But moments of hate such as this were rare. Generally he was cool enough—cooler and perhaps more tolerant than Edwards, who always in general talk showed himself bitterly conscious of the “class struggle.” Edwards came up to the office for a few minutes after luncheon nearly every day now, and as long as the two men talked personally or of concrete subjects he forgot his obsession—or, rather, seemed almost irately unable to apply it in any way to Stacey; but at the least broadening of the conversation it emerged, a sullen thing.
“Come out to dinner with us some evening, will you? To-night, if you like,” Stacey suggested once.
“No,” said Edwards shortly.
Stacey laughed. “Why not? Bound to have no dealings with the devil or any of his allies? Better come. You’d like my father. You’d fight with him, but you’d like him.”
“I don’t want to,” said Edwards. “I don’t want to like any of your crew. It’s their likableness that I resent. Of course they’re likable. Why shouldn’t they be? They’ve leisure and all the appurtenances essential to becoming so. We’ve got to fight them—you, as class against class.”
“I see. Sentiment must be kept out. No fraternizing in the trenches.”
Edwards flushed. “You’re too rotten clever, Carroll,” he replied resentfully. “It’s easy for you to make me appear in the wrong.”
“No,” said Stacey, “I simply fancy you’re wrong to think in classes. They’re abstractions. If everybody would drop them men could meet as men.”
“Oh,” exclaimed Edwards, clearly out of patience, “it’s all very well for you to sit there and talk! You can afford to be sweetly reasonable. You’re fixed—safe. You’ve everything. Of course you can talk unselfishly; you can even talk like a revolutionary. You know damn well there isn’t going to be any revolution—not yet.”
“Well, as for that,” said Stacey mildly, “I’ll admit that I live in a luxurious house with all sorts of comforts—pleasant enough in their way. Only how much do they amount to? I’m not essentially soft. I go on inhabiting the place because it’s there, because I haven’t any particular social theories (I don’t, for instance, see what good my not living there would do any one), because of my father, and because of Catherine Blair, my friend Phil’s widow, and her boys.”