but when a war came and brought with it a social obligation and sanction both could be trained into competent engineers.’ ‘They weren’t good engineers,’ she remarked. ‘Everybody says that.’ ‘Ah, the defensive mechanism in action. Let me point out that it was in nearly everybody’s interest to say so. All the same,’ he admitted, ‘to some extent that was true. And why? Because nearly all of them not only had to learn hurriedly and without proper groundwork, but they had also to unlearn the habits carefully fostered for years of thinking such interests alien to them, and too gross for their
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