‘He had the kind of face which is always turned away from facts,’ Gideon said.  ’Facts are too difficult, too complicated for him.  Hard, jolly facts, with clear sharp edges that you can’t slur and talk away.  Potterism has no use for them.  It appeals over their heads to prejudice and sentiment....  It’s the very opposite to the scientific temper.  No good scientist could conceivably be a Potterite, because he’s concerned with truth, and the kind of truth, too, that it’s difficult to arrive at.  Potterism is all for short and easy cuts and showy results.  Science has to work its way step by step, and then hasn’t much to show for it.  It isn’t greedy.  Potterism plays a game of grab all the time—­snatches at success in a hurry....  It’s greedy,’ repeated Gideon, thinking it out, watching Jane’s firm little sun-browned hand with its short square fingers rooting in the sand for shells.

Jane had visited the stationer, who kept a circulating library, and seen holiday visitors selecting books to read.  They had nearly all chosen the most Potterish they could see, and asked for some more Potterish still, leaving Conrad and Hardy despised on the shelves.  But these people were not Cornish, but Saxon visitors.

And Katherine had seen the local paper, but it had been much less Potterish than most of the London papers, which confirmed them in their theory about Celts.

Thus they talked and discussed and played, and wrote their book in patches, and travelled from place to place, and thought that they found things out.  And Gideon, because he was the cleverest, found out the most; and Katherine, because she was the next cleverest, saw all that Gideon found out; and Juke, because he was religious, was for ever getting on to Potterism its cure, before they had analysed the disease; and the twins enjoyed life in their usual serene way, and found it very entertaining to be Potters inquiring into Potterism.  The others were scrupulously fair in not attributing to them, because they happened to be Potters by birth, more Potterism than they actually possessed.  A certain amount, said Juke, is part of the make-up of very nearly every human being; it has to be fought down, like the notorious ape and tiger.  But he thought that Gideon and Katherine Varick had less of it than any one else he knew; the mediocre was repellent to them; cant and sentiment made them sick; they made a fetish of hard truth, and so much despised most of their neighbours that they would not experience the temptation to grab at popularity.  In fact, they would dislike it if it came.

3

Socialist Cecily came out while they were at Lyme Regis.  Mrs. Potter sent the twins a copy.  In their detached way, the twins read it, and gave it to the others to look at.

‘Very typical stuff,’ Gideon summed it up, after a glance.  ’It will no doubt have an excellent sale....  It must be interesting for you to watch it being turned out.  I wish you would ask me to stay with you some time.  Yours must be an even more instructive household than mine.’