainly," said Kitty, "have expected it to have been worse.
If I had been one of the audience, it would have been."
6
Some of the subsequent meetings of that campaign, in fact, were. But not
all. On the whole, as Dr. Cross put it, they were not bad.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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