"Very likely he would." "-- if I WILL go to dinner!" cried Mr.Boythorn in a violent burst and stopping to strike his stick upon the ground.

"And he would probably add, 'Is there such a thing as principle, Mr.Harold Skimpole ?'" "To which Harold Skimpole would reply, you know," he returned in his gayest manner and with his most ingenuous smile, "'Upon my life I have not the least idea! I don't know what it is you call by that name, or where it is, or who possesses it.

If you possess it and find it comfortable, I am quite delighted and congratulate you heartily.
But I know nothing about it, I assure you; for I am a mere child, and I lay no claim to it, and I don't want it!' So, you see, excellent Boythorn and I would go to dinner after all!" This was one of many little dialogues between them which I always expected to end, and which I dare say would have ended under other circumstances, in some violent explosion on the part of our host.

But he had so high a sense of his hospitable and responsible position as our entertainer, and my guardian laughed so sincerely at and with Mr.
Skimpole, as a child who blew bubbles and broke them all day long, that matters never went beyond this point.

Mr.Skimpole, who always seemed quite unconscious of having been on delicate ground, then betook himself to beginning some sketch in the park which he never finished, or to playing fragments of airs on the piano, or to singing scraps of songs, or to lying down on his back under a tree and looking at the sky--which he couldn't help thinking, he said, was what he was meant for; it suited him so exactly.
"Enterprise and effort," he would say to us (on his back), "are delightful to me.