"It may be. The end is the same. If I am too short-sighted, too unimaginative to know how a fellow being feels, I can do nothing but blunder along. He may be hurt by me. I may do him an injustice, I may even cheat him of his chance at life, but it can't be helped, and again the result amounts to my being selfish."
As she worked over her biscuit dough, Claire listened to their talk resentfully. She wished they would keep still, but she said nothing. They went ahead, demonstrating, she thought bitterly, the truth of Lawrence's argument.
"I suppose mankind generally does the best it can," Philip said thoughtfully. "If you ask a man, if you really talk with him, you will find him kindly, inclined to be generous, and willing to do what he can for another. I have always found that true."
"So have I, in a way. He is kindly, he is inclined to be generous, and he is willing to do what he can for another. The trouble is, he makes a maudlin sentiment of his kindliness, a self-flattering charity of his generous inclinations, and is unable to do what he can for another because he is quite sincerely persuaded that he can't do anything."
"My friend, I have had men help me when it cost them trouble to do it. We all have. Without it, we would none of us accomplish anything of value."
"I, too, have had them help me, from the lending of money down to guiding me across a traffic-blurred street, but I have never yet found more than three or four whose imagination was keen enough and whose judgment clear enough to give me a square deal at living."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that the same man who will help me across the street, lend me money, and be a splendid comrade, stops short when he comes to the field of self-support. He will say sympathetically, 'I don't see how you can do it,' or 'I admire your grit, old man, and I'd like to see you do it,' and then begin scheming around to direct my interests, aspirations, and efforts into some other channel from where I want them, as though, out of his own great wisdom, he knew much better than I what a blind man could do. If you want to learn just how small the imagination of mankind is and how obstructive to progress is their fool good-heartedness, go among them as a capable mind with a physical handicap. You'll size them up, yourself included, as the most blindly wall-butting set of blundering organisms that ever felt their way through an endlessly obstructed universe."
"Breakfast!" Claire broke in with an unwonted sharpness in her tone. "And do let the biscuits stop the argument."
They laughed and sat down to a silent meal. When it was ended, and the men took their cigarettes to the fireplace, she said: "I wish you would both do me a favor to-day."