"By the way, have you settled what you're going to do--is it to be Cambridge or the Bar ?" He pursed his lips, but made no immediate answer, for Helen was still slightly inattentive.

She had been thinking about Rachel and which of the two young men she was likely to fall in love with, and now sitting opposite to Hirst she thought, "He's ugly.

It's a pity they're so ugly." She did not include Hewet in this criticism; she was thinking of the clever, honest, interesting young men she knew, of whom Hirst was a good example, and wondering whether it was necessary that thought and scholarship should thus maltreat their bodies, and should thus elevate their minds to a very high tower from which the human race appeared to them like rats and mice squirming on the flat.
"And the future ?" she reflected, vaguely envisaging a race of men becoming more and more like Hirst, and a race of women becoming more and more like Rachel.

"Oh no," she concluded, glancing at him, "one wouldn't marry you.

Well, then, the future of the race is in the hands of Susan and Arthur; no--that's dreadful.