“Oh, of course, they are simply barbarians,” said Father Payne, “and it doesn’t do them any harm to be poor.  No, the tragedy lies in the case of a man with really expansive, generous, civilised instincts, to whom the world is full of wholesome and urgent delights, and whose life is simply starved out of him by poverty.  I have a great mind to send you to London for a couple of months, to live on a pound a week, and see what you make of it.”

“I’ll go if you wish it,” I said.

“It might bring things home to you,” said Father Payne, smiling, “but again it probably would not, because it would only be a game—­the real pinch would not come.  Most people would rather enjoy migrating to hell from heaven for a month—­it would just give them a sharper relish for heaven.”

“But do you really think your poverty hurt you?” I said.

“I have no doubt it did,” said Father Payne.  “Of course I was rescued in time, before the bitterness really sank down into my soul.  But I think it prevented my ever being more than a looker-on.  I believe I could have done some work worth doing, if I could have tried a few experiments.  I don’t know!  Perhaps I am ungrateful after all.  My poverty certainly gave me a wish to help things along, and I doubt if I should have learnt that otherwise.  And I think, too, it taught me not to waste compassion on the wrong things.  The people to be pitied are simply the people whose minds and souls are pinched and starved—­the over-sensitive, responsive people, who feel hunted and punished without knowing why.  It’s temperament always, and not circumstance, which is the happy or the unhappy thing.  I felt, when you said what you did about poverty, that you neither knew how harmless it could be, or how infinitely noxious it might be.  I don’t take a high-minded view of money myself.  I don’t tell people to despise it.  I always tell the fellows here to realise what they can endure and what they can’t.  The first requisite for a sensible man is to find work which he enjoys, and the next requisite is for him to earn as much as he really needs—­that is to say without having to think daily and hourly about money.  I don’t over-estimate what money can do, but it is foolish to under-estimate what the want of it can do.  I have seen more fine natures go to pieces under the stress of poverty than under any other stress that I know.  Money is perfectly powerless as a shield against many troubles—­and on the other hand it can save a man from innumerable little wretchednesses and horrors which destroy the beauty and dignity of life.  I don’t believe mechanically in humiliation and renunciation and ignominy and contempt, as purifying influences.  It all depends upon whether they are gallantly and adventurously and humorously borne.  They often make some people only sore and diffident, and I don’t believe in learning to hate life.  Not to learn your own limitations is childish:  and one of the insolences