“Yes.”
“And common?”
“Y-yes-s.”
“A child of the people,” I commented: “the common people.”
He nodded, wondering.
“One of the great, friendless mass of helpless humanity?”
He nodded.
“That wasn’t your fault, was it?” I said. “Not to blame for that? That’s not your sin, is it?”
He shook his head, staring, and he was so mystified that I said that most people were “pretty terribly punished for being born poor and common.” He nodded, but he wasn’t interested or enlightened, apparently. “And you learned, somehow, that the thing to do was to get yourself on, get up out of it, make a success of your life?”
“Yes,” he said slowly. “I don’t know how, but I did get that, somehow.”