"Incipient socialism, this," Somers confided to the wall opposite.
"It isn't," Woodroffe said. "I've no sympathy with the greasy proletariat; not my line at all. It is that the whole thing has just set me wondering how I'm going to get out of it. It's no damned good pretending, my dear Bob, that I wouldn't sooner be lying snug in a clean comfortable bed than delivering women like Nellie Mason. And, oh! Lord, the accent is on the clean all the time."
"You don't mean to imply ..." Somers began.
"My dear chap, of course I don't," Woodroffe cut in. "My bed here is clean enough for any one, but for about twelve hours of the day I am mixing with dirtiness of every sort and kind, and I had more than my fill of it in the war—lice by the yard and every sort of filth. You blooming base-wallahs never knew your blessings. Well, all I know is that I used to tell myself stories of getting clean, fantasy hot baths in exquisite surroundings, and picture myself going straight from them into brand new clothes and that sort of thing. Instead of which I've dropped straight into this. I know I'm clean all right, Bob, but I can't feel clean. You've got to admit now, haven't you, that ours is a dirty job, take it all round?"
Somers put his hand under his coat and scratched his left shoulder vigorously. "Oh! damn," he remarked, after a thoughtful interval.
"I might come back to it, after a couple of years or so," Woodroffe began again apologetically. "But it's becoming almost an obsession with me just now. I expect these psycho-analysis Johnnies would say I was suffering from some suppression or shock or something."
"You've definitely made up your mind to chuck this job, then?" Somers asked.
"I hadn't when we began," Woodroffe replied. "But talking to you about it seems to have cleared my mind. Honestly I'd no idea of chucking it when we started this jaw, and now it seems the only possible thing to do."
"What are you going to live on?" Somers asked.
"I've saved between four and five hundred pounds," Woodroffe said. "Carry me on for a bit, though I suppose it isn't worth two hundred these days. And then I might have a look round one of the colonies, Canada or New Zealand, or somewhere. It'd be cleaner than Peckham."