"We are probably a pair of sentimental fools," he went on, "but I believe in sentiment. A man could not say this out loud because sentiment was supposed to be essentially womanish. How those old distinctions weary one, with their scientific data to prove that men surpass women in the senses of feeling and taste, while women have better sight and hearing, and so on through every conceivable maundering of the human brain, forever harping on differences and accentuating them, forever dwelling on sex distinctions and never on a common humanity."
"It was a dreadfully scientific age," she assented, "a generation fearfully and wonderfully given over to statistics; and yet how many dreamers there were!"
"Yes, but in the twentieth century a young man dreamed dreams and saw visions at his own risk. While he dreamed of the brotherhood of man, his classmate with the corporation practice distanced him in the pursuit of position. While he led himself through the valley of the shadow of temptation, and feared no evil because of the Madonna vision in his soul, even the Madonnas preferred Lancelot and Tristram to Galahad. It wasn't an easy world for a man who wanted to keep faith with himself. It was a pinchbeck world, of pretence and pull,--that world that lies drowned out there. And yet I believe it was infinitely better than the lost Atlantis, better than the deluged planet of Noah, nobler and finer than the best civilization of which we have any trace. I never despaired of it, and yet as I grew older I wondered if I was not foolish and mistaken in daring to hope and to dream."
"I know," she said again. "I think I did despair, for it seemed to me a dreadful, a terrible world. I used to wonder how conscientious men and women could bring other human beings into it, to be and to suffer and to faint in the frantic struggle for the unrealities that made us miserable or happy. Consider how paltry they were. If we built a new house, we were infinitely more concerned to see that the contractor used pressed brick than we were to see that the construction of our own characters was true. When we grew wealthy we moved into houses of more stories; but how often did we say: 'Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul'? I had as clean and strong a heritage as you, but a different one. It is no use to comfort oneself with nice little aphorisms about the needle's eye, and saws about filthy lucre, and telling God's estimate of money from the kind of people He gives it to; I tell you biting poverty is a terrible thing, an unspeakable thing. It is a misfortune for a child to grow up under a sense of injustice. I used to have times of revolt against it all, when I hated with the blind, ferocious hate of a child, and I saw what David never saw,--the righteous forsaken, and his seed begging, not bread, but a chance to earn his bread, and begging for it without being able to make just terms. I saw my home sold under the sheriff's hammer, and my parents struggle all their lives because of the lack of money, when they had everything else, nobility, character, truth, and education. My girlhood was a long series of going-withouts. Finally I married a man who promised me everything. Ah, well, when has the Apple of Sodom failed to deceive the eye and undeceive the tongue? At least he did care for my voice, and through that I learned that all those years I had carried in my own throat the golden notes to have altered everything, and I sang a little gladness into my parents' lives before they ended, thank God."