But little by little she
grew weary and rather sad; brought up, as she had been, to admire new
ideas, to criticise the social arrangements that one met almost
everywhere, and to disapprove of a great many things, she had yet never
dreamed of such a wholesale arraignment as Mr. Ransom's, so much
bitterness as she saw lurking beneath his exaggerations, his
misrepresentations. She knew he was an intense conservative, but she
didn't know that being a conservative could make a person so aggressive
and unmerciful. She thought conservatives were only smug and stubborn
and self-complacent, satisfied with what actually existed; but Mr.
Ransom didn't seem any more satisfied with what existed than with what
she wanted to exist, and he was ready to say worse things about some of
those whom she would have supposed to be on his own side than she
thought it right to say about almost any one. She ceased after a while
to care to argue with him, and wondered what could have happened to him
to make him so perverse. Probably something had gone wrong in his
life--he had had some misfortune that coloured his whole view of the
world. He was a cynic; she had often heard about that state of mind,
though she had never encountered it, for all the people she had seen
only cared, if possible, too much. Of Basil Ransom's personal history
she knew only what Olive had told her, and that was but a general
outline, which left plenty of room for private dramas, secret
disappointments and sufferings.
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