‘You are a very philosophical spectator of the process,’ Robert said, still displeased.
‘Just consider what a capacious swallow the poor boy had in his tender infancy, and how hard it was crammed with legends, hymns, and allegories, with so many scruples bound down on his poor little conscience, that no wonder, when the time of expansion came, the whole concern should give way with a jerk.’
‘I thought Miss Charlecote’s education had been most anxiously admirable.’
‘Precisely so! Don’t you see? Why, how dull you are for a man who has been to Oxford!’
‘I should seriously be glad to hear your view, for Owen’s course has always been inexplicable to me.’
‘To you, poor Robin, who lived gratefully on the crumbs of our advantages! The point was that to you they were crumbs, while we had a surfeit.’
‘Owen never seemed overdone. I used rather to hate him for his faultlessness, and his familiarity with what awed my ignorance.’
‘The worse for him! He was too apt a scholar, and received all unresisting, unsifting—Anglo-Catholicism, slightly touched with sentiment, enthusiasm for the Crusades, passive obedience—acted faithfully up to it; imagined that to be “not a good Churchman,” as he told Charles, expressed the seven deadly sins, and that reasoning was the deadliest of all!’
‘As far as I understand you, you mean that there was not
sufficient distinction between proven and non-proven—important and unimportant.’