Henry and Cato Read Online Free PDF Page B

to his best knowledge, for Colette’s liberation! But there was a kind of invincible stupidity in the other sex which simply asked for bullying. After all it had taken them practically the whole of recorded history to invent a simple idea like the brassière. Yes, he had bullied his clever darling wife, now so long dead, and he had bullied his daughter. Perhaps he had been thoroughly unwise and it was indeed just a matter of tactics. He recalled how much he had valued studying when he was Colette’s age. Colette was perfectly capable of enjoying her work and getting a college degree of some kind; then as a graduate student she was sure to do very much better. She was a late developer and a bit of a slow-coach. The trouble was her teachers never saw that, in her slow way, she was really thinking.
    And now this half-baked half-witted letter. Somebody must have been getting at her. He would telephone Tindall tomorrow. Tindall was pretty flabby actually. John had resisted the impulse to send an angry telegram. Let her come home. He would argue rationally with her and send her back. He would explain to her everything that she would miss in life if she threw away her chances now. He could not let her give up her precious education and become a typist or a flower-arranging ninny or posturing mannequin like Gerda Marshalson. The young have got no backbone, he thought. They are not like we were. They can’t face anything difficult. They haven’t been taught the important difference between getting things right and getting things wrong. They just want to be themselves, but education is the process of extending and changing so as to understand what is alien. No wonder the lazy puling left-wing youth were drifting into pointless anarchism; always moaning, when there was so much good to do and so much to learn and to be cheerful about. Of course the trouble starts at school. And they are all so absolutely soaked in self-pity. I would never have told my father that I was unhappy at college!
    It’s a shame that I never got into parliament, thought John. He had been an unsuccessful Labour candidate. Now he had been for many years a university lecturer. Still, we must go on and on trying to improve things, he thought. Anyone anywhere can do that and there is plenty that I can do. He had learnt his own limitations by the same dogged method that he used in the study of history. He came of a Quaker family. He had intended to spend his precious sabbatical leave, which was now just beginning, in writing a history of Quakerism; from a sociological, not a religious, point of view of course. John Forbes had no truck with superstition. As a small child he had soon realized that although his father still went to Meeting he did not believe in God. His father called himself an ‘agnostic’, but that was just a matter of generation. He and his sturdy truthful bright-eyed father had early understood each other. ‘There is no God, John, not like they think,’ his father had told him. His father had taught him never to lie and that the world was godless almost in one breath. Now that the time had come however for John to write his history, he found that he no longer wanted to. There were far too many books already by men who were middling clever like himself. What after all justified a man’s life? Certainly not a book. He would read and think and prepare new sets of lectures. He knew that he was a talented teacher. One must keep hope and sense in one’s life and go on striving. John Forbes had never found these things too difficult. He could still do plenty of good in the world. Only now this valuable time was going to be interrupted by his daughter’s vagaries.
    John recalled his paternal grandparents, whom he had known well as a child, he recalled his splendid parents, his noble socially energetic father, his pure high-minded mother, his clever angelic wife who had died so senselessly of cancer. How could