“Miss Furze, you are taking a long walk.”
She told him she had been to see Phœbe, and of her death.
“You must be very tired: you must come with me.” She would have preferred solitude, but he insisted on her accompanying him, and she consented.
“I believe I saw Mr. Cardew in the meadow: I have just called on his wife.”
“Is she ill?”
“Yes, not seriously, I hope. You know Mr. Cardew?”
“Yes, a little. I have heard him preach, and have been to his house when I was living at Abchurch.”
“A remarkable man in many ways, and yet not a man whom I much admire. He thinks a good deal, and when I am in company with him I am unaccountably stimulated, but his thinking is not directed upon life. My notion is that our intellect is intended to solve real difficulties which confront us, and that all intellectual exercise upon what does not concern us is worse than foolish. My brain finds quite enough to do in contriving how to remove actual hard obstacles which lie in the way of other people’s happiness and my own.”
“His difficulties may be different from yours.”
“Certainly, but they are to a great extent artificial, and all the time spent upon them is so much withdrawn from the others which are real. He goes out into the fields reading endless books, containing records of persons in various situations. He is not like any one of those persons, and he never will be in any one of those situations. The situation in which he found himself that morning at home, or that in which a poor neighbour found himself, is that which to him is important. It is a pernicious consequence of the sole study of extraordinary people that the customary standards of human action are deposed, and other standards peculiar to peculiar creatures under peculiar circumstances are set up. I have known Cardew do very curious things at times. I do not believe for one moment he thought he was doing wrong, but nevertheless, if any other man had done them, I should have had nothing more to say to him.”