Here Kitty's eye lighted unintentionally on her brother Anthony's face, with the twist of a cynical grin on it, and she collapsed from the heights of eloquence. It never did for the Grammonts to encounter each other's eyes when they were being exalted; the memories and experiences shared by brothers and sisters rose cynically, like rude gamins, to mock and bring them down.
Kitty said, "If anyone would like to ask any questions...." and got off the tub.
Someone enquired, after the moment of blankness which usually follows this invitation, what they would be taught, exactly.
Kitty said there would be many different courses, adapted to differing requirements. But, in the main, everyone would be taught to use to the best advantage such intelligence as they might have, in that state of life to which it might please God to call them.
"And how," pursued the enquirer, a solid young blacksmith, "will the teachers know what that may be?"
Kitty explained that they wouldn't, exactly, of course, but the minds which took the course would be so sharpened and improved as to tackle any work better than before. But there would also be forms to be filled in, stating approximately what was each individual's line in life.
After another pause a harassed-looking woman at the back said plaintively, "I'm sure it's all very nice, miss, but it does seem as if such things might be left to the men. They've more time, as it were. You see, miss, when you've done out the house and got the children's meals and put them to bed and cleaned up and all, not to mention washing-day, and ironing—well, you've not much time left to improve the mind, have you?"
It was Dr. Cross who pointed out that, the mind once improved, these household duties would take, at most, half the time they now did. "I know that, ma'am," the tired lady returned. "I've known girls who set out to improve their minds, readin' and that, and their house duties didn't take them any time at all, and nice it was for their families. What I say is, mind improvement should be left to the men, who've time for such things; women are mostly too busy, and if they aren't they should be."
Several men said "Hear, hear" to this. Rural England, as Dr. Cross sometimes remarked, was still regrettably eastern, or German, in its feminist views, even now that, since the war, so many more thousands of women were perforce independent wage-earners, and even now that they had the same political rights as men. Stephen flung forth a few explosive views on invidious sex distinctions, another pet topic of his, and remarked that, in the Christian religion, at least, there was neither male nor female. A shade of scepticism on the faces of several women might be taken to hint at a doubt whether the Christian religion, in this or in most other respects, was life as it was lived, and at a certainty that it was time for them to go home and get the supper. They began to drift away, with their children round them, gossiping to each other of more interesting things than Mind Training. For, after all, if it was to be it was, and where was the use of talking?