sense—and it seems to us he ought to get a job somewhere teaching school, or maybe some newspaper work—which he could do—or, perhaps, he should have studied law.”
So did their minds work on this subject. Yet the very argument they made—that he was the same kind of person as the rest of them, and not remote, wonderful, or mysterious—should have been the chief thing in his favour. But none of them could see this. For where they thought there was nothing wonderful or mysterious about them, he thought that there was; and none of them could see that his greatest asset, his greatest advantage, if he had any, was that he was made out of the same earth—the same blood, bone, character, and fury—as the rest of them. For, could they only have known it, the reason he read all the books was not, as they all thought, because he was a bookish person, for he was not, but for the same reason that his mother was mad about property—talked, thought, felt, and dreamed about real estate all the time, and wanted to own the earth just as he wanted to devour it. Again, the fury that had made him read the books was the same thing that drove his brothers and his sisters around incessantly, feeding the huge fury of their own unrest, and making them talk constantly and to everyone, until they knew all about the lives of all the butchers, bakers, merchants, lawyers, doctors, Greek restaurant owners, and Italian fruit-dealers in the community.
If they had understood this—that he had the same thing in him that they all had in them—they would have understood about his wanting to be a writer, and even the trouble in which presently he would involve himself, and that seemed so catastrophic and disgraceful to him at that time, would not have seemed so bad to them, for his father, one of his brothers, and several of his kinsmen had been in this same trouble—and it had caused no astonishment at all. But now that he had done this thing—now that the one they looked on as the scholar, and the bookish person, had done it—it was as if the leading deacon of the Church had been caught in a raid on a bawdy-house.
Finally, there was to be some irony for Eugene later in the fact that, had he only known it and grasped it, there was ready to his use in that one conflict all of the substance and energy of the human drama, and that the only thing that was wonderful or important was that they were all full of the passion, stupidity, energy, hope, and folly of living men—fools, angels, guiltless and guilty all together, not to be praised or blamed, but just blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling—the whole swarming
