"Well, I've got a great deal of pluck."
"Yes—if you've got enough. It's one thing to say so now, and another to prove it when the time comes."
In his suppressed vehemence Teddy grasped Bob's wrist, as the hands of both lay on the small table above which their heads came together.
"I've got the pluck for anything but to go before their court and say what you want me to say. I took the money because my father and mother, after slaving for society all their lives, had a right to it; I shot a man because they'd got me so jumpy with all the wrongs they'd done me that I didn't know what my hand was up to. If they won't let me have my kind of justice, they'll just have to dope me out their own, and I'll swallow it."
Another conversation, in the same spot, and with heads together in the same way, was gentler.
"I know pretty well what they're going to hand me out—and it'll be all right. What kind of life would I have now, even if they acquitted me? What could I have had even if I'd never got into this scrape at all? I'm not cut out for big things. I'm just the same size as poor old dad, and I'd have gone the same way. Ma's got it straight—it's not good enough. Think of rotting in an office all your life just to reach the gorgeous sum of forty-five a week, and when you've got it to be chucked into the hell of the unemployed! Say, Bob, why can't everyone have enough in a world where there's plenty to go round?"
"I guess it's because we haven't the right kind of world."
"But why haven't we? We've been at it long enough."
"Perhaps not. That may be where the trouble lies. When life came on this planet, to begin with, it took millions of years to get it anywhere. Nobody knows how long it was before the thing that lived in the water could creep on the land; but it was time to be reckoned by ages. When you come to ages, the human race is young. It's made a life for itself which it doesn't know how to swing. In a few more ages it may learn; but it hasn't learned as yet."
Teddy reflected.