“You can talk. You might write. Edit. You’ve got a deadly critical eye. Yes, you are a Lycurgan. That’s settled.”
“How can you say I can talk?”
“You’ve got a tenacity. I’d back you against anyone in argument, when you’re roused.”
“Argument is no good to anybody, world without end, amen.”
“Don’t be frivolous, Miriam. Real argument’s a fine clean weapon.”
“Cutting both ways; proving anything.”
“Quarrelsome Miriam.”
“And you know what you think about my writing. That I, or anybody could learn to write, passably.”
“If you have written anything, I’ve not seen it. You shall learn to write, passably, in the interests of socialism.”
What an awful fate. To sit in a dusty corner, loyally doing odd jobs, considered by him “quite a useful intelligent creature” among other much more clever, and to him, more attractive creatures, all working submissively in the interests of a theory that he understood so well that he must already be believing in something else. But she was already a useful fiercely loyal creature, that was how he described her, at Wimpole Street——But that was for the sake of freedom. Working with him there would be no freedom at all. Only a series of loyal posings.