"Compassion" was a tricky thing...
The Hell's Kitchen brand ran so deep in Nick and the others that even their "compassion" seemed different from everyone else's.
Maybe it wasn't just Nick and his friends. The children of all Hell's Kitchen were deeply affected.
"Pragmatism" had seeped into their bones. They found it hard to empathize with grief that served no purpose.
They had a basic sense of justice, but found it difficult to feel sympathy for things they didn't understand.
Nate followed behind the children, struggling to describe how he felt.
He was an emotional man, so he felt conflicted even as he had to admit Nick was right.
Strip away the sentimental trappings, and many moving stories were really just that.
But hearing those "hard truths" from a kid barely in his teens made him feel strange in a way he couldn't describe.
It was like how people thought doctors were generally cold and police officers were generally heartless...
But doctors had witnessed countless deaths, and police officers had seen countless horrors in the world.
In Nate's eyes, these kids' behavior was deeply abnormal...
Even little Ginny, the youngest, had a bit of a punk's attitude!
She was enthusiastic, but some feelings that should have stirred a little girl's empathy seemed to have little effect on her.
Nate felt that wasn't right, but he didn't know what to say. There was something so "free and easy" about these kids. Their terrible pasts seemed to be no burden at all, whether they belonged to someone else or to the kids themselves...
Even Nate, a middle-aged man, found that hard to manage. At the very least, he had remained trapped in the memory of his son's death, unable to move on. It had driven him to form a con artist's organization