Mr. Lavender: "If you are indeed the
invisible king swaying the currents of national life, and turning its
tides at will, it is essential that we should believe in you; and before
we can believe in you must we not know all about you?"

"By Jove, sir," replied the Personage, "that strikes me as being
contrary to all the rules of religion. I thought faith was the ticket."

By this answer Mr. Lavender was so impressed that he sat for a moment in
silence, with his eyebrow working up and down.

"Sir," he said at last, "you have given me a new thought. If you are
right, to disbelieve in you and the acts which you perform, or rather
the editions which you issue, is blasphemy."

"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 though