Like most of his
political type, he wallowed in his own peculiar snobbery. But of
anything like companionship between father and daughter there had
existed very little. While railing, wherever he found ears into
which to rail, against the vicious luxury and sordid shallowness
of the upper middle classes, his instinctive desire to shine above
his poorer associates had sent Phyllis to an upper middle class
school. Now Gedge had a certain amount of bookish and political
intelligence. Phyllis inheriting the intellectual equipment of her
sentimental fool of a mother, had none, Oh! she had a vast fund of
ordinary commonsense. Of that I can assure you. A bit of hard
brain fibre from her father had counteracted any over-sentimental
folly in the maternal heritage. And she came back from school a
very ladylike little person. If pressed, she could reel off all
kinds of artificial scraps of knowledge, like a dear little
parrot. But she had never heard of Karl Marx and didn't want to
hear. She had a vague notion that International Socialism was a
movement in favour of throwing bombs at monarchs and of seizing
the wealth of the rich in order to divide it among the poor--and
she regarded it as abominable.
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