But you're
wondering where _you_ come in."
"Women are only interested in what's coming to them," said Susan.
"Sensible men are the same way. The men who aren't--they work
for wages and salaries. If you're going to live off of other
people, as women and the rich do, you've got to stand steady,
day and night, for Number One. And now, here's where _you_
come in. You've no objection to being respectable?"
"I've no objection to not being disreputable."
"That's the right way to put it," he promptly agreed.
"Respectable, you know, doesn't mean anything but appearances.
People who are really respectable, who let it strike in,
instead of keeping it on the outside where it belongs--they
soon get poor and drop down and out."
Palmer's revelation of himself and of a philosophy which life
as it had revealed itself to her was incessantly urging her to
adopt so grappled her attention that she altogether forgot
herself. A man on his way to the scaffold who suddenly sees
and feels a cataclysm rocking the world about him forgets his
own plight. Unconsciously he was epitomizing, unconsciously
she was learning, the whole story of the progress of the race
upward from beast toward intellect--the brutal and bloody
building of the highway from the caves of darkness toward the
peaks of light. The source from which springs, and ever has
sprung, the cruelty of man toward man is the struggle of the
ambition of the few who see and insist upon better conditions,
with the inertia and incompetence of the many who have little
sight and less imagination.
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