"I rolled up the scroll, and gave it back to Caius, saying that I should like to read it all, but that at the moment I had not the time; and I suggested that he should lend it to me. He shook his head, murmuring that it was not his property, that it was only deposited in his house for safe keeping, the convenience of those who wished to consult it; but he offered to let me see it, in his house, at any time that I might wish. I said that perhaps I might come again, and went out into the street. I do not think that I had any intention of coming again; but as the women passed me in the moonlit streets, and the beggar children held out their supplicating hands, I seemed to hear the words: 'If I give away in food all my goods, and though I give my body to be burned and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.'
"Yes; I felt it in those streets, where little girls, still children and innocent, aped with a diabolic mimicry the manners and allurements of the women who followed me, followed me with a soft, rippling noise of draperies and odour of cosmetics, like shadows, like ghosts. In the city of the goddess of pleasure, I seemed to learn, for the first time, the secret of pain. But beyond and above that sympathy with this drifting helpless mass that is humanity, I felt a curious desire to learn more of the personality of the writer who could write: 'If any man considereth himself wise among you, let him become a fool that he may be wise, and threaten to come among his disputing disciples with a rod.' His humility seemed to overpass the bounds of pride, his words were whips, his contempt for argument and disputation burned with a superhuman energy. He seemed to say: 'These are but words, empty sounds. I teach you the truth, accept it humbly; have I not suffered for it, and will you, who have but enjoyed it in peace and plenty, attempt to alter it?'
"I came back to my lodgings, and the woman who had followed me turned away with a sigh.
"The next ten days I spent on business; and I went a great deal to the Prefect's palace where the conversation of Gallio and his friends charmed and delighted me. Gallio saw the world and the Empire drifting toward a complete breakdown. Civilisation, according to him, filled man with desires which he can never gratify; it tended to accentuate the difference between the poor and the rich, and the whole question resolved itself for him into a question of politics. The Roman stock was perishing, and its place was being taken by a horde of servile races. The people were only being kept in check by a system of doles, and amused with pageants. The burden of taxation was becoming insufferable.