abject, stupid indifference was the bottom of it all: abject, brutal
indifference to everything--yes, everything. Just a piece of female
functioning, no more.
Alvina was supposed to receive a certain fee for these cases she
attended in their homes. A small proportion of her fee she kept for
herself, the rest she handed over to the Home. That was the
agreement. She received her grudged fee callously, threatened and
exacted it when it was not forthcoming. Ha!--if they didn't have to
pay you at all, these slum-people, they would treat you with more
contempt than if you were one of themselves. It was one of the
hardest lessons Alvina had to learn--to bully these people, in their
own hovels, into some sort of obedience to her commands, and some
sort of respect for her presence. She had to fight tooth and nail
for this end. And in a week she was as hard and callous to them as
they to her. And so her work was well done. She did not hate them.
There they were. They had a certain life, and you had to take them
at their own worth in their own way. What else! If one should be
gentle, one was gentle. The difficulty did not lie there. The
difficulty lay in being sufficiently rough and hard: that was the
trouble. It cost a great struggle to be hard and callous enough.
Glad she would have been to be allowed to treat them quietly and
gently, with consideration. But pah--it was not their line. They
wanted to be callous, and if you were not callous to match, they
made a fool of you and prevented your doing your work.
Was Alvina her own real self all this time? The mighty question
arises upon us, what is one's own real self? It certainly is not
what we think we are and ought to be. Alvina had been bred to think
of herself as a delicate, tender, chaste creature with unselfish
inclinations and a pure, "high" mind. Well, so she was, in the
more-or-less exhausted part of herself. But high-mindedness had
really come to an end with James Houghton, had really reached the
point, not only of pathetic, but of dry and anti-human, repulsive
quixotry. In Alvina high-mindedness was already stretched beyond the
breaking point. Being a woman of some flexibility of temper,
wrought through generations to a fine, pliant hardness, she flew
back. She went right back on high-mindedness. Did she thereby betray
it?
We think not. If we turn over the head of the penny and look at the
tail, we don't thereby deny or betray the head. We do but adjust it
to its own complement. And so with high-mindedness. It is but one
side of the medal--the crowned reverse. On the obverse the three
legs still go kicking the soft-footed spin of the universe, the
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