Everything you look at,
middle-class. Respectable! Everything good--eet is, you say, shocking.
Madame Grundy! Eet is all limited and computing and self-seeking. Dat is
why your art is so limited, youra fiction, your philosophin, why you
are all so inartistic. You want nothing but profit! What will pay! What
would you?"...
He had all those violent adjuncts to speech we Western Europeans have
abandoned, shruggings of the shoulders, waving of the arms, thrusting
out of the face, wonderful grimaces and twiddlings of the hands under
your nose until you wanted to hit them away. Day after day it went on,
and I had to keep any anger to myself, to reserve myself for the time
ahead when it would be necessary to see the quap was got aboard and
stowed--knee deep in this man's astonishment. I knew he would make a
thousand objections to all we had before us. He talked like a drugged
man. It ran glibly over his tongue. And all the time one could see his
seamanship fretting him, he was gnawed by responsibility, perpetually
uneasy about the ship's position, perpetually imagining dangers.
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