Page:Anthony Hope - The Dolly Dialogues.djvu/48

 decidedly good-looking, fresh and sincere of aspect, with large inquiring eyes—eyes which I felt would demand a little too much of me at breakfast—but then a large tea-urn puts that all right.

'Miss Sophia Milton—Mr. Carter,' said Mrs. Hilary, and left us.

Well, we tried the theatres first; but as she had only been to the Lyceum and I had only been to the Gaiety, we soon got to the end of that. Then we tried Art: she asked me what I thought of Degas: I evaded the question by criticising a drawing of a horse in last week's Punch—which she hadn't seen. Upon this she started literature. She said 'Some Qualms and a Shiver' was the book of the season. I put my money on 'The Queen of the Quorn.' Dead stop again! And I saw Mrs. Hilary's eye upon me: there was wrath in her face. Something must be done.

A brilliant idea seized me. I had read that four-fifths of the culture of England were Conservative. I also was a Conservative. It was four to one on! I started politics. I could have whooped for joy when I elicited something particularly incisive about the ignorance of the masses.

'I do hope you agree with me,' said Miss Milton. 'The more one reads and thinks, the more one sees how fatally false a theory it is that the ignorant masses—people such as I have described—can ever rule a great Empire.'

'The Empire wants gentlemen; that's what