Mr. Y. You joke about it, do you? And they reduced your food so that every day, nay, every hour, you feel yourself further away from life, and so much nearer to death. All the vital functions are depressed and you feel yourself dried up, and your soul, which ought to be cured and improved, is put upon starvation treatment, and thrust back a thousand years of civilization, you are only allowed to read books that have been written for the edification of our antediluvian ancestors, you can manage to hear what’s never going to take place in heaven; but what takes place on this earth remains a sealed book; you are taken away from your environment, degraded from your class, put beneath those who are beneath you; you get visions of what life was like in the Age of Bronze, feel as though you were dressed in skins in a barbarous state—lived in- a cave and drank out of a trough.
Mr. X. Quite so; but it’s only reasonable that if a man’s behaving as though this were the Age of Bronze he should live in the appropriate costume of the period.
Mr. Y.[Frowns.] You’re making fun of me, you are. You carry on like a man in the Age of Stone, who is yet somehow allowed to live in an Age of Gold.
Mr. X.[Interrogating sharply.] What! What do you mean by that expression of yours—the Age of Gold?
Mr. Y. [Slyly.] Nothing at all.
Mr. X. You’re lying, you are, because you haven’t the pluck to say what you really meant.
Mr. Y. I haven’t the pluck! You think that! I showed some pluck, I think, when I dared show myself in this neighborhood after I’d gone through what I’d gone through. But do you know the worst part of the suffering when a man’s inside? Do you? It’s just this, that the other men aren’t there too.
Mr. X. What other men?
Mr. Y. The men who went scot-free.
Mr. X. Are you referring to me?