"But everybody has time to think, Roger. You're always talking about the way machinery affects men, they just do things over and over with their hands because it gets mechanical and they don't have to think about it. They can think while they're working, if they're the thinking kind."
"Try it. Make the same motion over and over for eight hours and see how alive your brain would be. Make it for a week, a month, all a working life. You're dead."
Anne looked thoughtful. She liked discussing with Roger and they usually agreed. But a note had crept into Roger's line of argument lately, that disturbed her almost physically, just as it did to hear a soap-boxer shrieking on the corner. It always made something inside her curl up and retreat, so that she could never stop and listen to what the man was saying.
She got back again to particulars. "But he did do it. He burned a building and tried to kill a man."
"Yes, he did it, just as a machine that is started by a clever mechanic does the work for which it is made. It obeys its law. Angelo Sabatini is obeying his law, the law that ground him and his ancestors down until there was only a spark left—the spark that brought him six thousand miles—to the 'Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave'. And then we tried to kill that spark and Sabatini kicked out. Why, it's this spark, this will and courage to kick, that's the only thing in the man worth saving."
Anne felt a little frightened. "But, dear, I know things are all wrong and ought to be different, but they're not different yet. If you do wrong you have to pay the price."
Roger pushed back his almost untouched plate and began walking up and down the pretty room. "But that's just the point. The guilty, the really ethically guilty, do not pay the price. Angelo Sabatini is a victim of society, just as much as he would have been the victim of a beam falling on him. This isn't a personal fight between one fisherman and another, it's the whole social revolution. And that's what fools like Wainwright don't see or pretend they don't. They patch and sing hymns while they patch."
Anne laid down her dessert spoon hastily. "Roger," she said quietly after a silence, filled only by the dropping of the burned wood and Roger's even tread the length of the room, "you're not going to quarrel with Mr. Wainwright, are you?"
Roger smiled. "Hilary Wainwright doesn't quarrel with his employees. He dismisses them."
Anne looked quickly away into the fire. After a moment she asked, almost indifferently: "Do you think he will dismiss you?"