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 a standard, and not to extinguish the taste for intellectual things, which is too often what we contrive to do.”

“Now we must not be too serious all at once,” said Mrs. Graves.  “If we exhaust ourselves about education, we shall have nothing to fall back upon—­we shall be afraid to condescend.  I am deplorably ill-educated myself.  I have no standard whatever.  I have to consult dear Jane, have I not?  Jane is my intellectual touchstone, and saves me from entire collapse.”

“Well, well,” said Mr. Sandys good-humouredly, “Mr. Kennedy and I will fight it out together sometime.  He will forgive an old Pembroke man for wanting to know what is going forward; for scenting the battle afar off, in fact.”