"How is it you've given up reading of late days?"
"I've sunk into a lazy way. The lazier you are the less time there is for anything."
"You ought to read; you've ample leisure to improve your mind; and ample need to."
"That's just it—the ample leisure. When I had Christo to look after, though every precious moment of the day was full, I could find time for all. And that shows a busy man or woman's more likely to see well after affairs than a leisurely one. Some men can actually make time, I believe—Myles could. But now—through these black, hateful, sunless days—I feel I'm always wanting to creep off to bed, and sleep, and forget."
"That's never my brave girl spoke that?"
"I'm not brave; and I'm tired of the awful stores of things worth knowing collected by people who are dead. How the men who wrote books must look back from the other world and shiver at the stuff they've left behind them in this—knowing all they know there! But Myles was right in that. He used to say he'd learned more from leaning over gates than from any books. And I believe he had."
"He was grounded in solid knowledge by lessons from wise books to start with. They taught him to learn."
"Such a way as he had of twisting everything into a precept or example!"
"You'd have held that prosy talk presently."
"Speak of sermons in stones! He found whole gospels in a dead leaf."