looking
with a cool stare at Birkin:
    »So you really think things are very bad?«
    »Completely bad.«
    The smile appeared again.
    »In what way?«
    »Every way,« said Birkin. »We are such dreary liars. Our one idea is to lie
to ourselves. We have an ideal of a perfect world, clean and straight and
sufficient. So we cover the earth with foulness; life is a blotch of labour,
like insects scurrying in filth, so that your collier can have a pianoforte in
his parlour, and you can have a butler and a motor-car in your up- house, and as
a nation we can sport the Ritz, or the Empire, Gaby Deslys and the Sunday
newspapers. It is very dreary.«
    Gerald took a little time to re-adjust himself after this tirade.
    »Would you have us live without houses - return to nature?« he asked.
    »I would have nothing at all. People only do what they want to do - and what
they are capable of doing. If they were capable of anything else, there would be
something else.«
    Again Gerald pondered. He was not going to take offence at Birkin.
    »Don't you think the collier's pianoforte, as you call it, is a symbol for
something very real, a real desire for something higher, in the collier's life?«
    »Higher!« cried Birkin. »Yes. Amazing heights of upright grandeur. It makes
him so much higher in his neighbouring collier's eyes. He sees himself reflected
in the neighbouring opinion, like in a Brocken mist, several feet taller on the
strength of the pianoforte, and he is satisfied. He lives for the sake of that
Brocken spectre, the reflection of himself in the human opinion. You do the
same. If you are of high importance to humanity you are of high importance to
yourself. That is why you work so hard at the mines. If you can produce coal to
cook five thousand dinners a day, you are five thousand times more important
than if you cooked only your own dinner.«
    »I suppose I am,« laughed Gerald.
    »Can't you see,« said Birkin, »that to help my neighbour to eat is no more
than eating myself. I eat, thou eatest, he eats, we eat, you eat, they eat - and
what then? Why should every man decline the whole verb. First person singular is
enough for me.«
    »You've got to start