"Yes, Vio; I call it being led. I didn't see it till I got back here;
and even here I didn't see it till--till this afternoon. And now--now
I've done with all this. I've done with the easy, gentlemanly life of
spending money and being waited on. I'm not saying it isn't all right;
it's only not all right for me. I've got something else to do. There
was a time, you know it as well as I do, when a poor man was an offense
to me, and an uncultivated person an abhorrence. I was a snob from every
point of view, and I was proud of being one. And now--"
Pulling down the shade and turning completely round, she stood with her
back to the window.
"Yes, Billy? And now?"
"It's no use. I can't tell you. I couldn't explain if I used up all
the words in the dictionary. It's just a tugging in my heart to get back
where--" I had a sudden inspiration. "Read that," I said, taking
Pelly's letter from my pocket.
She stood under the central bunch of electrics while I closed the
suit-case and fastened the straps. Having finished the letter, she
handed it back to me.
"Well?" I asked.
"It's just--just a common person's letter, as far as I see, and rather
coarse. Boosey might have written it, or Miles, the chauffeur."
"And that's all you see in it?"
"What more is there to see?"
"That's just it. That's just where the inexplicable thing lies. I see,
or rather I feel, a tenderness in it that probably no one could detect
but myself. Even the reference to drinking--"
"The quart."
"Yes; the quart. You've got to remember how small the margin for
pleasure is in a life like Sam's, and how innocently he and Bridget and
Jim can do what they had much better let alone. They're not vicious;
they're only--how shall I say?--they're only undeveloped. We're not
such saints ourselves, even with our development; and when all
civilization has bent its efforts, church and state together, to keep
their minds as primitive as possible so that they'll do the most
primitive kinds of work, you can't blame them if they take their
pleasures and everything else primitively. We've got to have another
educational system."
"But they say our educational system is very good as it is."
"As far as it goes; but we still have one system for the rich and
another for the poor, and we shall never get equality of mind till we
have equality of educational opportunity. But that's only a detail. It
all hangs together. As far as I'm concerned, it sums itself up in the
urging that takes me back among simple people because--because I love
them, Vio; that's the only word for it, and in their way they've loved
me."
She crossed the room aimlessly.
"Other--other people have--have loved you, as you call it, who--who
mayn't have been simple."
"Y-yes. But--but in the cup they handed to me there were bitter
ingredients. In the cup I'm talking of there was only ... love. It was
a blind, stumbling, awkward, mannish love, if you like; but it was ...
love. It was the pure, unadulterated thing, as unconscious of itself as
the air is. The girl who was here this afternoon is an example of it.
For anything I know, she was an idiot to have come; but she came, poor
soul, because she thought--"
"Well, what did she think?"
"That if Dick Stroud were out of the way I should have a better chance
with you."
She was still moving aimlessly about the room, picking up small objects
and putting them down again.
"She said--she said he'd been tagging around after her, it's her
expression, for nearly three years."
"To my practically certain knowledge that is so."
"She said, too, that she could marry him if she liked, but that she
didn't want to."
"I don't know anything about that."
"If she went with him at all, she said, it would probably be ... without
marriage, as she didn't wish to be bound to him."