He stammered for a pretty speech, but did not find it before she continued:
"Yes—you are so delightfully primitive; you will not use the world as it is but insist on acting as if it were something else."
"I am not sure I understand."
"Well, there is the wife of my Judge: she is a fact in my world; in yours she is a problem to be stated, straightened, and solved. If she had come to you, as she did to me yesterday, with her theory that all that Southern Negroes needed was to learn how to make good servants and lay brick—"
"I should have shown her—" Bles tried to interject.
"Nothing of the sort. You would have tried to show her and would have failed miserably. She hasn't learned anything in twenty years."
"But surely you didn't join her in advocating that ten million people be menials?"
"Oh, no; I simply listened."
"Well, there was no harm in that; I believe in silence at times."
"Ah! but I did not listen like a log, but positively and eloquently; with a nod, a half-formed word, a comment begun, which she finished."