meet.

As soon as they were seated Mr. Sandys launched into the talk, like an
eagle dallying with the wind. He struck Howard as an extremely
good-natured, sensible, buoyant man, with a perpetual flow of healthy
interests. Nothing that he said had the slightest distinction, and his
power of expression was quite unequal to the evident vividness of his
impressions. He had a taste for antithesis, but no grasp of synonyms.
Every idea in Mr. Sandys' mind fell into halves, but the second clause
was produced, not to express any new thought, but rather to echo the
previous clause. He began at once on University topics. He had himself
been a Pembroke man, and it had cost him an effort, he said, to send
Jack elsewhere. "I don't take quite the orthodox view of education," he
said, "in fact I am decidedly heterodox about its aims and the object
that it has. It ought not to fall behind its object, and all this
specialisation seems to me to be dangerous, and in fact decidedly
perilous. My own education was on the old classical lines--an excellent
gymnastic, I think, and distinctly fortifying. The old masterpieces,
you know, Thucydides and so forth--they should be the basis--the
foundation so to speak. But we must not forget the superstructure, the
house of thought, if I may use the expression. You must forgive my
ventilating these crude ideas, Mr. Kennedy. I went in myself, after
taking my degree, for a course of general reading. Goethe and Schiller,
you know. Yes, how fine that all is, though I sometimes feel it is a
little Teutonic? One needs to correct the Teutonic bias, and it is just
there that the gymnastic of the classics comes in; it gives one a
standard--a criterion in fact. One must have a criterion, mustn't one,
or it is all loose, and indeed, so to speak, illusive? I am all for
formative education; and it is there that women--I speak frankly in the
presence of three intelligent women--it is there that they suffer.
Their education is not formative enough--not formal enough, in fact!
Now, I have tried with dear Maud to communicate just that touch of
formality. You would be surprised, Mr. Kennedy, to know what Maud has
read under my guidance. Not learned, you know--I don't care for
that--but with a standard, or if I may revert to my former expression,
a criterion."

He paused for a moment, saw that he was belated, and finished his soup
hastily.

"Yes," said Howard, "of course that is the real problem of
education--to give