“In what regard?”

“I’m going to tell you. Do you remember the famine of ’46?”

“Very well. I saw the boats loaded with emigrants arriving in our country, and I brought them a good many kettles of soup myself.”

“Nothing has changed.”

“I assumed so. An entire population doesn’t stop dying of hunger all at once.”

“No, but it stops faster if you think about the starving bellies and work to fill them, instead of spending your time philosophizing about the doctrines of Adam Smith and Ricardo. I know that thousands of English men and women were in agony because they knew what was happening in the Irish cottages. You saw the boatloads of emigrants; we saw the cartloads of corpses thrown into the pits. Still, in spite of everything, for two years the English merchant ships never stopped sailing away with England’s rich harvests of wheat, to sell them in foreign markets. And this at the very height of the potato famine, when the wretched Irish peasants were weeping with hunger, perched on the gates of their rotten fields.

“The government ministers feared the objections of the economists: It seemed that intervention by the state ran counter to the laws those gentlemen had cleverly devised. By the time the government thought of doing something, England’s wheat was far away and feeding foreign mouths. The government arranged for wheat to come from the Indies, but they put its distribution into the hands of common merchants, who made a fortune through speculation.

“Humans are the weakest creatures in the world because they’re intelligent. Intelligence is, by definition, the art of turning a blind eye. If you want to remedy an ill, you can’t turn a blind eye. For me, in this instance (choose your own, according to your nature), it’s a twenty-year-old boy who’s dying of starvation. He was born to live and to love.

“No dying person behaves better than someone who’s starving to death: He doesn’t speak, he doesn’t moan . . . he dies, without making a fuss, lying on the ground. . . . And most of the time he hides his face, as though he were ashamed. To him you can turn a blind eye the most easily. But have the courage (or the sentimentality, if you like) to lift that head up and look at that face, and you’ll say to yourself: This man has to eat. He has to eat immediately.

“Then you won’t think anymore about selling. You’ll think about giving. Which is the very opposite of the economists’ laws, and not ‘intelligent’ at all, I’ll grant you that. Sentimentality.”

“If I’m not saying anything,” said Herman, “it’s because I’m listening to you very intently.”

“That’s all. As you can see, I don’t know anything about politics. Last year there was the meeting of the Chartists at Kennington Common. I don’t know which of them was right, Feargus O’Connor or William Smith O’Brien. All I know is, they took O’Brien prisoner in a cabbage field and condemned him to death. My husband defended him. I realize that telling you this is hardly an advertisement for the lawyer in the case. Still, there’s nothing to reproach him with. He did what he could. It wasn’t much, but he did it. Besides, the sentence was commuted. I don’t know to what extent he might consider it one of his personal successes. He’s an unfeeling man.”