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“Your assumptions are deliciously sweeping, but may I point out that a decent and–the dear old Abbot of Wilton would have put it in his resonant monkish Latin much better than I can–a scholarly reserve, does not necessarily connote blank vacuity of mind on all subjects.”

“Ah, the dear old Abbot of Wilton,” said the Rat sympathetically, as one nursed in that bosom. “Charmin’ fellow–thorough scholar and gentleman. Such a pity!”

“Oh, Sacred Fountains!” the Waters were fairly boiling. “He goes out of his way to expose his ignorance by triple bucketfuls. He creaks to high Heaven that he is hopelessly behind the common order of things! He invites the streams of Five Watersheds to witness his su-su-su-pernal incompetence, and then he talks as though there were untold reserves of knowledge behind him that he is too modest to bring forward. For a bland, circular, absolutely sincere impostor, you’re a miracle, O Wheel!”

“I do not pretend to be anything more than an integral portion of an accepted and not altogether mushroom institution.”

“Quite so,” said the Waters. “Then go round–hard—-“

“To what end?” asked the Wheel.

“Till a big box of tanks in your house begins to fizz and fume–gassing is the proper word.”

“It would be,” said the Cat, sniffing.

“That will show that your accumulators are full. When the accumulators are exhausted, and the lights burn badly, you will find us whacking you round and round again.”

“The end of life as decreed by Mangles and his creatures is to go whacking round and round for ever,” said the Cat.

“In order,” the Rat said, “that you may throw raw and unnecessary illumination upon all the unloveliness in the world. Unloveliness which we shall–er–have always with us. At the same time you will riotously neglect the so-called little but vital graces that make up Life.”

“Yes, Life,” said the Cat, “with its dim delicious half-tones and veiled indeterminate distances. Its surprisals, escapes, encounters, and dizzying leaps–its full-throated choruses in honour of the morning star, and its melting reveries beneath the sun-warmed wall.”

“Oh, you can go on the tiles, Pussalina, just the same as usual,” said the laughing Waters. “We sha’n’t interfere with you.”

“On the tiles, forsooth!” hissed the Cat.

“Well, that’s what it amounts to,” persisted the Waters. “We see a good deal of the minor graces of life on our way down to our job.”

“And–but I fear I speak to deaf ears–do they never impress you?” said the Wheel.

“Enormously,” said the Waters. “We have already learned six refined synonyms for loafing.”

“But (here again I feel as though preaching in the wilderness) it never occurs to you that there may exist some small difference between the wholly animal–ah–rumination of bovine minds and the discerning, well- apportioned leisure of the finer type of intellect?”

“Oh, yes. The bovine mind goes to sleep under a hedge and makes no bones about it when it’s shouted at. We’ve seen that–in haying-time–all along the meadows. The finer type is wide awake enough to fudge up excuses for shirking, and mean enough to get stuffy when its excuses aren’t accepted. Turn over!”

“But, my good people, no gentleman gets stuffy as you call it. A certain proper pride, to put it no higher, forbids—“

“Nothing that he wants to do if he really wants to do it. Get along! What are you giving us? D’you suppose we’ve scoured half heaven in the clouds, and half earth in the mists, to be taken in at this time of the day by a bone-idle, old hand-quern of your type?”

“It is not for me to bandy personalities with you. I can only say that I simply decline to accept the situation.”

“Decline away. It doesn’t make any odds. They’ll probably put in a turbine if you decline too much.”

“What’s a turbine?” said the Wheel, quickly.

“A little thing you don’t see, that performs surprising revolutions. But you won’t decline. You’ll hang on to your two nice red-strapped axles and your new machine-moulded pinions like–a–like a leech on a lily stem! There’s centuries of work in your old bones if you’d only apply yourself to it; and, mechanically, an overshot wheel with this head of water is about as efficient as a turbine.”