Here spoke the child who imagines that grown-up people have no excuse to be anything but very good. There might be something worth pursuing in that thought. A child might consider itself chained more inseverably than one who apparently possesses the perfectiveness of free-will. Had civilization complicated too unreasonably the problem of evil? It was a commonplace to suppose that the sense of moral responsibility increased with the opportunity of development, and yet after all was not the reverse true? “Why should it be easier to behave here than in Leppard Street?” Michael asked. “I do wish you could understand it’s really so much more difficult. I can’t distinguish what is wrong from what is right nearly so well as you can.” “Well, in my experience, and my experience has done its bit I can tell you,” said Barnes in self-satisfied parenthesis. “In my experience most of the difficulties in this world come from wanting something we haven’t got. I don’t care what it is—a woman or a drink or a new suit of clothes. Money’ll buy any of them. Give me ten pounds a week, and I could be a bloody angel.” “Supposing I offered you half as much for three months,” suggested Michael. “Do you think you’d find life any easier while it lasted?” “Well, don’t be silly,” said Barnes. “Of course I should. If you’d walked home every night with your eyes on the gutter in case anybody had dropped a threepenny bit, you’d think it was easier. It’s not a bit of good your running me down, Fane. If you were me, you’d be just the same. Those monks at the Abbey used to jaw about holy poverty. The man who first said that ought to be walking about hell with donkey’s ears on his nob. What’s it done for me? I ask you. Why, it’s made me so that I’d steal a farthing from one blind man to palm it off as half-a-quid on another.” “Tell me about Leppard Street,” said Michael, laughing. “What’s it like?” “Well, you go and punch a few holes in a cheese rind. That’s what it looks like. And then go and think yourself a rat who’s lost all his teeth, and you’ve got what it feels like to be living in it.” “Supposing I said I’d like to try?” asked Michael. “What would you think?” “Think? I shouldn’t think two seconds. I should know you were having a game. What good’s Leppard Street to you, when you can sit here bouncing up and down all day on cushions?” “Experience,” said Michael. “Oh, rats! Nothing’s experience that you haven’t had to do.” “Well, I’ll give you five pounds a week,” Michael offered, “if you’ll keep yourself free to do anything I want you to do. I shouldn’t want anything very dreadful, of course,” he added. It was difficult for Michael to persuade Barnes that he was in earnest, so difficult indeed that, even when he produced five sovereigns and offered them directly to him, he had to disclose partially his reason for wishing to go to Leppard Street. “You see, I want to find a girl,” he explained.