e conversation.

"I suppose you know some of the passers-by."

"Yes, I know a tidy few. There's one gentleman who gives me a penny
every day, but he's gone abroad, I hear, and sixpence a week is a big
drop."

As I had given him a penny a day all the summer, I assumed he was
speaking of me. And my sixpence a week meant a day's dinner, perhaps
two days' dinners! It was only necessary for me to withhold my charity
to give him ease. He would hardly be able to live without my charity,
and if one of his other patrons were to do likewise the world would be
freed from a life that I could not feel to be of any value.

So do we judge the world if we rely on our reason, but instinct clings
like a child and begs like a child, and my instinct begged me to
succour this poor man, to give him a penny every day, to find out what
his condition was, and to stop for a chat every time I gave him my
penny. I had obeyed my instinct all the summer, and now reason had
intervened, reason was in rebellion, and for a long time I avoided, or
seemed to avoid, the passage where the blind man sat for eight or nine
hours, glad to receive, but never asking for alms.

I think I forgot the blind man for several months. I only remembered
him when I was sitting at home, or when I was at the other side of the
town, and sometimes I thought I made myself little excuses not to pass
through the passage. Our motives are so vague, so complex and many,
that one is never quite sure why one does a thing, and if I were to say
that I did not give the blind man pennies that winter because I
believed it better to deprive him of his means of livelihood and force
him out of life than to help him to remain in life and suffer, I should
be saying what was certainly untrue, yet the idea was in my mind, and I
experienced more than one twinge of conscience when I passed through
the passage. I experienced remorse when I hurried past him, too selfish
to unbutton my coat, for every time I happened to pass him it was
raining or blowing very hard, and every time I hurried away trying to
find reasons why he bore his miserable life. I hurried to my business,
my head full of chatter about St. Simon's Stylites, telling myself that
he saw God far away at the end of the sky, His immortal hands filled
with immortal recompenses; reason chattered about the compensation of
celestial choirs, but instinct told me that the blind man standing in
the stone passage knew of such miraculous conso