? Knowledge slowly
            builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down. Knowledge, through
            patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of
            it; Ignorance, wanting its day's dinner, lights a fire with the
            record, and gives a flavour to its one roast with the burnt souls of
            many generations. Knowledge, instructing the sense, refining and
            multiplying needs, transforms itself into skill and makes life
            various with a new six days' work; comes Ignorance drunk on the
            seventh, with a firkin of oil and a match and an easy »Let there not
            be« - and the many-coloured creation is shrivelled up in blackness.
            Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple,
            having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas
            Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make
            it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric
            of human good, and turn all the places of joy dark as a buried
            Babylon. And looking at life parcel- wise, in the growth of a single
            lot, who having a practised vision may not see that ignorance of the
            true bond between events, and false conceit of means whereby
            sequences may be compelled - like that falsity of eyesight which
            overlooks the gradations of distance, seeing that which is afar off
            as if it were within a step or a grasp - precipitates the mistaken
            soul on destruction?
 
It was half-past ten in the morning when Gwendolen Harleth, after her gloomy
journey from Leubronn, arrived at the station from which she must drive to
Offendene. No carriage or friend was awaiting her, for in the telegram she had
sent from Dover she had mentioned a later train, and in her impatience of
lingering at a London station she had set off without picturing what it would be
to arrive unannounced at half an hour's drive from home - at one of those
stations which have been fixed on not as near anywhere but as equidistant from
everywhere. Deposited as a feme sole with her large trunks, and having to wait
while a vehicle was being got from the large-sized lantern called the Railway
Inn, Gwendolen felt that the dirty paint in the waiting-room, the dusty decanter
of flat water, and the texts in large letters calling on her to repent and be
converted, were part of the dreary prospect opened by her family troubles; and
she hurried away to the outer door looking towards the lane and fields. But here
the very gleams of sunshine seemed melancholy, for the autumnal leaves and grass
were