and
stripping bare, and going down one by one and empty-handed into the
common highways, to take their share of hardness like men. It will be
extraordinarily difficult. Changing one's camp is. It's so difficult as
to be all but impossible. Perhaps you've read the Bible story of the
young man with great possessions, and how it was said, 'With men it is
impossible...' Well, the tradition, true or false, goes that in the end
he did it; gave up his possessions and became financially poor. But we
don't know, even if that's true, what else he kept of his wealth; a good
deal, I daresay, that wasn't money or material goods. One can't tell.
What we do know is that to cross that dividing line, to change one's
camp, is a nearly impossible thing. Someone says, 'That division, the
division of those who have and those who have not, runs so deep as almost
to run to the bottom.' The great division, he calls it, between those who
seize and those who lose. Well, the Haves aren't always seizers, I think;
often--more often, perhaps--they have only to move tranquilly through
life and let gifts drop into their hands. It's pleasant to see, if we are
not in a mood to be jarred. It's often attractive. It was mainly that
that attracted you long ago in Denis Urquhart. The need and the want in
you, who got little and lost much, was somehow vicariously satisfied by
the gifts he received from fortune; by his beauty and strength and good
luck and power of winning and keeping. He was pleasant in your eyes,
because of these gifts of his; and, indeed, they made of him a pleasant
person, since he had nothing to be unpleasant about. So your emptiness
found pleasure in his fullness, your poverty in his riches, your weakness
in his strength, and you loved him. And I think if anything could (yet)
have redeemed him, have saved him from his prosperity, it would have been
your love. But instead of letting it drag him down into the scrum and the
pity and the battle of life, he turned away from it and kept it at a
distance, and shut himself more closely between his protecting walls of
luxury and well-being. Then, again, Lucy gave him his chance; but he
hasn't (so far) followed her love either. She'd have led him, if she
could, out of the protecting, confining walls, into the open, where
people are struggling and perishing for lack of a little pity; but he
wouldn't. So far the time hasn't been ripe for his saving; his day is
still to come. It's up to all of us who