"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." I looked up in curiosity. "And did she say there was any possibility of her going with him at all?"