Joe sat down at the fire, filled his pipe, looked steadily at it, and then laid it on the mantel-piece. ‘No, no, Master Joe. You must be thrifty now. You have smoked twice since--I can afford to say--since dinner-time, for you haven’t dined. It is strange, now that the sense of hunger has passed off, what a sense of excitement I feel. Two hours back I could have been a cannibal. I believe I could have eaten the vice-provost--though I should have liked him strongly devilled--and now I feel stimulated. Hence it is, perhaps, that so little wine is enough to affect the heads of starving people--almost maddening them. Perhaps Dick suspected something of this, for he did not care that I should go along with him. Who knows but he may have thought the sight of a supper might have overcome me. If he knew but all. I’m much more disposed to make love to Letty Clancy than to go in for galantine and champagne. By the way, I wonder if the physiologists are aware of that? It is, perhaps, what constitutes the ethereal condition of love. I’ll write an essay on that, or, better still, I’ll write a review of an imaginary French essay. Frenchmen are permitted to say so much more than we are, and I’ll be rebukeful on the score of his excesses. The bitter way in which a Frenchman always visits his various incapacities--whether it be to know something, or to do something, or to be something--on the species he belongs to; the way in which he suggests that, had he been consulted on the matter, humanity had been a much more perfect organisation, and able to sustain a great deal more of wickedness without disturbance, is great fun. I’ll certainly invent a Frenchman, and make him an author, and then demolish him. What if I make him die of hunger, having tasted nothing for eight days but the proof-sheets of his great work--the work I am then reviewing? For four days--but stay--if I starve him to death, I cannot tear his work to pieces. No; he shall be alive, living in splendour and honour, a frequenter of the Tuileries, a favoured guest at Compiègne.’