“Trust her instinct,” said Dolly, and Arthur was restrained.
Oswald took advantage of the interruption to take the word from Arthur.
“We joke and sharpen our wits in this sort of talk,” he said, “but education, you know, isn’t a joke. It might be the greatest power in the world. If I didn’t think I was a sort of schoolmaster in Africa.... That’s the only decent excuse a white man has for going there.... I’m getting to be a fanatic about education. Give me the schools of the world and I would make a Millennium in half a century.... You don’t mean to let Peter drift. You say it, but you can’t mean it. Drift is waste. We don’t make half of what we could make of our children. We don’t make a quarter—not a tenth. They could know ever so much more, think ever so much better. We’re all at sixes and sevens.”
He realized he wasn’t good at expressing his ideas. He had intended something very clear and compelling, a sort of ultimatum about Peter.
“I believe in Sir Francis Galton,” Aunt Phœbe remarked in his pause; saying with stern resolution things that she felt had to be said. They made her a little breathless, and she fixed her eye on the view until they were said. “Eugenics. It is a new idea. A revival. Plato had it. Men ought to be bred like horses. No marriage or any nonsense of that kind. Just a simple scientific blending of points. Then Everything would be different.”
“Almost too different,” Arthur reflected....
“When I consider Peter and think of all one could do for him——” said Oswald, still floundering for some clenching way of putting it....
§ 5
One evening Dolly caught her cousin looking at her husband with an expression that stuck in her memory. It was Oswald’s habit to sit if he could in such a position that he could rest the obliterated cheek of his face upon a shadowing hand, his fingers on his forehead. Then one saw what a pleasant-faced man he would have been if only he had left that Egyptian shell alone. So he was sitting on this occasion, his elbow on the arm of the settle. His brow was knit, his one eye keen and steady. He was listening to his host discoursing upon the many superiorities of the artisan in the middle ages to his successor of today. And he seemed to be weighing and estimating Arthur with some little difficulty.
Then, as if it was a part of the calculation he was making, he turned to look at Dolly. Their eyes met; for a moment he could not mask himself.