How can you say there's a soul there

"How can you say there's a soul there. How can you tell when the soul enters the flesh. Or whether you even have a soul?"
"It's murdering your own child, is what it is."
"Child, schmild. A complex protein molecule, is all."
"I guess on the rare occasions you bathe you wouldn't mind using Nazi soap made from one of those six million Jews."
"All right -" he was mad - "show me the difference."
After that it ceased being logical and phony and became emotional and phony. They were like a drunk with dry heaves: having brought up and expelled all manner of old words which had always, somehow, sat wrong, they then proceeded to fill the loft with futile yelling trying to heave up their own living tissue, organs which had no business anywhere but where they were.
As the sun went dawn she broke out of a point-by-point condemnation of Slab's moral code to assault Cheese Danish # 56, charging at it with windmilling nails.
"Go ahead," Slab said, "it will help the texture." He was on the phone. "Winsome's not home." He jittered the receiver, dialed information. "Where can I get 300 bills," he said. "No, the banks are closed . . . I am against usury." He quoted to the phone operator from Ezra Pound's Cantos.
"How come," he wondered, "all you phone operators talk through your nose." Laughter. "Fine, we'll try it sometime." Esther yelped, having just broken a fingernail. Slab hung up. "It fights back," he said. "Baby, we need 300. Somebody must have it." He decided to call all his friends who had savings accounts. A minute later this list was exhausted and he was no closer to financing Esther's trip south. Esther was tramping around looking for a bandage. She finally had to settle for a wad of toilet paper and a rubber band.
"I'll think of something," he said. "Stick by Slab, babe. Who is a humanitarian." They both knew she would. To whom else? She was the sticking sort.
So Slab sat thinking and Esther waved the paper ball at the end of her finger to a private tune, maybe an old love song. Though neither would admit it they also waited for Raoul and Melvin and the Crew to arrive for the party; while all the time the colors in the wall-size painting were shifting, reflecting new wavelengths to compensate for the wasting sun.

Rachel, out looking for Esther, didn't arrive at the party till late. Coming up the seven flights to the loft she passed at each landing, like frontier guards, nuzzling couples, hopelessly drunken boys, brooding types who read out of and scrawled cryptic notes in paper books stolen from Raoul, Slab and Melvin's library; all of whom informed her how she had missed all the fun. What this fun was she found out before she'd fairly wedged her way into the kitchen where all the Good People were.
Melvin was holding forth on his guitar, in an improvised folk song, about how humanitarian a cove his roommate Slab was; crediting him with being (a) a neo-Wobbly and reincarnation of Joe Hill, (b) the world's leading pacifist, (c) a rebel with taproots in the American Tradition, (d) in militant opposition to Fascism, private capital, the Republican administration and Westbrook Pegler.