“No.”
“What I like about you,” he said irrelevantly, “is you don’t ask questions.”
“No; I never do.”
“That’s right,” he said, and, as though unconscious of her presence, he began to talk to himself in a sort of dreamy monotone that had an odd contrast of melancholy against the background of gaiety that came thrumming and throbbing from across the wall.
“Well, and, after all, we’re just children—all great cry-babies. We can’t enjoy what we’ve got, or know how to keep it. We go out and shoot ourselves or some one else—at least the great fools do—because some one we don’t love and over whose life, after all, we have no right, meets some one else who is bored. Work—work,” he said, his thoughts flowing in some connection comprehensible only to himself; “that’s the whole thing—the joy of working for something, for something you hope to get—and when that’s gone——” he stopped suddenly, continuing the thought in his own mind, looking out of the window. “Well, even then, why should we cry out? At least we don’t starve; we have a roof over our heads; we don’t harness our bodies to grindstones just to keep on living. I wonder which counts in the end—what they do, or what we do?”
Evidently he was thinking of the hordes which spread away from them in filthy blocks, for, after a long contemplation of the snow-coated roofs, and the heavy, reddened pall of clouds which caught the city’s reflection, he continued,
“Do you know what keeps them going—all of them—thousands on thousands—just the same as us?”
“What?”
“Hope,” he said, with a laugh. “The hope that something wonderful may happen. They don’t know what it is. Poor devils, what can they hope for? But, you see, it may come. That’s where destiny plays tricks with us—has its laugh at us. Good Lord, how life plays with us, like a cat plays with a mouse! Hope! That’s how it can get us to go on, to stand a little more—the future—to-morrow—the thing you can’t guess.” He turned to her again. “Do you understand?”
“Yes, I understand—to-morrow.”