"Don't let's argue to-night. I'm pretty tired and argument would do
no good. We'd just say things we shouldn't. You said just now you
doubted if you knew why I was here. I may not be sure of all my
reasons, but one of them is, I wanted to get away from--there." My
hand made motion in a vague direction intended for my former
neighborhood.
"Do you find this section of the city a satisfactory change?"
Selwyn's tone was ironic. He looked for a moment into the eyes I
raised to his, then turned away and, hands in his pockets, began to
walk up and down the room. When he spoke again his voice had changed.
"Don't mind anything I say to-night. I shouldn't have come. I'm a
bit raw yet that you should have done this without telling me. You
have a right to do as you choose, of course, only--. Besides getting
away from your old life--were there other reasons?"
"Not very definite ones." Into my face came surge of color, and,
turning, I cut off the light in the lamp behind me. "When one is in
a parade one can't see what it looks like, very often doesn't
understand where it is going. I want to see the one I was in, see
from the sidewalk the kind of human beings who are in it, and what
they are doing with their time and energies and opportunities and
knowledge and preparedness and--oh, with all the things that make
their position in life a more responsible one than--than the people's
down here."
"Was it necessary to come to Scarborough Square to watch--your
parade? One can stand off anywhere."
"But I don't want just to stand off. I want to see with the eyes of
the people who look at us, the people who don't approve of us, though
they envy us. We're so certain they're a hard lot to deal with, to
do for, to make anything of--these people we don't know save from
charity contact, perhaps,--that I've sometimes wondered if they ever
despair of us, think we, too, are pretty hopeless and hard to--to
wake up."
"And you imagine the opinions and conclusions of uneducated,
untrained, unthinking people will give you light concerning the
valuation of your class? It matters little what they think. They
don't think!"
"Do you know many of these people of whose mental machinery you are
so sure?" I smiled in the eyes which would not smile into mine.
"Know them personally, I mean?"
"I do not." Selwyn's tone was irritable. "My business dealings with
them have not inspired desire for a closer acquaintance. To get as
much money as possible from the men who employ them and give in
return as little work as they can, is the creed of most of them. You
can do nothing with people like that. I know them better than you
will ever know them."
"As a corporation attorney, yes. As a division of the human race, as
working people, you know them. As beings much more like yourself
than you imagine, you don't."
Selwyn again stopped. "You'd hardly expect me to find them
congenial--the beings you refer to."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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