Page:E Nesbit - The Literary Sense.djvu/315

Rh more unlikely things than you do. You believe in algebra and Euclid and log—what's-his-names. Now I don't believe a word of all that."

"We have it on the best authority that by getting up early you can believe six impossible things before breakfast."

"But they're not impossible. Don't you see that's just it? The things I like to believe are the very things that might be true. And they're relics of a prettier time than ours, a time when people believed in ghosts and fairies and witches and the devil—oh, yes! and in God and His angels, too. Now the times are bound in yellow brick, and we believe in nothing but . . . Euclid and—and company prospectuses and patent medicines."

When she is a little angry she is very charming, but it was too dark for me to see her face.

"Then," I asked, "it is merely the literary sense that leads you to make the Holy Sign when you find two knives crossed on your table, or to knock under the table and cry 'Unberufen' when you have provoked the Powers with some kind word of the destiny they have sent you?"