As reg'lar as
winter comes Longwood is knocked off--no work. I've knowed them not
have a bit of meat for weeks together, and him a-loungin' about at
the corner of the street. Wasn't that enough to make him feel as if
somebody ought to be killed? And Marshall and Dennis say as the
proper thing to do is to give him a vote, and prove to him there was
never no Abraham nor Isaac, and that Jonah never was in a whale's
belly, and that nobody had no business to have more children than he
could feed. And what goes on, and what must go on, inside such a
place as Longwood's, with him and his wife, and with them boys and
gals all huddled together--But I'd better hold my tongue. We'll let
the smoke out of this room, I think, and air it a little.'
She opened the window, and Baruch rose and went home.
Whenever Mrs Caffyn talked about the labourers at Great Oakhurst,
whom she knew so well, Clara always felt as if all her reading had
been a farce, and, indeed, if we come into close contact with actual
life, art, poetry and philosophy seem little better than trifling.
When the mist hangs over the heavy clay land in January, and men and
women shiver in the bitter cold and eat raw turnips, to indulge in
fireside ecstasies over the divine Plato or Shakespeare is surely not
such a virtue as we imagine it to be.
CHAPTER XXVII
Baruch sat and mused before he went to bed.
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