The garrison was absolutely mere tongue, mere gossip of public-house bars, firesides, etc .-- more serious, of the Socialist lecture-rooms.

And what of the girl's own feeling?
Was there no sense of compassion in him?
Very little.

And in saying so I mean anything but to convey that Mutimer was conspicuously hard-hearted.

The fatal defect in working people is absence of imagination, the power which may be solely a gift of nature and irrespective of circumstances, but which in most of us owes so much to intellectual training.

Half the brutal cruelties perpetrated by uneducated men and women are directly traceable to lack of the imaginative spirit, which comes to mean lack of kindly sympathy.
Mutimer, we know, had got for himself only the most profitless of educations, and in addition nature had scanted him on the emotional side.