"Millions! Does it need millions to keep an office clean and comfortable? You had better confess that you cannot bear to spend a peseta in making yourself decent. I have told you many times, Julian, you are poor, and you will be poor all your days. I should be richer with a thousand pence than you with a thousand dollars—because I know how to spend them."
Calderón grumbled a protest and went on with his work. The Duke, without taking his hat off, dropped into the only easy chair, covered with white buckskin, or which ought to have been white, for it was of a doubtful hue now, between yellow and greenish-grey, with black patches where heads and hands were wont to rest. There were besides three or four stools covered with the same material, in the same state, a book-case full of bundles of papers, a small cash-box, an ancient walnut-wood writing-table covered with oil-cloth, and behind the table a greasy, shabby arm-chair in which the head of the house sat enthroned. This small room was lighted by a barred window, to ward off the prying looks of passers-by; there were blinds, which, being the cheapest and commonest of their kind, had this peculiarity, that one was much too wide and the other so short that it did not cover the lower pane by at least a quarter.
"Why in the world don't you quit this blessed leather-shop, which is not worthy of a man of your position and fortune?"
"Fortune—fortune!" muttered Calderón with his eyes still fixed on the paper he was writing on. "People talk of my fortune I know, but if I were compelled to liquidate, who knows what would come of it?"
Calderón never confessed his wealth; he loved to crawl; any allusion to his riches annoyed him beyond measure. Salabert, on the contrary, loved to flourish his millions in the face of the world, and play the nabob, at the smallest possible cost of course.
"Besides," Calderón went on with some acerbity, "every one looks at what comes in and never thinks of what goes out. Our expenses are greater every day. Have you any idea, now, of what our private expenditure has been this year? Come."
"Nothing much," replied Requena, with a depreciating smile.
"Nothing much? Why it amounts to more than seventy-five thousand dollars, and we are only in November."
"What do you say?" exclaimed the Duke greatly astonished. "Impossible!"
"As I tell you."