nervous man with the glittering eyes opposite me, evidently also interested, listened without changing his place.
“What is wrong with education?” said the lady, with a scarcely perceptible smile. “Surely it can’t be better to marry as they used to in the old days when the bride and bridegroom did not even see one another before the wedding,” she continued, answering not what her interlocutor had said but what she thought he would say, in the way many ladies have. “Without knowing whether they loved, or whether they could love, they married just anybody, and were wretched all their lives. And you think that this was better?” she said, evidently addressing me and the lawyer chiefly and least of all the old man with whom she was talking.
“They’ve got so very educated,” the tradesman reiterated, looking contemptuously at the lady and leaving her question unanswered.
“It would be interesting to know how you explain the connection between education and matrimonial discord,” said the lawyer, with a scarcely perceptible smile.
The tradesman was about to speak, but the lady interrupted him.
“No,” she said, “those times have passed.” But the lawyer stopped her.
“Yes, but allow the gentleman to express his views.”
“Foolishness comes from education,” the old man said categorically.
“They make people who don’t love one another marry, and then wonder that they live in discord,” the lady hastened to say, turning to look at the lawyer, at me, and even at the clerk, who had got up and, leaning on the back of the seat, was smilingly listening to the conversation. “It’s only animals, you know, that can be paired off as their master likes; but human beings have their own inclinations and attachments,” said the lady, with an evident desire to annoy the tradesman.