ne can apply somebody else's ready-made
phrase about them. And then there are lots of lovely names and
words--Monophysite, Iamblichus, Pomponazzi; you bring them out
triumphantly, and feel you've clinched the argument with the mere
magical sound of them. That's what comes of the higher education."

"You may regret your education," said Anne; "I'm ashamed of my lack of
it. Look at those sunflowers! Aren't they magnificent?"

"Dark faces and golden crowns--they're kings of Ethiopia. And I like
the way the tits cling to the flowers and pick out the seeds, while the
other loutish birds, grubbing dirtily for their food, look up in envy
from the ground. Do they look up in envy? That's the literary touch, I'm
afraid. Education again. It always comes back to that." He was silent.

Anne had sat down on a bench that stood in the shade of an old apple
tree. "I'm listening," she said.

He did not sit down, but walked backwards and forwards in front of the
bench, gesticulating a little as he talked. "Books," he said--"books.
One reads so many, and one sees so few people and so little of the
world. Great thick books about the universe and the mind and ethics.
You've no idea how many there are. I must have read twenty or thirty
tons of them in the last five years. Twenty tons of ratiocination.
Weighted with that, one's pushed out into the world."

He went on walking up and down. His voice rose, fell, was silent a
moment, and then talked on. He moved his hands, sometimes he waved his
arms. Anne looked and listened quietly, as though she were at a lecture.
He was a nice boy, and to-day he looked charming--charming!

One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made ideas about
everything. One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it.
One should have lived first and then made one's philosophy to fit
life...Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even
the most difficult of them, deceptively simple. In the world of ideas
everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled. Was it
surprising that one was miserable, horribly unhappy? Denis came to
a halt in front of the bench, and as he asked this last question he
stretched out his arms and stood for an instant in an attitude of
crucifixion, then let them fall again to his sides.

"My poor Denis!" Anne was touched. He was really too pathetic as he
stood there in front of her in his white flannel trousers. "But does one
suffer about these things? It