Brian, with a quiet smile at her enthusiasm, went on: "I know exactly
what I want to say, and why I want to say it. There is a world of
people, Auntie Sue, whose lives have been broken and spoiled by one
thing or another, and who have more or less cut themselves loose from
everything, and are just drifting, they don't care a hang where, because
they think they have failed so completely that there is nothing more
in life for them. People like me,--I don't mean thieves and criminals
necessarily,--who have had that which they know to be the best and
biggest and truest part of themselves tortured and warped and twisted
and denied and smashed and beaten and betrayed and killed; and who,
because they feel that their real selves are dead within them, don't
care what happens to that part which is left."
He was walking the floor again now, and speaking with a depth of feeling
which he had never before revealed to his gentle companion.
"It is not so much the love of wrong-doing that makes people turn
bad,"--he continued,--"it is having their real selves misunderstood and
doubted and smothered and their realest loves and dreams and aspirations
never recognized, or else distorted and twisted and made to appear
as something they hate. I want to make the people--and there are many
thousands of them--who are suffering in the living hell that tormented
me, feel that I know and understand.
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