"You mustn't say such things," said he, at last. "I'll tell you why! What you said was perfectly genuine, and I have no doubt you feel it--but, if I may say so, it's like talking about a place where you have never been, as if you had visited it, when you have only read about it in the guide-book. I don't mean that you wish to deceive for an instant--but you simply don't know! That's the tragic thing about money--that it is both so important and so unimportant. If you have enough money, you need never give it a thought; if you haven't, it's the devil! It's like health--no one who hasn't been on the wrong side of the dividing line knows what a horrible place the wrong side is. Those two things--I daresay there are others--poverty and ill-health--put a man on the rack. The healthy man, and the man with a sufficient income, are apt to think that the poor man and the ill man make a great fuss about very little. I don't know about ill-health, but by George, I know all about poverty--and I'll tell you once for all. For twenty years I was poor, and this is what that means. To be tied hand and foot to a piece of hideous drudgery--morning by morning, month by month, and with the consciousness too that, if health fails you, or if you lose your work, you will either starve or have to sponge on your friends--never to be able to do what you like or go where you like--to know that the world is full of beautiful places, delightful people, interesting ideas, books, talk, art, music--to sicken for all these things, and not even to have the time or energy to get hold of such scraps of them as can be found cheap in London--to feel time slipping away, and all your instincts for beautiful things unused and unsated--to live a solitary, grubby, nasty life--never able to entertain a friend, or to go a trip with a friend, or to do a kindness, or to help anyone generously--and yet to feel that with an income which many people would regard as ridiculously inadequate, you could do most of these things--the slavery, the bondage, the dreariness of it!" He broke off, much moved. "But," said I, "don't many quite poor people live happily and contentedly and kindly with minute incomes?"