the other unfortunates. Isn't that a thing worth having? Isn't it
something to be down on the ground with the poor and empty-handed, not
above them, where you can't hear them crying and laughing? Would you, if
you could, be one of the prosperous, who don't care? Would you, if you
could, be one of those who have their joy in life ready-made and put into
their hands, instead of one of the poor craftsmen who have to make their
own? What's the gaiety of the saints? Not the pleasant cheerfulness of
the Denis Urquharts and their kind, who have things, but the gaiety, in
the teeth of circumstances, of St. Francis and his paupers, who have
nothing and yet possess all things. That's your gaiety; the gaiety that
plays the fool, as you put it, looking into the very eyes of agony and
death; that loses and laughs and makes others laugh in the last ditch;
the gaiety of those who drop all cargoes, fortune and good name and love,
overboard lightly, and still spread sail to the winds and voyage, and
when they're driven by the winds at last onto a lee shore, derelicts
clinging to a broken wreck, find on the shore coloured shells to play
with and still are gay. That's your gaiety, as I've always known it and
loved it. Are you going to chuck that gaiety away, and rise up full of
the lust to possess, and take and grasp and plunder? Are you going to
desert the empty-handed legion, whose van you've marched in all your
life, and join the prosperous?" Rodney broke off for a moment, as if he
waited for an answer. He rose from his chair and began to walk about the
room, speaking again, with a more alright vehemence. "Oh, you may think
this is mere romance, fancy, sentiment, what you will. But it isn't. It's
deadly, solid truth. You can't grasp. You can't try to change your camp.
You--and Lucy too, for she's in the same camp--wouldn't be happy, to put
it at its simplest. You'd know all the time that you'd shirked, deserted,
been false to your business. You'd be fishes out of water, with the
knowledge that you'd taken for your own pleasure something that someone
else ought to have had. It isn't in either of you to do it. You must