As she sat there beside him she thought
of some of these things, asked herself whether they were what he was
thinking of when he said, for instance, that he was sick of all the
modern cant about freedom and had no sympathy with those who wanted an
extension of it. What was needed for the good of the world was that
people should make a better use of the liberty they possessed. Such
declarations as this took Verena's breath away; she didn't suppose you
could hear any one say such a thing as that in the nineteenth century,
even the least advanced. It was of a piece with his denouncing the
spread of education; he thought the spread of education a gigantic
farce--people stuffing their heads with a lot of empty catchwords that
prevented them from doing their work quietly and honestly. You had a
right to an education only if you had an intelligence, and if you looked
at the matter with any desire to see things as they are you soon
perceived that an intelligence was a very rare luxury, the attribute of
one person in a hundred. He seemed to take a pretty low view of
humanity, anyway. Verena hoped that something really bad had happened to
him--not by way of gratifying any resentment he aroused in her nature,
but to help herself to forgive him for so much contempt and brutality.
She wanted to forgive him, for after they had sat on their bench half an
hour and his jesting mood had abated a little, so that he talked with
more consideration (as it seemed) and more sincerity, a strange feeling
came over her, a perfect willingness not to keep insisting on her own
side and a desire not to part from him with a mere accentuation of their
differences.
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