"But you're fond of them, aren't you?"
"No better wife no guy never had, and no nicer little fam'ly."
"Well, then, that's so much to the good. Those are assets, aren't they? They'll mean more to you than if you had money in the savings bank and didn't have them."
"I can't eddicate 'em proper, or send 'em to high-school, let alone college, or give 'em nothin' like what they ought to have. All I can leave 'em when I die is what my father left me, the right not to be able to get nowhere—and yet you'll hear a lot of gabbers jazzin' away about this bein' the best country for a working-man."
During the lunch-hour we drifted into Fifth Avenue, joining the throng of those who for sixty minutes were like souls enjoying a respite from limbo. Limbo, I ask you to notice, is not hell; but it is far from paradise. The dictionary defines the word as a borderland, a place of restraint, and it was in both those senses, I think, that the shop and the factory struck the imaginations of these churning minds. The shop and the factory formed a borderland, neither one thing nor another, a nowhere; but a place of restraint none the less. More than the physical restraint involved in the necessity for working was implied by this; it was restraint of the spirit, restraint of the part of a man that soars, restraint of the impulse to seize the good things of life in a world where they seemed to be free.
Though I could understand little of the conversation around me—Yiddish, Polish, Armenian, Czech—I knew they were talking of jobs and bosses in relation to politics and the big things of life.
"What's the matter with them guys at Albany and Washington that they don't come across with laws—?"
That was the question and that was the complaint. It was one of the two main blends in the current of dissatisfaction. The other blend was the conviction that if those who had the power didn't right self-evident wrongs, the wronged would somehow have to right themselves. There was no speechmaking, no stump oratory, after the manner of a Celtic or Anglo-Saxon crowd; all was smothered, sullen, burning, secretive, and intense.
On our way back to the cavern the Finn remarked:
"No man doesn't mind work. He'd rather work than loaf, even if he was paid for loafin'. What he can't stick is not havin' room to grow in, bein' squeezed into undersize, like a Chinese woman's foot."