“Holidays,” she sighed, though the corner of her mouth was packed with pins, “I cannot afford holidays.”
“Ho-ho, you can’t afford!”
Their common fund of repartee lay in his confident assumption that she was rolling in surplus income and her counter assertion that she was stricken in poverty; that people—the pigs—would not pay her prices, or that those who did not flinch at her prices would not pay her bills.
“Astonishing, deplorable, this Mammon-worship!” he declared, leaning genially upon her table; “you know, it breaks my heart to see you a slave to it, a woman of a thousand, ten thousand in fact. Give it up, O,”—he beat the table with his hand—“give it up before it is too late!”
“Too late for what?” she asked.
“Why, all the delightful things a woman like you could do.”
“As what?”
“O ... travel, glories of nature, you know, friendship, men ... love itself.”
“Give me all the money I want,”—she was brusque about it, and began to dab the unwanted pins back into their cushion—“and I’ll buy, yes buy, a sweetheart for each day in the week.”
“Heavens now!” He was chilled by this implication of an experience that may have been dull, that must have been bitter, but he floundered on: “What now would you give for me?”