business she would be a purposeless fool intent upon clothes and with it
she is all a woman should be. It is like a child to her."

Eleanor, who had turned to laugh at her husband, looked instead at the
ground and a shadow crossed her face. Telfer, who had begun talking
thoughtlessly, out of his excess of words, glanced from the woman to the
boy. He knew that the suggestion regarding a child had touched a secret
regret in Eleanor, and began trying to efface the shadow on her face by
throwing himself into the subject that chanced to be on his tongue, making
the words roll and tumble from his lips.

"No matter what may come in the future, in our day money-making precedes
many virtues that are forever on men's lips," he declared fiercely as
though trying to down an opponent. "It is one of the virtues that proves
man not a savage. It has lifted him up--not money-making, but the power to
make money. Money makes life livable. It gives freedom and destroys fear.
Having it means sanitary houses and well-made clothes. It brings into
men's lives beauty and the love of beauty. It enables a man to go
adventuring after the stuff of life as I have done.

"Writers are fond of telling stories of the crude excesses of great
wealth," he went on hurriedly, glancing again at Eleanor. "No doubt the
things they tell of do happen. Money, and not the ability and the instinct
to make money, is at fault. And what of the cruder excesses of poverty,
the drunken men who beat and starve their families, the grim silences of
the crowded, unsanitary houses of the poor, the inefficient, and the
defeated? Go sit around the lounging room of the most vapid rich man's
city club as I have done, and then sit among the workers of a factory at
the noon hour. Virtue, you will find, is no fonder of poverty than you and
I, and the man who has merely learned to be industrious, and who has not