I could get along so easy and so nice if I didn’t have you on my tail. I could live so easy and maybe have a girl.
Chapter 1 · George Milton
Context
George says this while lying back on the sand, half-musing and half-complaining about the burden of traveling with Lennie.
Analysis
The repeated modal 'could'—appearing twice in two sentences—locates George's freedom entirely in the conditional mood, a hypothetical grammar that the novella never permits to migrate into the indicative. The deflating progression from 'so easy and so nice' to the meager hope of 'maybe have a girl' exposes how impoverished even George's fantasy of liberation has become: the imagined alternative life is structured around the same lack (companionship, intimacy) that traveling with Lennie supposedly causes.
How to Use in Essay
Argue that George's fantasies of solo life systematically betray themselves by reproducing the deprivations they claim to remedy—this line demonstrates how the conditional mood marks the upper limit of working-class aspiration in the novella's grammar.