"What I am going to say now," he proceeded in soft, almost melancholy accents--"will sound ridiculously trite,--still it has the perverse prosiness of truth about it. It is this--in order to write with intense feeling, you must first _feel_. Very likely when you wrote this book of yours, you were almost a human hedge-hog in the way of feeling. Every prickly point of you was erect and responsive to the touch of all influences, pleasant or the reverse, imaginative or realistic. This is a condition which some people envy and others would rather dispense with. Now that you, as a hedge-hog, have no further need for either alarm, indignation or self-defence, your prickles are soothed into an agreeable passiveness, and you partially cease to feel. That is all. The 'change' you complain of is thus accounted for;--you have nothing to feel about,--hence you cannot comprehend how it was that you ever felt." I was conscious of irritation at the calm conviction of his tone. "Do you take me for such a callous creature as all that?" I exclaimed--"You are mistaken in me, Lucio. I feel most keenly----" "What do you feel?" he inquired, fixing his eyes steadily upon me--"There are hundreds of starving wretches in this metropolis,--men and women on the brink of suicide because they have no hope of anything in this world or the next, and no sympathy from their kind--do you feel for them? Do _their_ griefs affect _you_? You know they do not,--you know you never think of them,--why should you? One of the chief advantages of wealth is the ability it gives us to shut out other people's miseries from our personal consideration." I said nothing,--for the first time my spirit chafed at the truth of his words, principally because they _were_ true. Alas, Lucio!--if I had only known then what I know now!