Would anybody
like it?
MRS KNOX. Dont take offence where none is meant, Mr Gilbey. Talk
about something else. No good ever comes of arguing about such things
among the like of us.
KNOX. The like of us! Are you throwing it in our teeth that your
people were in the wholesale and thought Knox and Gilbey wasnt good
enough for you?
MRS KNOX. No, Jo: you know I'm not. What better were my people than
yours, for all their pride? But Ive noticed it all my life: we're
ignorant. We dont really know whats right and whats wrong. We're all
right as long as things go on the way they always did. We bring our
children up just as we were brought up; and we go to church or chapel
just as our parents did; and we say what everybody says; and it goes
on all right until something out of the way happens: theres a family
quarrel, or one of the children goes wrong, or a father takes to
drink, or an aunt goes mad, or one of us finds ourselves doing
something we never thought we'd want to do. And then you know what
happens: complaints and quarrels and huff and offence and bad
language and bad temper and regular bewilderment as if Satan possessed
us all. We find out then that with all our respectability and piety,
weve no real religion and no way of telling right from wrong. Weve
nothing but our habits; and when theyre upset, where are we? Just
like Peter in the storm trying to walk on the water and finding he
couldnt.
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