“So you really think things are very bad?”
“Completely bad.”
The smile appeared again.
“In what way?”
“Every way,” said Birkin. “We are such dreary liars. Our one idea is to lie to ourselves. We have an ideal of a perfect world, clean and straight and sufficient. So we cover the earth with foulness; life is a blotch of labour, like insects scurrying in filth, so that your collier can have a pianoforte in his parlour, and you can have a butler and a motor-car in your up-to-date house, and as a nation we can sport the Ritz, or the Empire, Gaby Deslys and the Sunday newspapers. It is very dreary.”
Gerald took a little time to re-adjust himself after this tirade.
“Would you have us live without houses—return to nature?” he asked.
“I would have nothing at all. People only do what they want to do—and what they are capable of doing. If they were capable of anything else, there would be something else.”
Again Gerald pondered. He was not going to take offence at Birkin.
“Don’t you think the collier’s pianoforte, as you call it, is a symbol for something very real, a real desire for something higher, in the collier’s life?”