"Oh, your breakfast must have disagreed with you," she flung back.
"I like a road that leads away to prospects bright and fair,
A road that is an ordered road, like a nun's evening prayer;
But best of all I love a road that leads to God knows where,"
Rod quoted. "Perhaps that expresses it best. If there is anything in heredity the original Roderick's restlessness has cropped out in me—without either his capacity or his opportunity for doing things. Think of the resolution, the spirit of that old fish, the vision. He saw far beyond himself. He must have had a dynamic energy. Whatever he wanted he went after, tooth and toenail. And look at the result—in the fifth generation—of his pains and planning. The governor's idea of life is as rigid as granite: good food, efficient service, genteel restraint in all things, taboos and forms of all sorts. Grove's a glorified shopkeeper, with all a vulgar shop-keeper's love of display. Phil's the official watchdog of the family's material interests. And I'm a negligible quantity. Rum lot. And I'm the only one who isn't perfectly satisfied with everything. Even old Phil would just grin if I talked to him the way I'm talking to you."
"He'd be right," the girl replied slowly. "You've got what everybody's after,—ease, security, leisure. You aren't chafed by anything sordid. You ought to realize how fortunate you are and be satisfied. You find life pleasant. Isn't that good enough?"
"Why, yes, so far as it goes," Rod admitted. "Only nobody who gets beyond purely superficial thinking is ever satisfied with mere pleasantness. I'm not a cow to lie down in a clover field and chew my cud forever."
"I give you up," Mary said. "You're a discontented pendulum."
"It's the fault of my education," Rod returned with mock humility.
"Education is a mixed blessing sometimes," Mary said in a tone that brought him to surprised attention. "It shouldn't be bestowed indiscriminately on those who can't live up to it, who can't gratify any of the cravings and dreams that education breeds. Education, if it's thorough, destroys too many illusions—illusions that one must hold as realities, if one is poor, a nobody, and without a chance to be anything else."
"Good Lord," he exclaimed, "you don't feel that way about it, surely?"
"Now and then—not always," she murmured. "It's like loving a thing and hating it, too. There are times when Euripides, and Housman's lyrics, and Thomas Hardy don't fit in with cooking and cotton stockings—when poetic and artistic visions of what-might-be tantalize like glimpses of a cloud-hidden moon. Why should one sharpen one's perception of beauties that are beyond one's reach? I should have been trained in domestic science or nursing, or selling fripperies to rich women, instead of being put through the cultural hotbed of a university. They meant well. But unless a girl has a ready-made: social background, or a decided talent, the so-called higher education is only a handicap."