'But we know all that,' she interrupted. 'I mean, we've read it. It's this sort of having-faith business. It's all right for people with money.'
'The very people,' he corrected her, 'for whom it's most difficult.'
'Oh dear,' and she heaved another Martha sigh. There was a pause. 'Couldn't you put it in a book, Joe—write it?' she asked, pride in one eye and ambition in the other. He looked very much of a man, standing there so erect with his eyes fixed on space above her head. 'We could do with a bit extra, too.'
'And might help other people,' he added, 'eh?'
She said nothing to that. 'It might sell; you never know.'
He shook his head. He realised, once again, the pathos in her, and at the same time that she vampired him. It's the pathetic people that ever vampire and exhaust those who are more vital.
'I'm not literary,' he replied, 'not literary in that way. Only the few with air in them would catch my idea, and the others, the commonplace Press in particular which decides the sale of a book, would find a joke they could understand and call it air. And air is gas, you know.' He chuckled. 'Whereas what I mean is Air—instantaneous unifier of thought and action, the L.C.D. of a new order of existence, a new point of view born of collective sympathy, as with a flock of birds, community involving something akin to the strange bird-wisdom and bird-knowledge—' he took a deep breath—'the solvent of all philosophic and religious problems——'
She caught a word and clutched it. 'Religious people,' she put it hurriedly, 'might buy it—a book like that.'
He came back from his flight with a thud, landing beside her. 'Their imagination is too sluggish, dear. As a rule, too, they have not intellect enough to detect the comic element in life. They can't laugh at themselves. They exclude joy and fun and play. They never really sing.'
'They do, yes,' said Mother—'I mean they don't. That's quite true.'