"
"You women," said Zachariah, with a smile, "or you girls rather, are
so positive. Just as though the world were divided like the goats
and the sheep in the gospel. That is a passage that I never could
quite understand. I never, hardly, see a pure breed either of goat
or sheep. I never see anybody who deserves go straight to heaven or
who deserves to go straight to hell. When the judgment day comes it
will be a difficult task. Why, Pauline, my dear, I am a humbug
myself."
"Ah well, I have heard all that before; but, nevertheless, what I say
is true. Some men, using speech as God meant men to use it, are
liars, and some are not. Of course not entirely so, nor at all
times. We cannot speak mere truth; we are not made to speak it. For
all that you are not a liar."
"Anyhow, I shall go on," said Mr. Allen. "We shall have a desperate
fight, and shall most likely lose; but no Tory shall sit for our
county if I can help it."
"Of course you will go on," said Zachariah. "So shall I go on. We
are to have a meeting in Clerkenwell to-morrow night, although, to
tell you the truth, I don't feel exactly the interest in the struggle
which I did in those of five-and-twenty years ago, when we had to
whisper our treasons to one another in locked rooms and put sentries
at the doors.
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