"I am not. I'm neither a slummer nor an uplifter. A slummer helps. I'm just looking on." I threw the cushion behind me to the other end of the sofa. "I thought it might be interesting to see for myself some of the causes which produce conditions. I've read a good deal, but one doesn't exactly sense things by reading. I want to see."
"And after you see?" Selwyn made an impatient movement with his hand. "A thousand years from now humanity may get results from scientific management in social organization, but most of your present-day methods are about as practical as trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon or to pick a posy out of swamp grass."
"What do you know of present-day methods?"
"Very little. Beating the air doesn't interest me. Most people seem to forget the processes of nature; seem to imagine that certain things can be brought to pass quickly which can only be accomplished slowly. From the first struggle of the human race to stand upright, to articulate, to find food, to strike fire, to paddle in water, to wear covering, to forage, explore— What is the matter?"
"Nothing." I leaned back in the corner of the sofa, my hands, palms upward, in my lap, my eyes on them that he might not see their smiling. "I was just wondering what that had to do with certain present-day conditions, certain injustices and inequalities, certain—"
"It explains them to some extent. From the earliest days of dawning thought, from the first efforts at self-expression, humanity has grouped itself not only into families, tribes, communities, nations, or what you will, but in each of these divisions there have ever been subdivisions. Ignorance and knowledge, strength and weakness, power and incapacity, find their level, rise or fall according to their proper place. If you have any little dreams of making all human beings after one pattern—"
"I haven't. It would be as uninteresting as impossible. But it is queer—"
"What is queer?" Selwyn stooped forward and broke a lump of coal from which sprang blazing reds and curling blues of flame. "Why did you stop?"
"I was thinking it was queer you should know so much of the history of the human race and so little of its life to-day. As a shrugger you stand off."
"For the love of Heaven don't let's get on that!"