There had been silence in the room for some minutes,
accentuated rather than broken by the quiet drumming of the girl's
fingers on the window sill. Finally Katherine breathed a deep sigh and
murmured to herself:
"'Far called our Navy fades away,
On dune and headland sinks the fire.
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre.'
I wonder if I've got the lines right," she whispered to herself. She
had forgotten there was anyone else in the room, and was quite
startled when Dorothy spoke.
"Kate, that's a solemn change, from Gilbert to Kipling. I always judge
your mood by your quotations. Has life suddenly become too serious for
'Pinafore' or the 'Mikado'?"
"Oh, I don't know," said Katherine, without turning round. "They are
humorous all, and so each furnishes something suitable for the
saddened mind. Wisdom comes through understanding your alphabet
properly. For instance, first there was Gilbert, and that gave us G;
then came Kipling, and he gave us K; thus we get an algebraic formula,
G.K., which are the initials of Chesterton, a still later arrival, and
as the mind increases in despondency it sinks lower and lower down the
alphabet until it comes to S, and thus we have Barn-yard Shaw, an
improvement on the Kail-yard school, who takes the O pshaw view of
life. And relaxing hold of him I sink deeper until I come to W-- W. W.
Jacobs-- how I wish he wrote poetry! He should be the humorist of all
sailors, and perhaps some time he will desert barges for battleships.
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