some supplications mean nothing (for supplications differ greatly in character). Occasionally supplications are long, drawn-out and drawling, stereotyped and mechanical⁠—they are purely begging supplications. Requests of this kind it is less hard to refuse, for they are purely professional and of long standing. “The beggar is overdoing it,” one thinks to oneself. “He knows the trick too well.” But there are other supplications which voice a strange, hoarse, unaccustomed note, like that today when I took the poor boy’s paper. He had been standing by the kerbstone without speaking to anybody⁠—save that at last to myself he said, “For the love of Christ give me a groat!” in a voice so hoarse and broken that I started, and felt a queer sensation in my heart, although I did not give him a groat. Indeed, I had not a groat on me. Rich folk dislike hearing poor people complain of their poverty. “They disturb us,” they say, “and are impertinent as well. Why should poverty be so impertinent? Why should its hungry moans prevent us from sleeping?”