"But you see my point?" I persisted. "Circumlocution is a Victorian nuisance. Any man who has anything to say says it simply and without trappings. And, mind you, Macdonald, people who use circumlocution in style use it in thought. The average man loves flowery literature, and he loves flowery thoughts. The contest between the plain style and the aureate style is really the old contest between realism and romance. The romantic way to look at crime is to fix your attention on drink and penny dreadfuls and cinema shows; the realistic way is to look bravely at the economic division of wealth that causes poverty and disease, the father and mother of crime."
"You're away from the point again," said Macdonald with a smile. "How do you defend Janet Brown's week of anagrams?"
"It doesn't need any defence; it was Janet's fancy to play herself and I fail to see that she was wasting time. You really never waste time unless you are under coercion."
"Another rotten paradox," he laughed, "go on!"
"When I allow convention to force me to play cards I feel that I am wasting time, for I hate the blamed things. But if I spend a day pottering with the wheels of an old clock I am not wasting time: I am extremely interested all the time."
"No, no! It won't do! Janet was wasting time, and you know it, in spite of your arguing!"
"I'll tell you what's wrong with you and all your fellow educationists, Macdonald," I said. "You've got utilitarian commercial minds. You worship work and duty, and you have your eyes on monetary success all the time. You look upon bairns as a foreman mechanic looks upon workmen, and your idea of wasted time is the same as his. If I were Bruce, the linen merchant, I should certainly accuse a girl of wasting time if I caught her reading a novelette during working hours. Bruce has one definite aim—production of linen. He knows exactly what he wants to produce. You don't, and I don't. We don't know what effect puzzling out anagrams will have on Janet's mentality. We have no right to accuse her of wasting time."
"Don't tell me," he cried; "there is a difference between work and play. Janet has no more right to play during school hours than a mill-girl has to read novelettes during working hours."
"The mill-girl is a wage-slave, and I don't think that dominies should apply the ethics of wage-slavery to education. Her master, Bruce, goes golfing and fishing on working days, only, he is economically free, and he can do what he likes. And I don't suppose you will contend that tending a loom is the goal of humanity. If you want to make Janet an efficient mill-girl by all means coerce her to work in school. But, Macdonald, I have argued a score of times that education should not aim at turning out wage-slaves. If Janet is to be a mill-girl all your history and grammar won't make her tend a loom any better; so far as the loom is concerned the composing of anagrams will help her quite as much as grammar will."