'But knowing is everything to you, it is all your life,' he broke out.
She slowly looked at him.

'Is it?' she said.

'To know, that is your all, that is your life--you have only this, this
knowledge,' he cried. 'There is only one tree, there is only one fruit,
in your mouth.'

Again she was some time silent.

'Is there?' she said at last, with the same untouched calm. And then in
a tone of whimsical inquisitiveness: 'What fruit, Rupert?'

'The eternal apple,' he replied in exasperation, hating his own
metaphors.

'Yes,' she said. There was a look of exhaustion about her. For some
moments there was silence. Then, pulling herself together with a
convulsed movement, Hermione resumed, in a sing-song, casual voice:

'But leaving me apart, Rupert; do you think the children are better,
richer, happier, for all this knowledge; do you really think they are?
Or is it better to leave them untouched, spontaneous. Hadn't they
better be animals, simple animals, crude, violent, ANYTHING, rather
than this self-consciousness, this incapacity to be spontaneous.'

They thought she had finished. But with a queer rumbling in her throat
she resumed, 'Hadn't they better be anything than grow up crippled,
crippled in their souls, crippled in their feelings--so thrown back--so