"What? The Five Towns isn't good enough! I can find something better than the law, and I can find something better than the Five Towns!... And here young Lawton has the impudence to begin to preach to me on Knype platform, and to tell me I'm wise in going! He's the President of the local Law Society, you know! No end of a President! And hasn't even got gumption enough to keep his father's practice together! Stupid ass! Well, I let him have it, and straight! He's no worse than the rest. They've got no brains in this district. And they're so narrow--narrow isn't the word! Thick-headed's the word. Stupid! Mean!... Mean!... What did it matter to them? I kept to all their rules. There was a real solicitor on the premises, and there'd soon have been another, if I'd had time. No concern of theirs how the money was divided between me and the real solicitor. But they were jealous--there you are! They don't understand enterprise. They hate it. Nothing ever moves in the Five Towns. And they've got no manners--I do believe that's the worst. Look at Lawton's manners! Nothing but a boor! They aren't civilized yet--that's what's the matter with them! That's what my father used to say. Barbarians, he used to say. 'Ce sont des barbares!'... Kids used to throw stones at him because of his neck-tie. The grown-ups chuck a brick at anything they don't quite fancy. That's their idea of wit."
Hilda was afraid of his tempestuous mood. But she enjoyed her fear, as she might have enjoyed exposure to a dangerous storm. She enjoyed the sensation of her fragility and helplessness there, cooped up with him in the close intimacy of the compartment. She was glad that he did not apologize to her for his lack of restraint, nor foolishly pretend that he was boring her.
"It does seem a shame!" she murmured, her eyes candidly admitting that she felt enormously flattered.
He sighed and laughed. "How often have I heard my father say that--'Ce sont des barbares!' Peels only brought him over because they could find nobody in the Five Towns civilized enough to do the work that he did.... I can imagine how he must have felt when he first came here!... My God!... Environment!... I tell you what--it's only lately I've realized how I loathe the provinces!"
The little interior in which they were, swept steadily and smoothly across the central sunlit plain of England, passing canals and brooks and cottages and churches--silent and stolid in that English stupidity that he was criticizing. And Hilda saw of George Cannon all that was French in him. She saw him quite anew, as something rather exotic and entirely marvellous. She thought: "When I first met him, I said to myself he was a most extraordinary man. And I was right. I was more right than I ever imagined. No one down there has any idea of what he really is. They're too stupid, as he says."
He imposed on her his scorn of the provincial. She had to share it. She had a vision of the Five Towns as a smoky blotch on the remote horizon,--negligible, crass, ridiculous in its heavy self-complacency. The very Orgreaves themselves were tinged with this odious English provincialism.
He smiled to himself, and then said, very quietly: "It isn't of the least importance, you know. In fact I'm rather glad. I've never had any difficulty in making money, and when I've settled up everything down there I shan't be precisely without. And I shall have no excuse for not branching out in a new line."
She meekly encouraged him to continue.
"Oh yes!" he went on. "The law isn't the only thing--not by a long way. And besides, I'm sick of it. Do you know what the great thing of the future is, I mean the really great thing--the smashing big thing?" He smiled, kindly and confidential.
She too smiled, shaking her head.