A Man Could Stand Up - Ford Madox Ford [17]
'Because of my father's reputation...Look here, did that person--Lady Macmaster!--speak to you as if you were me? Our names are near enough to make it possible.'
'You're,' Miss Wanostrocht said, 'as one might say, the fine fruit of the product of his views on the education of women. And if you...It's been such a satisfaction to me to observe in you such a...a sound, instructed head on such a...oh, you know, sane body...And then...An earning capacity. A commercial value. Your father, of course, never minced words...' She added:
'I'm bound to say that my interview with Lady Mac-master...Who surely isn't a lady of whom you could say that you disapprove. I've read her husband's work. It surely--you'd say, wouldn't you?--conserves some of the ancient fire.'
'He,' Valentine said, 'hasn't a word of Latin to his tail. He makes his quotations out, if he uses them, by means of school-cribs...I know his method of work, you know.'
It occurred to Valentine to think that if Edith Ethel really had at first taken Miss Wanostrocht for herself there might pretty obviously be some cause for Miss Wanostrocht's concern for her father's reputation as an intimate trainer of young women. She figured Edith Ethel suddenly bursting into a description of the circumstances of that man who was without furniture and did not appear to recognize the porter. The relations she might have described as having existed between her and him might well worry the Head of a Great Public School for Middle Class Girls. She had no doubt been described as having had a baby. A disagreeable and outraged current invaded her feelings...
It was suddenly obscured by a recrudescence of the thought that had come to her only incidentally in the hall. It rushed over her with extraordinary vividness now, like a wave of warm liquid...If it had really been that fellow's wife who had removed his furniture what was there to keep them apart? He couldn't have pawned or sold or burnt his furniture whilst he had been with the British Expeditionary Force in the Low Countries! He couldn't have without extraordinary difficulty! Then...What should keep them apart?...Middle Class Morality? A pretty gory carnival that had been for the last four years! Was this then Lent, pressing hard on the heels of Saturnalia? Not so hard as that, surely! So that if one hurried...What on earth did she want, unknown to herself?
She heard herself saying, almost with a sob, so that she was evidently in a state of emotion:
'Look here: I disapprove of this whole thing: of what my father has brought me to! Those people...the brilliant Victorians talked all the time through their hats. They evolved a theory from anywhere and then went brilliantly mad over it. Perfectly recklessly...Have you noticed Pettigul One?...Hasn't it occurred to you that you can't carry on violent physical jerks and mental work side by side? I ought not to be in this school and I ought not to be what I am!'
At Miss Wanostrocht's perturbed expression she said to herself:
'What on earth am I saying all this for? You'd think I was trying to cut loose from this school! Am I?'
Nevertheless her voice was going on:
'There's too much oxygenation of the lungs, here. It's unnatural. It affects the brain, deleteriously. Pettigul One is an example of it. She's earnest with me and earnest with her books. Now she's gone dotty. Most of them it only stupifies.'
It was incredible to her that the mere imagination that that fellow's wife had left him should make her spout out like this--for all the world like her father spouting out one of his ingenious theories!...It had really occurred to her once or twice to think that you could not run a dual physical and mental existence without some risk. The military physical developments of the last four years had been responsible for a real exaggeration of physical values. She was aware that in that Institution, for the last four years, she had been regarded as supplementing if not as actually replacing