At the same time it was _she_ who was always on the defensive--protecting her dreams, her acts, her opinions, against the constant fire of his half-ironical questions, which seemed to leave her no time at all to carry the war into the enemy's country.

He put her through a quick cross-examination about the village, its occupations, the incomes of the people, its local charities and institutions, what she hoped to do for it, what she would do if she could, what she thought it _possible_ to do.

She answered first reluctantly, then eagerly, her pride all alive to show that she was not merely ignorant and amateurish.
But it was no good.

In the end he made her feel as Antony Craven had constantly done--that she knew nothing exactly, that she had not mastered the conditions of any one of the social problems she was talking about; that not only was her reading of no account, but that she had not even managed to _see_ these people, to interpret their lives under her very eyes, with any large degree of insight.
Especially was he merciless to all the Lady Bountiful pose, which meant so much to her imagination--not in words so much as in manner.

He let her see that all the doling and shepherding and advising that still pleased her fancy looked to him the merest temporary palliative, and irretrievably tainted, even at that, with some vulgar feeling or other.
All that the well-to-do could do for the poor under the present state of society was but a niggardly quit-rent; as for any relation of "superior" and "inferior" in the business, or of any social desert attaching to these precious efforts of the upper class to daub the gaps in the ruinous social edifice for which they were themselves responsible, he did not attempt to conceal his scorn.