374 A MODERN COMEDY
in the fate of a pound of sugar bought with the fraction
of a Bradbury; He would not arbitrarily interfere with
a ripple of the tides set loose by His arrangement of the
Spheres. God, to Michael, was a monarch strictly limited
by His own Constitution. He restored the letter to his
pocket. Poor creatures ! But really, with 1,200,000 and
more English unemployed, mostly due to that confounded
Kaiser and his Navy stunt------! If that fellow and his
gang had not started their Naval rivalry in 1899, England
would have been out of the whole mess, or, perhaps, there
never would have been a mess !
He turned up from the Temple station towards the
offices of ' The Outpost.' He had c taken ' that weekly for
some years now. It knew everything, and managed to
convey a slight impression that nobody else knew any-
thing ; so that it seemed more weighty than any other
weekly. Having no particular Party to patronise, it could
patronise the lot. Without Imperial bias, it professed a
special knowledge of the Empire. Not literary, it made
a p oint of reducing the heads of literary men—Michael,
in his publishing days, had enjoyed every opportunity of
noticing that. Professing respect for Church and the Law,
it was an adept at giving them * what-for.' It fancied
itself on Drama, striking a somewhat Irish attitude towards
it. But, perhaps above all, it excelled in neat detraction
from political reputations, keeping them in their place,
and that place a little lower than ' The Outpost's.' More-
over, from its editorials emanated that ' holy ghost' of
inspired knowledge in periods just a little beyond average
comprehension, without which no such periodical had real
importance.
Michael went up the stairs two at a time, and entered
a large square room, where Mr. Blythe, back to the door,
was pointing with a ruler to a circle drawn on a map.