"That bundle ain't nothing for you to carry. You wouldn't have started out with it if it had been. It's the same way about giving a woman a seat in a car. If she looks as if she needed it, why a humane man would give her his seat the same as he would to a tired man. But most times the man needs it more."
"You wouldn't have wanted your wife to stand?"
"Well, she weren't never real well, not after the child came."
He spoke more gently, and added without any polite delicacy, "There must have been something wrong happened then, for she got up weak, and couldn't bear children no more."
"You miss her!"
"Yes, sometimes, when work's plenty, and I feel strong, and there's something for her to live for. Most times I think it's just as well she's gone. And the child, too," he added softly. "You see it ain't as it is with you, with a working-man and his wife. They don't have so much love and notions, maybe. That don't stand long after the first weeks. The man's got to work and the woman, too. If she's a pretty-looking girl when he marries her, sweet and fresh, them looks don't last long. It's like anything you use all the time. There's no chance to lay it by and let it freshen up. Now you and my wife were about of an age, I judge. But she looked to be the mother of you, before she died. You are as pretty as you ever was or more so, and men would court you to-day if you were single. It wasn't so with my woman, and I did the best I could for her, too. Don't you suppose a working-man hates to see his wife grow old, through hard work and no chance to freshen up? He mayn't be as nice in his tastes as your sort, but he don't like to see his wife wear out."
Romantic love, so he seemed to hold, was one of the luxuries of the expensive classes. While he was talking they passed into the driveway and came to the house. Hussey finally got to the veranda, where he sat stiffly on the edge of a large steamer chair, holding his derby hat in his two hands. After a time he deposited the hat on the floor and gradually slipped into the comfortable depths of the chair and talked on more freely.
There was nothing new or wise in the bookbinder's talk. Yet certain things that he said, furtive, flame-like words of revolt which contained half truths, sank into Helen's receptive mind: "Man pays pretty high for his civilization, as he calls it, and what does he get for it? The police station and the fire department." "The Bible says that man must be born again. Yes—that's so! With a new kind of belly that knows when it's had enough." "The labor question always comes down to cutting the pie: because a man with one kind of a brain can think faster than his neighbor, ought he to get a bigger slice? Does he need it to make him think?"
There was a vein of character in the man himself, a passionate faith in a vision of society other than that which holds to-day. His talk was not vindictive, or greedy, or envious, but he assumed calmly that the present state of society was wasteful and unjust, and that already, here and there, men and women were beginning to wake from the individualistic nightmare and were ready to try an altogether new manner of living together.
"I get tired," he said in answer to a platitude that Helen made, "hearing what some folks are kind enough to do for society—how necessary they are to make it run. Don't you believe it, not for one second! If we could take account of stock in some way, and find out just what mere brains are good for and how much they do in gettin' food and clothes and shelter, I guess we'd put brains lower down. And what's more, if the only way you can get the best work out of smart men is to let them hog it, then human nature must be a pretty poor sort of outfit, and we'd better all starve. But the best workmen I've known didn't work because they had to: it was in 'em from the beginning of time to work better than the others."