He viewed uneasily the
last outcome of progress and the vastly increased facilities for
instruction of the juvenile population. The age was sufficiently godless,
in his judgment; and he had found that a Board School education was the
first nail in the coffin of every young man's faith.
Joan, therefore, allowing nothing for the value of riches, of education, of
intellect, was content to accept Barron's own cynical statement in a spirit
widely different from the speaker's. He had sneered at himself, just as he
had sneered at his own dead father. But Joan missed all the bitterness of
his speech. To her he was simply a wondrously honest man who loved truth
for itself, who could never utter anything not true, who held it no offense
to speak truth even of the dead. Gentle or simple, he seemed infinitely
superior to all men whom she had met with. And yet this beautiful nature
walked through the world quite alone. He had asked her to remember him when
he was gone; he had said that she was his friend. And he cared little for
women--there was perhaps no other woman in the world he had called a
friend. Then the girl's heart fluttered at the presumption of her silly,
soaring thoughts, and she glanced nervously to the right and to the left of
the lonely road, as though fearful that some hidden eavesdropper might peep
into her open mind. The magic spell was upon her. This little, pale, clever
man, so quiet, so strange, so unlike anything else within her seventeen
years of experience, had wrought Nature's vital miracle, and Joan, who,
until then, believed herself in love with her sailor sweetheart, now stood
aghast before the truth, stood bewildered between the tame and bloodless
fantasy of her affection for Joe Noy and this wild, live reality.
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