For one thing, Helen May was undergoing the transition from a mild
satisfaction with her education and mentality, to a shamed consciousness
of an appalling ignorance and mental crudity. Holman Sommers was
unwittingly the cause of that. There was nothing patronizing or
condescending in the attitude of Holman Sommers, even if he did run to
long words and scientifically accurate descriptions of the smallest
subjects. It was the work he placed before her that held Helen May
abashed before his vast knowledge. She could not understand half of what
she deciphered and typed for him, and because she could not understand
she realized the depth of her benightedness.
She was awed by the breadth and the scope which she sensed more or less
vaguely in _The Evolution of Sociology_. Holman Sommers quoted freely,
and discussed boldly and frankly, such abstruse authors as Descartes,
Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Comte, Gumplowicz, some of them names she had
never heard of and could not even spell without following her copy
letter by letter. Holman Sommers seemed to have read all of them and to
have weighed all of them and to be able to quote all of them offhand;
whereas Schopenhauer was the only name in the lot that sounded in the
least familiar to Helen May, and she had a guilty feeling that she had
always connected the name with music instead of the sort of things
Holman Sommers quoted him as having said or written, she could not make
out which.
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