"Pay them, old chap," he returned quickly.
"What's the good of that?"
"Good? Oh, I see!" He laughed, with a touch of scorn. "It's a question
of definition. When you see a fellow creature suffering and it shocks
your refined susceptibilities and you say 'poor devil' and pass on, you
think you have pitied him. But you haven't. You think pity's a passive
virtue. It isn't. If you really pity anybody, you go mad to help
him--you don't stand by with tears of sensibility running down your
cheeks. You stretch out your hand, because you've damn well got to. If
he won't take it, or wipes you over the head, that's his look-out. You
can't work miracles. But once in a way he does take it, and then--well,
you work like hell to pull him through. And if you do, what bigger thing
is there in the world than the salvation of a human soul?"
"It's worth living for," said I.
"It's worth doing any confounded old thing for," he declared.
I envied Campion as I had envied no man before. He was alive in heart
and soul and brain; I was not quite alive even yet.
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