“I despair too,” she said impetuously.  “How are you going to judge people merely by their minds?”

“You agree with my spinster Aunt, I expect,” said St. John in his jaunty manner, which was always irritating because it made the person he talked to appear unduly clumsy and in earnest. “’Be good, sweet maid’—­I thought Mr. Kingsley and my Aunt were now obsolete.”

“One can be very nice without having read a book,” she asserted.  Very silly and simple her words sounded, and laid her open to derision.

“Did I ever deny it?” Hirst enquired, raising his eyebrows.

Most unexpectedly Mrs. Thornbury here intervened, either because it was her mission to keep things smooth or because she had long wished to speak to Mr. Hirst, feeling as she did that young men were her sons.

“I have lived all my life with people like your Aunt, Mr. Hirst,” she said, leaning forward in her chair.  Her brown squirrel-like eyes became even brighter than usual.  “They have never heard of Gibbon.  They only care for their pheasants and their peasants.  They are great big men who look so fine on horseback, as people must have done, I think, in the days of the great wars.  Say what you like against them—­they are animal, they are unintellectual; they don’t read themselves, and they don’t want others to read, but they are some of the finest and the kindest human beings on the face of the earth!  You would be surprised at some of the stories I could tell.  You have never guessed, perhaps, at all the romances that go on in the heart of the country.  There are the people, I feel, among whom Shakespeare will be born if he is ever born again.  In those old houses, up among the Downs—­”

“My Aunt,” Hirst interrupted, “spends her life in East Lambeth among the degraded poor.  I only quoted my Aunt because she is inclined to persecute people she calls ‘intellectual,’ which is what I suspect Miss Vinrace of doing.  It’s all the fashion now.  If you’re clever it’s always taken for granted that you’re completely without sympathy, understanding, affection—­all the things that really matter.  Oh, you Christians!  You’re the most conceited, patronising, hypocritical set of old humbugs in the kingdom!  Of course,” he continued, “I’m the first to allow your country gentlemen great merits.  For one thing, they’re probably quite frank about their passions, which we are not.  My father, who is a clergyman in Norfolk, says that there is hardly a squire in the country who does not—­”

“But about Gibbon?” Hewet interrupted.  The look of nervous tension which had come over every face was relaxed by the interruption.