onions, because God had made him so that he did hate onions, and
(going still deeper into things) insisted that to eat a thing when
you did not want it was wasting it much more truly than it would
be wasting it to leave it; the little girl ate up all the grounds
left in her teacup, and then announced the fact with considerable
complacency.

Very, very natural. The little girl's act was a slight straw
showing how a great current sets. It was a fair exemplification
of a tendency which is woven into the make of our being. Tell the
average mortal that it is wrong to walk on the left side of the road,
and in nine cases out of ten he will conclude that the proper thing
must be to walk on the right side of the road; whereas in actual
life, and in almost all opinions, moral, political, and religious,
the proper thing is to walk neither on the left nor the right side,
but somewhere about the middle. Say to the ship-master, You are to
sail through a perilous strait; you will have the raging Scylla on
one hand as you go. His natural reply will be, Well, I will keep as
far away from it as possible; I will keep close by the other side.
But the rejoinder must be, No, you will be quite as ill off there;
you will be in equal peril on the other side: there is Charybdis.
What you have to do is to keep at a safe distance from each. In
avoiding the one, do not run into the other.

It seems to be a great law of the universe, that Wrong lies upon
either side of the way, and that Right is the narrow path between.
There are the two ways of doing wrong--Too Much and Too Little.
Go to the extreme right hand, and you are wrong; go to the extreme
left hand, and you are wrong too. That you may be right, you have
to keep somewhere between these two extremes: but not necessarily