At this point Oswald became aware of Joan coming out of the house towards him.
He looked at his watch. “Much too early yet, Joan,” he said.
“Yes, but I want to be meeting him,” said Mrs. Joan....
So they walked down to the station and waited for a long time on the platform. And Joan said very little to Oswald because she was musing pleasantly.
When the train came in neither Joan nor Peter took much notice of Oswald after the first greeting. I do not see what else he could have expected; they were deeply in love and they had been apart for a couple of weeks, they were excited by each other and engrossed in each other. Oswald walked beside them up the road—apart. “I’ve got some work,” he said abruptly in the hall. “See you at lunch,” and went into his study and shut the door upon them, absurdly disappointed.
§ 6
Peter came on Wednesday. It was not until Friday that Oswald found an opportunity to deliver his valediction. But he had rehearsed it, or rather he had been rehearsing experimental fragments of it for most of the night before. On Thursday night the cloudy malaise of his mind broke and cleared. Things fell into their proper places in his thoughts, and he could feel that his ideas were no longer distorted and confused. The valediction appeared, an ordered discourse. If only he could hold out through a long talk he felt he would be able to make himself plain to them....
He lay in the darkness putting together phrase after phrase, sentence after sentence, developing a long and elaborate argument, dipping down into parentheses, throwing off footnotes, resuming his text. For the most part Joan and Peter remained silent hearers of this discourse; now his ratiocination glowed so brightly that they were almost forgotten, now they came into the discussion, they assisted, they said helpful and understanding things, they raised simple and obvious objections that were beautifully overcome.
“What is education up to?” he would begin. “What is education?”
Then came a sentence that he repeated in the stillness of his mind quite a number of times. “Consider this beast we are, this thing man!” He did not reckon with Peter’s tendency to prompt replies.