"Oh, I don't know. I know I'm terribly susceptible to the 'nice things of life,' but I do get tired of being nice. Especially when I have a bad temper, as I had to-night. I'm not at all imprisoned in a harem, and as for social aspirations, I'm a nobody. But still I have been brought up to look at things that aren't 'like the home life of our dear Queen' as impossible, and I'm quite sure that father believes that poor people are poor because they are silly and don't try to be rich. But I've been reading; and I've made--to you it may seem silly to call it a discovery, but to me it's the greatest discovery I've ever made: that people are just people, all of them--that the little mousey clerk may be a hero, and the hero may be a nobody--that the motorman that lets his beastly car spatter mud on my nice new velvet skirt may be exactly the same sort of person as the swain who commiserates with me in his cunnin' Harvard accent. Do you think that?" "I know it. Most of my life I've been working with men with dirty finger-nails, and the only difference between them and the men with clean nails is a nail-cleaner, and that costs just ten cents at the corner drug-store. Seriously--I remember a cook I used to talk to on my way down to Panama once----" ("Panama! How I'd like to go there!") "----and he had as much culture as anybody I've ever met." "Yes, but generally do you find very much--oh, courtesy and that sort of thing among mechanics, as much as among what calls itself 'the better class'?" "No, I don't." "You don't? Why, I thought--the way you spoke----" "Why, blessed, what in the world would be the use of their trying to climb if they already had all the rich have? You can't be as gracious as the man that's got nothing else to do, when you're about one jump ahead of the steam-roller every second. That's why they ought to _take_ things. If I were a union man, I wouldn't trust all these writers and college men and so on, that try to be sympathetic. Not for one minute. They mean well, but they can't get what it means to a real workman to have to be up at five every winter morning, with no heat in the furnished housekeeping room; or to have to see his Woman sick because he can't afford a doctor." So they talked, boy and girl, wondering together what the world really is like.