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7.
For these reasons the social novelists seem to me to make society far too simple. Movement is fluid. People move up and down in classes voluntarily, but the psychological reasons and cost of such a movement are apt to be terrific. I still like Dickens' "Bleak House" best of all social novels because it shows the tragedy to be general and the rottenness to extend from the top to the bottom. Movement is not really up and down, but across. Sometime I think the strangest thing, and yet the most understandable thing of all is the social novelists who depict the poor with fervor, and yet expect to become rich and famous thereby. Isn't it nuts? Remember Boris, that very aggressive Jewish kid that made your life miserable through several quarters? I think I shall remember till my dying day what he said. He asked, "Why don't you stay on your own side of the tracks? Why do you try to horn in on underlined: ours?" I could not explain it then, but I consider that by one remove that underlined: is my