“Mrs. Scroope’s been here,” said Meg, bringing a loaf to the table.
“What did she want?”
“She wanted to reprimand me.”
“And what have you been doing?”
Meg was in the larder again. “’Tis not me, ’tis you.”
“What do you mean, mother?”
“She’s been a-hinting,” here Meg pushed a dish of potatoes to the right of the bread, and a salt-cellar to the left of the yawning remains of a rabbit pie, “about your not being a teetotal. She says the boozing do give the choir a bad name and I was to persuade you to give it up.”
“I should like to persuade her it was time she is dead. I don’t go for to take any pattern from that rich trash. Are we the grass under their feet? And can you tell me why parsons’ wives are always so much more awful than the parsons themselves? I never shall understand that if I lives a thousand years. Name o’ God, what next?”
“Well, ’tis as she says. Drink is no good to any man, and she can’t say as I ain’t reprimanded you.”
“Name o’ God,” he replied, “do you think I booze just for the sake o’ the booze, because I like booze? No man does that. He drinks so that he shan’t be thought a fool, or rank himself better than his mates—though he knows in his heart he might be if he weren’t so poor or so timid. Not that one would mind to be poor if it warn’t preached to him that he must be contented. How can the poor be contented as long as there’s the rich to serve? The rich we have always with us, that’s our responsibility, we are the grass under their feet. Why should we be proud of that? When a man’s poor the only thing left him is hope—for something better: and that’s called envy. If you don’t like your riches you can always give it up, but poverty you can’t desert, nor it won’t desert you.”