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"But a joke that seems cheap to you doesn't seem cheap to the person who laughs at it, or he wouldn't laugh."

Her face brightened as a fresh idea flooded her mind:

"The wooden image a savage prays to may seem cheap to you, but it's the best god he knows, and it's all right for him to pray to it."

"Bully for you," said Roger. "Perfectly true. But I've got away from the point I had in mind. Humanity is yearning now as it never did before for truth, for beauty, for the things that comfort and console and make life seem worth while. I feel this all round me, every day. We've been through a frightful ordeal, and every decent spirit is asking itself what we can do to pick up the fragments and remould the world nearer to our heart's desire. Look here, here's something I found the other day in John Masefield's preface to one of his plays: The truth and rapture of man are holy things, not lightly to be scorned. A carelessness of life and beauty marks the glutton, the idler, and the fool in their deadly path across history. I tell you, I've done some pretty sober thinking as I've sat here in my bookshop during the past horrible years. Walt Whitman wrote a little poem during the Civil War—Year that trembled and reeled beneath me, said Walt, Must I learn to