“Nay, I ought to ask you that question,—you who know everything that goes on in our set,” said the young serpent. Any tree planted in “our set,” if it had been but a crab-tree, would have tempted Mr. Avenel’s Eve to jump at its boughs.
“Are you coming, there?” cried Dick, from the foot of the stairs.
CHAPTER XX.
“I have just been at our friend Levy’s,” said Randal, when he and Dick were outside the street door. “He, like you, is full of politics; pleasant man,—for the business he is said to do.”
“Well,” said Dick, slowly, “I suppose he is pleasant, but make the best of it—and still—”
“Still what, my dear Avenel?” (Randal here for the first time discarded the formal Mister.)
MR. AVENEL.—“Still the thing itself is not pleasant.”
RANDAL (with his soft hollow laugh).—“You mean borrowing money upon more than five per cent?”
“Oh, curse the percentage. I agree with Bentham on the Usury Laws,—no shackles in trade for me, whether in money or anything else. That’s not it. But when one owes a fellow money even at two per cent, and ‘t is not convenient to pay him, why, somehow or other, it makes one feel small; it takes the British Liberty out of a man!”