He did not seem to hear her, and she was cudgelling her inexperience for some smooth retreat, when he broke out explosively:
"I'm the product of over-sudden civilisation, like a thin-blooded man plunging into cold water. From the crude half-lights of my own country I leaped at one bound into the brilliance of civilisation's beam, as it is found in America. And I couldn't stand it—few of us can. We get numb to everything but our own discomfort. And knowing we're bound for life, we struggle and beat our wings against things as we find them, in a panic because they differ so from things we were born to. We're like a bird in a room. It may be a cosy, warm and friendly room, but the bird wants only to get out in the cold. . . . The human tide we're plunged in from the very first day ignores us, or tramples us, or drives us like cattle, forgetting that we are numb and bewildered, panic stricken, unable to think beyond primal emotions. . . .
"If we could only have a year's apprenticeship where sympathy holds our hands! If only we could enter the new state by a gradient instead of a plunge! But there is no isle between, no one to lead us gently to the light. . . . And few of us would pause to be led. And so we struggle, and in the struggling hurt ourselves or are hurt. We strike out—and are struck back by stronger force than ourselves. And so we tumble back to sullen silence, watching and planning to beat that force as we may. . . . And there I am."
The hopelessness of his tone held appealing hands to her. She longed to help him, yet knew not how. And suddenly it came to her that perhaps it lay within her power to build up the structure of dissatisfaction that he was exposing to her.
"You know how foolish it is," she said. "You have intelligence, you see where fighting leads. Why strike back? Go with the tide; it is not trying to overwhelm you, only to do you good. There'd be few knocks then."
"Ah," he cried bitterly, "but it's too late. The poison of resistance has flooded our veins, and as yet there is no antidote. Slowly it has been weaving itself into the very fibre of my character; I can't help it. At moments like this I see, for my mind still retains some of its sense of proportion . . . but part of the poison of it is that we do more with our hands, these hands you hate, than with our minds. Ten years it has been coursing through me. Can I alter my stature by a thought? As I talk to you I'm able to stand aside and watch the horrible thing, but gnawing always at me is the memory of those early days of panic."
She shook her head. "You'll never understand," she sighed. "I hoped you would."
"But I do understand. It's you can't, because you never stood on foreign shore—alone."
"Yet it is better than home, or you wouldn't come in your thousands."
"Better than home, yes, but worse than we hoped. Only those who flee the rude traditions, the heartless laws, the ignorance and comfortless life of worn-out Europe can see the pictures the very word 'America' rouses in us. I don't know whether it is not more the fault of our ignorance than of the boasts of those who have already gone, of those who would profit by our going, that we land with hopes nothing on earth could justify. And, not finding the milk and honey flow out to lave our ship, we start depressed and resentful. We land in a strange country with only a word of its language. No one greets us, no one holds our fumbling hands. By dirty ways we slink to dirty tenement houses to hide ourselves—where disloyalty is the air we breath, discomfort our bed, and robbery our experience—robbed by the very friends who preceded us. Half-cowed, lonely, cursing in silence the drudgery that faces us, we learn to live for ourselves alone. Helpless, we drift into the hands of our own kind, who wax rich on the sale of us in herds to work no one else would undertake. Sullen, keen to the injustice of things, but ignorant of the simplicity of redress, we fall victims to our own morbid hatreds, to anything that promises to feed our fury. . . .