e it tickled his
vanity to reflect that he, the agricultural labourer's son and
apprentice to a village carpenter, was the possessor both of a Broadway
Grand and of a daughter who, entirely through his efforts, had learned
to play on it. Like most of his political type, he wallowed in his own
peculiar snobbery. But of anything like companionship between father
and daughter there had existed very little. While railing, wherever he
found ears into which to rail, against the vicious luxury and sordid
shallowness of the upper middle classes, his instinctive desire to
shine above his poorer associates had sent Phyllis to an upper middle
class school. Now Gedge had a certain amount of bookish and political
intelligence. Phyllis inheriting the intellectual equipment of her
sentimental fool of a mother, had none, Oh! she had a vast fund of
ordinary commonsense. Of that I can assure you. A bit of hard brain
fibre from her father had counteracted any over-sentimental folly in
the maternal heritage. And she came back from school a very ladylike
little person. If pressed, she could reel off all kinds of artificial
scraps of knowledge, like a dear little parrot. But she had never heard
of Karl Marx and didn't want to hear. She had a vague notion that
International Socialism was a movement in favour of throwing bombs at
monarchs and of seizing the wealth of the rich in order to divide it
among the poor--and she regarded it as abominable. When her father gave
her Fabian Society tracts to read, he might just as well, for all her
understanding of the argument, set her down to a Treatise on the
Infinitesimal Calculus. Her brain stood blank before such abstract
disquisitions. She loved easily comprehended poetry and novels that
made her laugh or cry and set her mind dancing round the glowing
possibilities of life; all disastrous stuff abhorred by the
International Socialist, to whom the essential problems of existence
are of no interest whatever. So, after a few futile attempts to darken
her mind, Gedge put her down as a mere fool woman, and ceased to bother
his head about her intellectual development. That came to him quite
naturally. There is no Turk more contemptuous of his womankind's
political ideas than the Gedges of our enlightened England. But on
other counts she was a distinct asset. He regarded her with immense
pride, as a more ornamental adjunct to his house than any other county
builder and contractor could display, and, recogn