"I don't agree. If you are not careful you can't talk nonsense. If you want to talk nonsense, you've not got to be not careful."

"There are too many 'nots,'" remarked Nadine.

"Not at all. If you are careless some sort of idea creeps into what you say, and it ceases to be nonsense. There are lots of creeping ideas about like microbes, any of which spoil it. Hardly anybody can be really meaningless for five minutes. That is why the Mad Tea Party is a supreme work of art: you can't attach the slightest sense to anything that is said in it."

"The question is what you mean by nonsense," said Nadine. "Is it what Mr. Bernard Shaw writes in his plays, or what Mrs. Humphry Ward writes in her books? They neither mean anything but they are not at all alike. In fact they are as completely opposed to each other as sense is to nonsense."

Berts threw himself back on the turf.

"True," he said. "But they are neither of them nonsense. The lame and the halt and the blind ideas creep into both. They both talk sense mortally wounded."

Esther gave her appreciative sigh.

"Oh, Berts, how true!" she said. "I went to a play by Mrs. Humphry Ward the other day, or else I read a book by Bernard Shaw, I forget which, and all the time I kept trying to see what the sense of it had been before it had its throat cut. But no one ever tried to see what Alice in Wonderland meant, or what Aunt Dodo means."

"Mama is wonderful," said Nadine. "She lives[Pg 74] up to what she says, too. Her whole life has been complete nonsense. I do hope Jack will persuade her to do the most ridiculous thing of all, and marry him."

[Pg 74]

"Is that why he is coming?" asked Esther.

"Oh, I hope so. It would be the greatest and most absurd romance of the century."

Hugh was eating sugar meditatively out of the sugar basin.

"I don't see that you have any right to lay down the law about nonsense, Nadine," he said. "You are constantly reading Plato, and making arguments, which are meant to be consecutive."

"I do that to relax my mind," said Nadine. "Berts is quite right. Nonsense is not the absence of sense, but the negative of sense, just as sugar is the 

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