Every novelist of serious pretensions adopts
anironic attitude towards his upper-class characters. But I wanted much more
thanmerely to escape from my job. I thought it over and decided what I would
do.
The thing that was done to him wasmerely a wanton
meaningless cruelty.
They are always twenty years out of date. How many
Englishmen have seenthe inside of an ordinary French bourgeois family, for
instance?
But you see I was still halfafraid of the working
class. Hence the proletarian cant from which we now suffer. Perhaps this
class-breaking business isnt so simple as it looked!
It was too hot to sleep and we spent the night in
talking.
For five years I had been part of anoppressive
system, and it had left me with a bad conscience. To begin with, many people have no
ear foraccent and judge you entirely by your clothes. They are always twenty years
out of date. Even the middle classes, for the first time in their history,are
feeling the pinch. And this ismerely a preliminary stage, in a country still rich
with the loot of ahundred years.
I thought it over and decided what I would
do.
Do you want the British Empire to hold togetheror
do you want it to disintegrate?
Ihave lived in common lodging-houses for months
together. Thefirst is one of the finest types of man we have. It was too hot to
sleep and we spent the night in talking. In the free air of England that kind of
thing is notfully intelligible.