She nodded.
"The Prisoner," said Jeff. "That's what I am—The Prisoner."
"They don't do it to be hateful. It's in love. That's what they mean it in—love."
Jeff made a little gesture of the hand, as if he tossed off something so lightly won.
"Never mind how they mean it. That's not what I'm coming to. It's that they call me The Prisoner. Well, ten minutes ago it just occurred to me that we're all prisoners. I saw it as it might be a picture of life and all of us moving in it. Alston Choate's a prisoner to Esther. So's Reardon. Only it's not to Esther they're prisoners. It's to the big force behind her, the sorcery of nature, don't you see? Blind nature."
She was looking at him with the terrified patience of one compelled to listen and yet afraid of hearing what threatens the safe crystal of her own bright dream: that apprehensive look of woman, patient in listening, but beseeching the speaker voicelessly not to kill warm personal certainties with the abstractions he thinks he has discovered. Jeffrey did not understand the look. He was enamoured of his abstraction.
"And all the mill hands have been slaves to Weedon Moore because he told them lies, and now they're prisoners to Madame Beattie because she's telling them another kind of lie, God knows what. And Addington is prisoner to catch-words."
"But what are we prisoner to?" Lydia asked sharply, as if these things were terrifying. "Is Farvie a prisoner?"
"Why, father, God bless him!" said Jeff, moved at once, remembering what his father had to fight, "he's prisoner to his fear of death."