“If he was discouraged or broken down any way,” Lemuel calmly added.
“Oh!” said Sewell. “You mean that you found more sympathy among your old friends and neighbours than you do here?”
“No,” said Lemuel bluntly. “That's what city people think. But it's all a mistake. There isn't half the sympathy in the country that there is in the city. Folks pry into each other's business more, but they don't really care so much. What I mean is that you could live cheaper, and the fight isn't so hard. You might have to use your hands more, but you wouldn't have to use your head hardly at all. There isn't so much opposition—competition.”
“Oh,” said Sewell a second time. “But this competition—this struggle—in which one or the other must go to the wall, isn't that painful?”
“I don't know as it is,” answered Lemuel, “as long as you're young and strong. And it don't always follow that one must go to the wall. I've seen some things where both got on better.”
Sewell succumbed to this worldly wisdom. He was frequently at the disadvantage men of cloistered lives must be, in having his theories in advance of his facts. He now left this point, and covertly touched another that had come up in his last talk with Evans about Barker. “But you find in the country, don't you, a greater equality of social condition? People are more on a level, and have fewer artificial distinctions.”
“Yes, there's that,” admitted Lemuel. “I've worried a good deal about that, for I've had to take a servant's place in a good many things, and I've thought folks looked down on me for it, even when they didn't seem to intend to do it. But I guess it isn't so bad as I thought when I first began to notice it. Do you suppose it is?” His voice was suddenly tense with personal interest in the question which had ceased to be abstract.
“Oh, certainly not,” said the minister, with an ease which he did not feel.
“I presume I had what you may call a servant's place at Miss Vane's,” pursued Lemuel unflinchingly, “and I've been what you may call head waiter at the St. Albans, since I've been there. If a person heard afterwards, when I had made out something, if I ever did, that I had been a servant, would they—they—despise me for it?”
“Not unless they were very silly people,” said Sewell cordially, “I can assure you.”