“If I could only write the things I think! But they vanish before pen and paper and the need of words, as the mists of the night vanish before the hard, searching sun. I am ignorant of how to use words; and those in the world who might help me will never know of me. As for those around about, they reckon me three parts fool, with just a little gift of re-writing names over their dirty shop-fronts.”
“Yet it ’s money. What did ’e get for that butivul fox wi’ the goose in his mouth you painted ’pon Mr. Lamacraft’s sign to Sticklepath?”
“Ten shillings.”
“That’s solid money.”
“It isn’t now. I bought a book with it—a book of lies.”
Chris was going to speak, but changed her mind and sighed instead.
“Well, as our affairs be speeding so poorly, we’d best to do some gude deed an’ look after this other coil. You must let Will knaw what ’s doin’ by letter this very night. ’T is awnly fair, you being set in trust for him.”
“Strange, these Grimbal brothers,” mused Clement, as the lovers proceeded in the direction of Chagford. “They come home with everything on God’s earth that men might desire to win happiness, and, by the look of it, each marks his home-coming by falling in love with one he can’t have.”
“Shaws the fairness of things, Clem; how the poor may chance to have what the rich caan’t buy; so all look to stand equal.”
“Fairness, you call it? The damned, cynical irony of this whole passion-driven puppet-show—that’s what it shows! The man who is loved cannot marry the woman he loves lest they both starve; the man who can give a woman half the world is loathed for his pains. Not that he ’s to be pitied like the pauper, for if you can’t buy love you can buy women, and the wise ones know how to manufacture a very lasting substitute for the real thing.”