"How can that be, sir?" asked 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.
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