“I should think so,” said the Personage, emitting a long whiff of smoke.  Hadn’t that ever occurred to you before?”

“No,” replied Mr. Lavender, naively, “for I have never yet disbelieved anything in those journals.”

The Personage coughed heartily.

“I have always regarded them,” went on Mr. Lavender, “as I myself should wish to be regarded, ‘without fear and without reproach.’  For that is, as I understand it, the principle on which a gentleman must live, ever believing of others what he would wish believed of himself.  With the exception of Germans,” he added hastily.

“Naturally,” returned the Personage.  “And I’ll defy you to find anything in them which disagrees with that formula.  Everything they print refers to Germans if not directly then obliquely.  Germans are the ‘idee fixe’, and without an ‘idee fixe’, as you know, there’s no such thing as religion.  Do you get me?”

“Yes, indeed,” cried Mr. Lavender, enthused, for the whole matter now seemed to him to fall into coherence, and, what was more, to coincide with his preconceptions, so that he had no longer any doubts.  “You, sir —­the Unseen Power—­are but the crystallized embodiment of the national sentiment in time of war; in serving you, and fulfilling the ideas which you concrete in your journals, we public men are servants of the general animus, which in its turn serves the blind and burning instinct of justice.  This is eminently satisfactory to me, who would wish no better fate than to be a humble lackey in that house.”  He had no sooner, however, spoken those words than Joe Petty’s remarks about Public Opinion came back to him, and he added:  “But are you really the general animus, or are you only the animus of Mayors, that is the question?”

The personage seemed to follow this thought with difficulty.  “What’s that?” he said.

Mr. Lavender ran his hands through his hair.

“And turns,” he said, “on what is the unit of national feeling and intelligence?  Is it or is it not a Mayor?”

The Personage smiled.  “Well, what do you think?” he said.  “Haven’t you ever heard them after dinner?  There’s no question about it.  Make your mind easy if that’s your only trouble.”

Mr. Lavender, greatly cheered by the genial certainty in this answer, said:  “I thank you, sir.  I shall go back and refute that common scoffer, that caster of doubts.  I have seen the Truth face, to face, and am greatly encouraged to further public effort.  With many apologies I can now get out,” he added, as the train stopped at South Croydon.  “Blink!” And, followed by his dog, he stepped from the train.

The Personage, who was indeed no other than the private secretary of the private secretary of It whom Mr. Lavender had designated as the Truth watched him from the window.

“Well, that was a treat, dear papa!” he murmured to himself, emitting a sigh of smoke after his retreating interlocutor.