"Yes, Billy? And now?"
"It's no use. I can't tell you. I couldn't explain if I used up all the words in the dictionary. It's just a tugging in my heart to get back where—" I had a sudden inspiration. "Read that," I said, taking Pelly's letter from my pocket.
She stood under the central bunch of electrics while I closed the suit-case and fastened the straps. Having finished the letter, she handed it back to me.
"Well?" I asked.
"It's just—just a common person's letter, as far as I see, and rather coarse. Boosey might have written it, or Miles, the chauffeur."
"And that's all you see in it?"
"What more is there to see?"
"That's just it. That's just where the inexplicable thing lies. I see, or rather I feel, a tenderness in it that probably no one could detect but myself. Even the reference to drinking—"
"The quart."
"Yes; the quart. You've got to remember how small the margin for pleasure is in a life like Sam's, and how innocently he and Bridget and Jim can do what they had much better let alone. They're not vicious; they're only—how shall I say?—they're only undeveloped. We're not such saints ourselves, even with our development; and when all civilization has bent its efforts, church and state together, to keep their minds as primitive as possible so that they'll do the most primitive kinds of work, you can't blame them if they take their pleasures and everything else primitively. We've got to have another educational system."