have bought those things out of her proper
earnings. I believe she's a really bad lot. I don't like to think it,
but it must be so. Hilary can't have been so stupid after what I said to
him. If she really is bad, it simplifies things very much; but Hilary is
just the sort of man who will never believe it. Oh dear!'
It was, to be quite fair, immensely difficult for Stephen and his
wife--or any of their class and circle--in spite of genuinely good
intentions, to really feel the existence of their "shadows," except in so
far as they saw them on the pavements. They knew that these people
lived, because they saw them, but they did not feel it--with such
extraordinary care had the web of social life been spun. They were, and
were bound to be, as utterly divorced from understanding of, or faith in,
all that shadowy life, as those "shadows" in their by-streets were from
knowledge or belief that gentlefolk really existed except in so far as
they had money from them.
Stephen and Cecilia, and their thousands, knew these "shadows" as "the
people," knew them as slums, as districts, as sweated industries, of
different sorts of workers, knew them in the capacity of persons
performing odd jobs for them; but as human beings possessing the same
faculties and passions with themselves, they did not, could not, know
them. The reason, the long reason, extending back through generations,
was so plain, so very simple, that it was never mentioned--in their heart
of hearts, where there was no room for cant, they knew it to be just a
little matter of the senses. They knew that, whatever they might say,
whatever money they might give, or time devote, their hearts could never
open, unless--unless they closed their ears, and eyes, and noses. This
little fact, more potent than all the teaching of philosophers, than
every Act of Parliament, and all the sermons ever preached, reigned
paramount, supreme. It divided class from class, man from his shadow--as
the Great Underlying Law had set dark apart from light.
On this little fact, too gross to mention, they and their kind had in
secret built and built, till it was not too much to say that laws,
worship, trade, and every art were based on it, if not in theory, then in
fact. For it must not be thought that those eyes were dull or that nose
plain--no, no, those eyes could put two and two together; that nose, of
myriad fancy, could imagine countless things unsmelled which must lie
behind a
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