"You'd _never_
understand. It's the tone--your tone that we object to."
"Yes. It's your tone," said the Black Rat, picking himself up limb by
limb.
"If you thought a trifle more about the work you're supposed to do, and a
trifle less about your precious feelings, you'd render a little more duty
in return for the power vested in you--we mean wasted on you," the Waters
replied.
"I have been some hundreds of years laboriously acquiring the knowledge
which you see fit to challenge so light-heartedly," the Wheel jarred.
"Challenge him! Challenge him!" clamoured the little waves riddling down
through the tail-race. "As well now as later. Take him up!"
The main mass of the Waters plunging on the Wheel shocked that well-bolted
structure almost into box-lids by saying: "Very good. Tell us what you
suppose yourself to be doing at the present moment."
"Waiving the offensive form of your question, I answer, purely as a matter
of courtesy, that I am engaged in the trituration of farinaceous
substances whose ultimate destination it would be a breach of the trust
reposed in me to reveal."
"Fiddle!" said the Waters. "We knew it all along! The first direct
question shows his ignorance of his own job. Listen, old thing. Thanks to
us, you are now actuating a machine of whose construction you know
nothing, that that machine may, over wires of whose ramifications you are,
by your very position, profoundly ignorant, deliver a power which you can
never realise, to localities beyond the extreme limits of your mental
horizon, with the object of producing phenomena which in your wildest
dreams (if you ever dream) you could never comprehend.
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